Regional rhythms ramped up for global dance floors: Bomba Estereo

Boston Globe, May 8, 2011

Train your ears southward, to the nightspots of South America’s capital cities, and it won’t take long before you start grooving to some form of electro-cumbia. The mix of electronica with cumbia, a folk-music mainstay of South America, has sparked myriad groups, collectives like Buenos Aires’s ZZK, and endless variants that weave in reggae or hip-hop. Fluid, vital, accessible, electro-cumbia has made it into the arsenal of a certain global DJ crowd that stays on the hunt for new, intelligent sounds.

The newest sensation in the genre, Bomba Estereo, is in a way, one of the most authentic. Cumbia took different forms in each country, but its roots are in Colombia – particularly the Afro-Colombian communities of the Caribbean coast. A Colombian band with a charismatic costena (coastal) lead singer, Bomba Estereo – which plays the Brighton Music Hall on Monday – has made a mission of unearthing obscure cumbia and other sounds and working them into dynamic, soulful tracks that could work as well in a London or New York club as at Carnaval in Barranquilla.

Read More

Wrecking crew: Odd Future

Boston Globe, May 8, 2011

“They say I’m immature, I say that they’re repressed.” It’s an eternal complaint of misunderstood youth, and, in this instance, a line from the wildly talented and at times deeply off-putting debut album “Bastard,” by the young and outre Los Angeles rapper Tyler, the Creator.

The line also sums up the debate raging among music nerds as Tyler’s posse/creative collective, the absurdly named Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA), has emerged from the Los Angeles skater scene and become a national phenomenon behind a dozen albums, each made by various sub-sets of the crew, all free to download from the group’s site and myriad blogs.

The records introduce a cast of characters who recall the way Wu-Tang Clan burst on the scene in 1993 – when Odd Future’s members were children. There’s dark-witted Tyler, the provocative founder; Earl Sweatshirt, the gifted MC who has mysteriously disappeared; Domo Genesis, the weedhead; Syd, the DJ and sole woman; and others. A total of eight make up the current core unit, which visits the Paradise Thursday for a sold-out show.

Read More

Indo-Pak ambient project The Eternal Twilight: “We are both real cute and young”

MTV Desi, April 29, 2011

Ethereal, ambient post-rock inspired by Brian Eno, Sigur Rós and Hammock—but made in Mumbai and Rawalpindi by a couple of guys swapping digital files across the Indo-Pak border? Why not—especially if it sounds as good as The Eternal Twilight, whose debut albumEverything Resembles You just came our way.

Read More

DJ Rekha: from the basement to the White House

MTV Desi, April 27, 2011

Ah, Easter in America. Chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, kids running around the lawn — and bhangra? Yes! At the White House, no less.

New York’s own indispensable Desi producer and all-around culture maven DJ Rekha has been seen at the White House a few times since Barack Obama’s election. Fresh back from an insanely early morning gig at the White House Easter Egg Roll, she shared her impressions exclusively with MTV Desi’s Siddhartha Mitter.

You’re kind of a White House regular now, eh?

I guess so! I’ve been three times and played twice. And apparently I was on a list for the State Dinner with Manmohan Singh but didn’t make the cut.

Read More

From many sounds, one beat

Boston Globe, April 11, 2011

NEW YORK – The narrow steps to the basement of a modest brick house in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn lead into a little enclave of Salvador da Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian drum culture.

Instruments of all kinds crowd the studio: timbales, congas, and homemade drums using trash barrel tops and other recycled materials. Recording equipment covers available surfaces. Strong incense wafts through the room.

And a man with dreadlocks and an ultra-wide smile bounds from the clutter to greet a visitor with a warm embrace. “I just finished writing a song!” he says, in a lush Brazilian accent. “I’m very happy. You must have brought good energies!”

Dende Macedo is in a good mood. In fact, Macedo appears fixed in a permanently excellent mood.

Read More

Her second act is true to her soul

Boston Globe, April 4, 2011

In the brand-new video for “Until U,” from soul singer Ashanti Munir’s album, “Soul of a Woman,” a couple in the fullness of adulthood are dressing and preparing for an event – their wedding, it seems – while black-and-white flashbacks picture a much younger couple walking in the rain, 25 years earlier. It describes a kind of love, Munir sings, that she had despaired of finding again … “until u.”

Shot in Munir’s home in Brockton and, recognizably, on Quincy Shore Drive and in the Boston Public Garden, the video and the song it supports encapsulate key facts about Munir: She’s making the kind of old-school, adult R&B that struggles these days to wedge itself onto commercial playlists. She’s doing it in Boston, a city not known for its soul-music market and venues. And she has taken her time.

Read More

Sounds of Africa served three ways

Boston Globe, February 25, 2011

A concert is a product, and sometimes a product is felt to require a brand name to describe it and attract audience and sales. This is often the case with tours that feature international artists who might or might not share a stage in their regions of origin.

“Acoustic Africa,” which hits the Somerville Theatre Sunday, is such a product. It gathers two fine musicians from Mali, Habib Koite and Afel Bocoum, and one from Zimbabwe, Oliver Mtukudzi, in a supergroup with members of their regular bands.

It’s a stellar lineup, and even though the packaging’s implicit claim that they represent, somehow, the entire African continent, is spurious at best, the tour – fresh from a series of European dates late last year – is a chance to catch masters at work and in a potentially exciting setting for cross-genre improvisation and interplay.

Read More

Delta spirit

Boston Globe, February 18, 2011

One hundred years ago – the exact date was May 8, 1911 – Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Miss. He lived 27 years and left only 29 songs, but his impact on the blues and its progeny, rock ‘n’ roll, is immeasurable. The legend around Johnson – its crux his mythical encounter with the devil at a dusty Delta crossroads – only amplifies his aura.

The paradox is that Johnson is, in other ways, little known, as if the legend overwhelmed the facts of a man’s brief, hard life. Performed by everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to legions of anonymous players in nondescript bars, his songs – “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” “Love in Vain,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” and more – are so tightly bound to the sinew of American culture as to feel like common property.

Johnson himself remains phantomatic, that thin voice and haunting guitar on scratchy original recordings that only got mass-market diffusion with a 1990 complete box set.

Read More

Sonic connection

Boston Globe, January 7, 2011

As their makers describe it, the ideal setting to hear the duets of cellist Vincent Segal and kora player Ballake Sissoko is the one where they recorded “Chamber Music,” their slow and sumptuous album: in Bamako, Mali, deep in the night, when the heat has dropped and silence envelops the city.

If that is not an option, however, a church makes a fine substitute. And by happy coincidence, Segal and Sissoko perform tonight at the First Church in Cambridge, where the stillness of the space, as Segal and Sissoko have found when playing churches in Europe, should match the temper of their music.

“Churches are magnificent,” says Sissoko on the phone from Mali. “A place that’s calm, where there’s no stress. A place for pure listening.”

Read More

Mixing his Latin accents

Boston Globe, November 27, 2010

NEW YORK – A small diaspora of new-generation Latin American singer-songwriters has recently gained critical mass: artists steeped in the folk music of their countries but also jazz, rock, and electronica, artists who seem most comfortable in places like New York, Barcelona, or Mexico City where the scene is ever-changing and full of expatriates.

Claudia Acuna from Chile, Lila Downs from Mexico, Sofia Rei Koutsovitis from Argentina, and Marta Gomez from Colombia are a few of these new-breed Latin troubadours who have made names for themselves in the past few years. But the well of talent runs deeper, and around these best-known artists are colleagues, friends, and accompanists who are also enriching this new school of Latin song.

Among them is Juancho Herrera. His guitar work has accompanied all four of the singers just mentioned as well as Jenny Scheinman and other genre-bending players in New York, where he has lived for a decade. But Herrera is a singer in his own right, with an eclectic and engaging 2006 album, “Buscando,” and an upcoming new one, “Banda,” in which he mixes a host of lesser-known South American folk rhythms with sweet and often playful stories, in Spanish and English, that carry an instant pop appeal.

Read More

Bhangra fever!

Boston Globe, November 12, 2010

One Friday last fall, Omer Mirza, cofounder of the Bay Area dance troupe Bhangra Empire, received an unusual request. Would the group be available, asked the e-mailer, to perform in Washington, D.C., that Tuesday?

It was far too short notice: The members of Bhangra Empire, one of 100-plus groups in the United States dedicated to the energetic Punjabi folk dance bhangra, all had jobs or classes to attend. Still Mirza replied, out of courtesy. He was glad he did. The request was on behalf of the White House.

And so, after a hectic weekend, Bhangra Empire found itself performing, alongside Jennifer Hudson, Kurt Elling, and the National Symphony Orchestra, at the lavish state dinner for visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Read More

AfroCubism blends the best of both worlds

Boston Globe, November 5, 2010

In the 1960s, the West African republic of Mali was newly independent and brimming with optimism. A new middle class was starting to swell in the capital, Bamako. Education and progress were in the air. And pulling crowds onto dance floors were jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and most of all, the elegant stylings and vibrant energy of Cuban rumba, charanga, and son.

Today, Mali has turned into a major exporter of sounds, behind superstars Salif Keita, Habib Koite, Oumou Sangare, the late Ali Farka Toure, and many more. Bamako and the annual Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu are pilgrimage destinations for Western musicians, producers, and a growing number of adventurous fans.

But the Cuban connection is not lost. It has been renewed by the super-group AfroCubism, whose extravagant lineup – anchored by Cuban guitarist Eliades Ochoa and Malian luminaries Djelimady Tounkara on guitar, Bassekou Kouyate on ngoni, and Toumani Diabate on kora – is on the road for the most important world-music tour of the season. They visit the Berklee Performance Center on Sunday.

Read More

Live from N.Y.: A struggling Berklee grad gets his big break

Boston Globe, October 4, 2010

NEW YORK – Viewers of last weekend’s season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” who blinked at the wrong moment as the camera panned across the set might not have spotted the newest member in the house band. But there he was, a slender figure at the keyboard, dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail: Roxbury’s Tuffus Zimbabwe, now filling one of TV’s hottest seats.

Until a few weeks ago, Zimbabwe, 28, had been hustling to make ends meet by accompanying church choirs, teaching after-school programs, and playing miscellaneous gigs across a swath of the Tri-State area from Newark, to Jamaica, Queens. But now, as a member of one of TV’s most prominent bands, the Berklee College of Music graduate suddenly has a measure of security most musicians his age would envy. Steady work. A union job. Benefits. And the prestige of playing in the footsteps of greats such as Michael Brecker and David Sanborn.

Read More

More than words: Le Trio Joubran honors Mahmoud Darwish

Boston Globe, October 3, 2010

Palestinian artists abroad are used to bearing a heavy symbolic load, whether they like it or not. The history of their people, marked by displacement, occupation, and the endless peace process, imparts a certain intensity to even lighthearted work and invites controversies that might have nothing to do with the performers and their material.

But when the Paris-based Palestinian brothers known as Le Trio Joubran, virtuosos of the oud, the ancient Arabic lute, make their Boston debut at the Somerville Theatre on Thursday, their seriousness will speak to a more intimate loss: the death, in August 2008, of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

A leading light of world literature and a national hero who received a state funeral in Ramallah, Darwish was also a mentor to the brothers. Their tribute concert featuring recordings of Darwish reading turned into their third album, “A l’ombre des mots” (In the shadow of words), released last year.

Read More

Revival of the fittest?

Soundcheck, WNYC Radio, September 29, 2010

Acts like Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings and Eli (Paperboy) Reed present a soul sound that some cast as throwbacks to the sixties and seventies. Writer Siddhartha Mitter says that these revival acts walk a fine line between homage and pastiche. But New Yorker critic Sasha-Frere Jones, once a skeptic, says that they’re moving the genre forward.

Jazz revelations: Mina Cho

Boston Globe, September 27, 2010

If there is a recurring motif in the unusual path from Korea to Boston of pianist Mina Cho it is revelation.

It was a pair of musical revelations that exposed the young woman, who as a child in Korea had the ambition to become a world-famous classical pianist, first to the emotional force of gospel, and then to the beauty and improvisational potential of South American folk music.

And revelation in the religious sense has accompanied Cho, a committed Christian, along the parallel tracks of religious and secular music, and into unexpected roles, for instance as the pianist in several Boston black and immigrant churches.

Read More

Jazz way out: Anthony Brown’s Asian-American Orchestra takes on Coltrane

Boston Globe, September 17, 2010

Each year in the fall, a Boston ritual that is unique in the country gathers fans, musicians, and seekers moved by the music and spirit of John Coltrane, who died in 1967 leaving an emotional legacy that sets him apart from other titans of modern jazz.

The John Coltrane Memorial Concert, started in 1977 in a loft called Friends of Great Black Music and hosted by Northeastern University since 1986, is the nation’s preeminent long-running Trane celebration. Run by a cadre of veteran Boston musicians and featuring guests from Trane associates Pharoah Sanders and McCoy Tyner to the late hip-hop MC Guru, the concert each year opens new windows onto Trane’s work and vision.

This year’s edition, tomorrow at Northeastern’s Blackman Theatre, follows another trace that Trane left on his interrupted journey. It features the Asian American Orchestra, a path-breaking West Coast ensemble that joins instruments and ideas from jazz and the musical traditions of East and South Asia.

Read More

Malian singer Khaira Arby has arrived

Boston Globe, September 12, 2010

It’s pretty much accepted on the world-music circuit that Mali, population 13 million, always boxes above its weight. Salif Keita, Ali Farka Toure, Habib Koite, Oumou Sangare, Tinariwen, Amadou and Mariam are just some of the global superstars the West African nation has produced. It’s so rich, it’s silly.

But that doesn’t mean that all the great music on offer in Mali has made it to the world stage. Nor does it give Malian artists an automatic ticket to the big time. The wonder of Mali is that it still leaves plenty to discover.

That’s where Khaira Arby comes in. For 20 years she’s sung in the ancient desert city of Timbuktu where she has the following of a hometown heroine. Her cassette-only recordings have circulated only in the region. Though a protegee of Farka Toure and a virtuoso singer – in four languages! – backed by the muscled grooves of an elite band, she’s barely toured outside her home country.

Read More

Sounds of Brazil—by way of Appalachia

Boston Globe, September 5, 2010

The revelation, says guitarist Clay Ross, boiled down to a single song. It was a baiao – a style of folk music from northeastern Brazil – by one of the masters of the genre that drove home to this South Carolina country boy-turned-New York City jazzman a connection that he could not deny.

“It’s a song called `Voa Ilza,’ by Hermeto Pascoal,” Ross says, putting down the burrito he’s been eating at a Brooklyn terrace to tap out the rhythm while he hums the melody. It’s a long, jaunty, sinewy number that, to an American ear, sounds a lot like something that just came down from the Appalachian foothills.

“I mean come on, man, that’s a fiddle tune!” Ross says. “It’s bluegrass! And the groove is sick.” He taps away at the table top. “It had everything I liked about good groove music. It had all these things I could identify with.”

Read More

Straight outta Vladivostok

Boston Globe, August 13, 2010

Most bands on their way to success have to face typical obstacles like dodgy record deals or squabbles among bandmates. Far fewer must deal with collapse and transformation of the social order, a crippling economic crisis, suspicious authorities, and a music market where 9 out of 10 CDs are pirated and earn the bands zero revenue.

That’s the setting Russian artists have faced since the 1990s, and where Mumiy Troll, a veteran quartet from Vladivostok, have not just survived but prospered. Since leader Ilya Lagutenko and his bandmates, childhood friends and teen rock rebels in late Soviet days, formed the current lineup in 1996, they’ve reached – and kept – arena-filling star status in one of the world’s most turbulent markets.

Read More

Taqwacore: Salat, angst and rock & roll

MTV Desi, August 12, 2010

On a warm evening last August in Oakland, California, a group of young men – relaxed, casually dressed, not all of them freshly showered – stand barefoot on flattened cardboard boxes in the yard behind a scruffy bar on Telegraph Avenue. They figure out which way is East: Mecca is out there, somewhere across the alley and over the hills. Nearby, friends and early arrivals for the evening’s show mill about. Someone has fired up a grill for burgers and dogs. Bottles of Corona circulate. Those who drink, drink; those who don’t, abstain. At the proper moment, one of the worshippers steps forward and begins the ritual of maghrib, the evening prayer. “Allahu Akbar…” drifts out on the California breeze.

Read More

Jazz you can feel

Boston Globe, August 8, 2010

NEW YORK – An experience that Alicia and Michael Olatuja did not anticipate when they began touring their sleek vocal-jazz band, the Olatuja Project, was strangers approaching them in tears after a set to gush about their music’s healing force.

In recent months, as the project has honed its combination of elegant, nocturnal jazz with gospel, R&B, and Yoruba elements, they have encountered this effect at such venues as the Jazz Cafe in London, and Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola here. (They play the Beehive in Boston on Friday.)

“The same thing happened last night,” says Alicia Olatuja. The couple is at a Brooklyn diner in the afternoon following a two-night stand at the Zinc Bar downtown. “A girl left after the second set because she was so embarrassed, she was bawling her eyes out, so she had to leave.”

Read More

The month of vuvuzelas

OkayAfrica, July 11, 2010

In the run-up to the climax of the World Cup on July 11 in Johannesburg, with the field of teams inexorably reducing to finalists Netherlands and Spain, there was at last time between matches to start assessing the tournament’s global impact.

This was, after all, the first World Cup of the Facebook and Twitter age. Even YouTube was just a year old when Italy defeated France in the ill-tempered final of the last World Cup, in 2006. This time, the global audience consumed the World Cup – already the planet’s most popular and obsessively-watched sports event – in the most dense, real-time, multilingual, multimedia manner we have ever known.

And what we consumed extended far beyond events on the field: beyond ignominious first-round exits by Italy and France; beyond the blond ‘do and pinpoint strikes of Japan’s Keisuke Honda; beyond the imperious beatdowns a young, multiethnic Germany put on highly-touted England and Argentina; beyond the hands of Uruguay’s Luis Suarez illegally stopping Ghana’s late game-winner, and Ghana striker Asamoah Gyan tragically missing the ensuing penalty kick; beyond referee errors, goalkeeper heroics, 0-0 draws, and every glorious moment when the Jabulani ball, supposedly the sleekest and roundest ever made, was struck, tapped, stroked, headed or smashed into the back of the net.

Read More

Skin tones

Boston Globe, June 13, 2010

On the issue that is nearest to his heart and most closely touches who he is, Salif Keita is trying a new tack: directness.

As anyone who has seen him knows, Keita, the great singer from Mali and a crucial figure in modern African music, is an albino. The condition, which manifests through depigmentation of the skin and eyes, can result in extreme photosensitivity, vision problems, and a heightened risk of skin cancer.

But albinos face human dangers as well: isolation, scorn, and worse. Keita knows: In his youth, it was prejudice that pushed him toward music to express himself and find a vocation, when his aristocratic lineage (his family is said to descend from medieval emperor Sundiata) ought to have precluded crossing caste lines.

Read More

In afterlife, Fela Kuti is having a moment

Boston Globe, June 6, 2010

NEW YORK – A performance of “Fela!,” the acclaimed Broadway show on the life of Nigerian superstar Fela Anikulapo Kuti, makes for the kind of culture clash rarely seen on the Great White Way. And that’s just in the audience.

During intermission at one performance this spring, two women asked whether a Nigerian writer sitting nearby had seen the show before, because he seemed to know all the lyrics. The women, regular theatergoers who’d come for the season’s hot ticket, had never heard of Fela. The plot – in which Fela and his many wives face a horrific army raid on their Lagos compound that leads to the death of Fela’s beloved mother – was opaque to them. The Nigerian writer, meanwhile, had authenticity quibbles: He found the pidgin English dialogue was oversimplified and lead actor Sahr Ngaujah’s Yoruba diction flawed.

Yet by show’s end – whether moved by the lavish choreography of director Bill T. Jones, the spot-on playing of the house band featuring members of Afrobeat group Antibalas, or dramatic turns in the story line – all joined in the standing ovation.

Thirteen years after his AIDS-related death in 1997, Fela is enjoying a high tide of exposure. The musical, which garnered 11 nominations for this year’s Tony Awards and travels to London in the fall, is just one component.

Read More

Festival showcases Africa in all its diversity

Boston Globe, May 23, 2010

With the World Cup kicking off in three weeks in Johannesburg, the eyes of the world are about to be trained on Africa.

But how many people know that 2010 marks 50 years of independence for more than half the nations on the continent? And how aware are we of its rich social and cultural diversity, and the wrenching crises it still faces?

Those questions were much on the mind of Boston activist Mireille Tushiminina, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo who helps run a nonprofit, the Shalupe Foundation, that channels support to victims of civil war in eastern Congo, especially orphans and victims of rape.

Read More

Sonny Rollins is still blowing strong

Boston Globe, April 17, 2010

The last time Sonny Rollins performed in this region, he closed out the 2008 Newport Jazz Festival with a potent, expansive set, his tenor sax broadcasting relentless improvised patterns into the salty breeze as the sun went down over Fort Adams. The impression was forceful and nearly elegiac, the muscular music of the Saxophone Colossus – as he’s been affectionately known throughout jazz since the famous 1956 album by that title – Read More

“Don’t let it become a job”

Boston Globe, April 2, 2010

It’s been a season of recognition for Kenny Barron. In January the pianist received the National Endowment for the Arts’ Jazz Masters award, the most prestigious honor in the field, at the ceremony the NEA holds each year at Jazz at Lincoln Center. At 66, Barron was the youngest of this year’s crop, which included one of his mentors, Yusef Lateef. And this spring Barron will receive an honorary degree from the Berklee College of Music.

A steady and highly regarded presence on the jazz scene since 1961, when he arrived in New York as a teenager from Philadelphia and joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band, Barron has entered the lifetime-achievement phase of his career, somewhat to his bemusement.

“My first thought when they told me about it was, wow, am I really that old?” he says of hearing the news of his NEA award, which carries a $25,000 purse, lavish by the depleted financial standards of jazz. He is nursing an afternoon cognac in a New York restaurant, having just taught his ensemble class at Juilliard.

Read More

Plucked from extinction

Boston Globe, March 26, 2010

One of the small indignities that African musicians face when on tour in this country is having to be rude to fellow countrymen when the breakneck road schedule leaves no time for proper courtesies.

“The other day we played in Alaska, and local Malians came to see us,” says Bassekou Kouyate, master of the ngoni, a traditional Malian instrument. “They had cooked a meal for us at their home, and I had to turn them down.”

But Kouyate and his band Ngoni Ba are on a mission that trumps social calls. Their marathon 47-city tour, which hits the Somerville Theatre tomorrow, is America’s introduction to an instrument that Kouyate has almost single-handedly rescued from obscurity and made a vibrant force at home in Mali and on the world music market.

Read More

Energy and intellect

Boston Globe, March 19, 2010

A pair of star charts, the kind used in astrology readings, adorn the cover of the latest recording by the almost decade-old, New York-based Respect Sextet. One chart is for Karlheinz Stockhausen, the avant-garde composer, born in 1928 in Germany. The other is for Sun Ra, the jazz visionary and leader of the Arkestra, who was presumably born in Alabama in 1914 – although there is ambiguity on that score.

Sun Ra’s birth certificate was never found, explain Respect trumpeter Eli Asher and saxophonist Josh Rutner in a conversation in a Manhattan coffee shop. With the specific time of Sun Ra’s birth unknown, the chart they had made for him is half blank, while Stockhausen’s has the full set of symbols and web of connecting lines.

Read More

Straight from the Crescent City

Boston Globe, March 12, 2010

No city in America owns a musical tradition as rich and distinctive as that of New Orleans. The paradox of this state of plenty – with famous destination events like Mardi Gras and Jazzfest and a year-round cornucopia of restaurants and club dates – is that great New Orleans musicians don’t hit the road all that often. They don’t need to.

So it’s a treat to see an all-star trio profoundly steeped in Crescent City tradition – Hammond B-3 organist Joe Krown, drummer Johnny Vidacovich, and singer-guitarist extraordinaire Walter “Wolfman” Washington – take a swing through the Northeast that brings them to Johnny D’s in Somerville tonight.

The three combine for a century at the heart of New Orleans sound – especially Washington, who was born there in 1943 and has been a working musician since his teens and a bandleader since the 1980s. They are supporting a recent release, “Live at the Maple Leaf,” recorded live at the New Orleans club of that name. (It features Russell Batiste on drums; Vidacovich, a bandleader with a cult following in the drummer world, is the regular fill-in.)

Read More

Pride in her heritage is easy to hear

Boston Globe, January 31, 2010

The best African act category at Britain’s prestigious MOBO (Music of Black Origins) awards last year was a heavyweight affair. Among the nominees were such global pop icons as Femi Kuti, Oumou Sangare, Baaba Maal, and Amadou & Mariam.

And the winner was … Nneka.

The waters are parting for Nneka Egbuna, the 28-year-old Nigerian singer with a slight rasp in her voice and a singer-songwriter’s full gamut of quirkiness, earnest politics, and candid emotion.

In the past few years she has become a presence in Europe, living in Hamburg and releasing three albums on a local label. One yielded a hit single, “Heartbeat,” a soulful cri de coeur set to a hypnotic pulse, with a video shot on the streets of Lagos, Nigeria.

Read More

Drawing “Attention”

Boston Globe, January 15, 2010

An aerial pan of the Capitol and Washington Monument opens the video for “Chillin,” the lead single from Wale’s debut album, “Attention Deficit.” To the song’s plump, bouncy beat, a sequence of D.C. images unfolds: Obama posters on hollowed-out buildings, street signs on Georgia Avenue, the football powerhouse Cardozo High School (“Home of the Clerks”), Wale and crew drawing a crowd outside Ben’s Chili Bowl.

And in the midst of all this: Lady Gaga.

The apparition of the blond-bobbed pop gadfly – delivering a pleasant sing-songy hook that makes her sound a lot like M.I.A. – is just one of the detours that Wale (pronounced wah-LAY) has taken on this album, long-awaited in hip-hop circles, from the genre’s dogma of hard-edged authenticity.

Read More

An eclectic music box of a band

Boston Globe, December 25, 2009

NEW YORK – When percussionist and composer John Hollenbeck, an eclectically minded veteran of the New York scene with a portfolio ranging from big band and klezmer to avant-garde “new music,” set out to form his own group, he didn’t necessarily expect to make something as unusual – nor as durable – as the Claudia Quintet.

Now nine years old and about to release its fourth CD, the quintet features a distinctive front line of clarinet, vibraphone, and accordion. Its distinctive sound and Hollenbeck’s ambitious yet accessible compositions have earned critical acclaim and fueled the emergence of Hollenbeck, 41, as a prominent composer, a Guggenheim fellowship recipient who is frequently solicited for adventurous new commissions.

This year Hollenbeck also released a well-received large ensemble record, “Eternal Interlude,” a modern and personal take on the big band, and launched several new projects in different formats. But it’s the Claudia Quintet, which plays on New Year’s Eve at the First Church in Boston as part of First Night, that has been his most consistent vehicle.

Read More

The Decade in Jazz and World Music

Soundcheck, WNYC Radio, December 16, 2009

We continue our Critics’ Week coverage of the decade in music with a look at the best of world music and jazz. Siddhartha Mitter, world music critic for the Boston Globe, and Will Layman, jazz critic for PopMatters.com, give us their picks for the decade that was.

Raekwon’s second act

Boston Globe, December 11, 2009

NEW YORK – On a late Monday night in a Brooklyn industrial zone, with the damp chill of early winter descending, trucks clatter down deserted streets, and the rapper Raekwon settles in for a session in the place where he feels most at ease: the studio.

“We had a day off, so we decided to come and just be in the environment,” he says. “It’s like going to practice.” Around him in the studio lounge, a small posse of managers, engineers, and random associates munch on Mexican takeout and contemplate a football game. Lush mid-tempo beats swirl out from the production area. People drift out onto the roof.

It’s a welcome moment of respite for the folk hero of Staten Island and founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, who will play the Paradise next Thursday. It is one stop on a grueling tour schedule in support of his new album, “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. II.”

Read More

Balafon master has his hands on a legacy

Boston Globe, December 6, 2009

It’s one thing to be born into a musical family. It’s another thing altogether to be entrusted, by birth, with guardianship of a tradition that dates to medieval times and is central to the culture and memories of an entire society.

That’s the burden that Balla Kouyate, griot and virtuoso of the West African instrument called balafon, shoulders today. It’s also the heritage that the Boston-based Kouyate seeks to blend with other cultures he has encountered here.

Kouyate will perform Thursday at Johnny D’s with his group World Vision – a shifting lineup that includes members with roots in China, Lebanon, Senegal, and Ivory Coast, with occasional guests from the salsa and jazz traditions. It’s a fusion project, but a rigorous one, where global-pop remakes (for instance, of the Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan”) only augment a core of material passed down through the folklore of great West African empires and local traditions in present-day Mali and Guinea.

Read More

To another place: Somi

Boston Globe, November 15, 2009

Somi’s new album, “If the Rains Come First,” glistens with the sheen of an almost impossibly perfect cosmopolitanism, but that shouldn’t be held against her.

It could hardly be otherwise. Recorded in Paris and New York, with a group that includes a Senegalese guitarist, Herve Samb, a Japanese pianist, Toru Dodo, and a British-Nigerian bassist, Michael Olatuja, this subtle, rhythmically taut gem of an album documents global nomads sharing personal as well as musical experiences.

Centering the frame is Somi, daughter of Rwandese and Ugandan parents, raised in a Midwest college town, and now based in New York, who writes lyrics full of poetic intimacy in English laced with Swahili, Kinyarwanda, and Rutoro. Her quiet feel and indeterminate allure have prompted comparisons to Cassandra Wilson and Sade.

Read More

New stars in the southeast: Kailash Kher

Boston Globe, November 8, 2009

According to a story that still circulates in India’s celebrity press, when Kailash Kher first arrived in Mumbai in 2001, he was so poor and bereft of connections that he had to live for a while on the platform of a suburban railway station.

That tale is an urban myth. And Kher, now one of India’s best-loved stars for his exhilarating, Sufi-inspired music, debunks it regularly. But the hardscrabble image of an aspiring singer arriving from the hinterland with no pedigree in the glitzy Bollywood biz is accurate in spirit, if not in detail.

Kher has made his way to the limelight with a sound and a story that separate him from Bollywood convention and the industry’s clannish milieu. The son of a Hindu priest from the town of Meerut, outside Delhi, he writes songs that brim with the devotional themes of Sufi poetry. He delivers them with a tone full of longing and a worshiper’s unmistakable sincerity.

Read More

This jazzwoman speaks softly, but carries a big repertoire

Boston Globe, October 11, 2009

NEW YORK – How refreshing. One of the biggest new voices in song is not, in fact, a big voice at all.

It’s the voice of Gretchen Parlato, who has taken an antiheroine’s route to prominence as a jazz singer, breaking with the conventional character traits. Rather than belt or blare, Parlato’s sound is light and contained, nearly conversational. In lieu of frills and pyrotechnics, she uses nuance and a great harmonic subtlety. Her material avoids standards and torch songs in favor of progressive fare from different moments and styles, with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock among her touchstone influences.

For Parlato, 33, who plays Regattabar on Thursday in support of her quietly mesmerizing new album, “In a Dream,” going understated actually maximizes her assets.

Read More

He’s the keeper of the beat

Boston Globe, October 4, 2009

Where to begin? The early days in Chicago, between blues, bebop, and the mid-’60s avant-garde? The time in Charles Lloyd’s band, or the years with Miles Davis when the master went electric with “Bitches Brew”? The four-decade friendship with Keith Jarrett and the subtle intimacy of their jazz standards trio? The Indian-infused work with Alice Coltrane, the jazz-rock with Vernon Reid, or the Spanish and African projects? Did we mention the Grammy-winning new age record?

With a discography of that quality and depth, you could call drummer Jack DeJohnette a witness to musical history. But more than that, he’s been its timekeeper – the man with the sticks, supplying a phenomenal range of modern sounds with their pulse and syncopation.

Read More

Indian Ocean reaches beyond

Boston Globe, October 2, 2009

The band Indian Ocean will not take offense if you call its music “fusion.” For one thing, the Delhi-based foursome is too laid-back to worry much about labels. And it’s true that at first glance Indian Ocean’s approach summons up echoes of Orientalist jazz-rock projects from the ’70s, with their setup of guitar, bass, and drum kit plus tablas, and their long, improvisation-heavy songs that weave Western melodic elements into a texture of Indian rhythms.

But this is no Mahavishnu Orchestra or Shakti. For one thing, all four members are Indians who grew up and still make their home in the country. Not all of them trained in Indian classical music, but they take from it not just the rhythm cycles but a lot of the same source material, be it folk music from India’s many rich regional traditions or the devotional poems of the medieval mystic Kabir.

Read More

Toasting its unique niche

Boston Globe, September 13, 2009

When it comes to launching jazz musicians into the big leagues, Boston schools have long been a key feeder. The well-known behemoth is the Berklee College of Music, but it was the New England Conservatory that launched the nation’s first jazz degree program, 40 years ago. This fall NEC celebrates that anniversary with a rich menu of events that highlight not just the history but the unique niche the school has honed as the jazz world has changed.

The festivities peak Oct. 24 with a marquee two-part concert by saxophone master Wayne Shorter – first with his quartet, then with the NEC Philharmonia orchestra. But starting Oct. 18, various NEC faculty and alumni will perform at local clubs (the Regattabar, Scullers, the Lily Pad, the Western Front) and at NEC’s Jordan Hall. Panels and master classes complete the program.

Today jazz education is an industry, but in the ’60s, jazz was still an art of the streets and clubs; in the schools, it was on the outside looking in. That was certainly the case at NEC, the venerable conservatory founded in 1867. “The saxophone was not allowed in the school, even as a classical instrument!,” Gunther Schuller, who became NEC’s president in 1967, reminisced to a panel audience at the school earlier this year.

Read More

Good vibrations: Jason Marsalis

Boston Globe, August 25, 2009

The youngest scion of jazz nobility, Jason Marsalis has forged a career that’s more eclectic than those of his celebrated brothers Wynton and Branford. Besides his longtime gig as the drummer in Marcus Roberts’s trio, Jason is a founder of the Latin jazz group Los Hombres Calientes. Now 32, Marsalis has a new album, “Music Update,” his first album in nine years, and his third as a leader In that time he’s picked up a new instrument, the vibraphone, and he wields the mallets on eight of the 13 tracks. The balance are overdubbed drum solos that range from marching-band flair to sexy shimmering and even a disco beat. We caught up with him on the phone from his home in New Orleans.

Q. Why get involved in a whole new instrument, the vibraphone?

A. Well, that’s just another side of percussion. It’s interesting: Originally, the vibes was my father’s idea back when I was in high school. I said OK, and after a while I started to get ideas about what I wanted to play on the vibes, even though I didn’t know how to play it yet.

Read More

Free to play all of who they are

Boston Globe, August 23, 2009

For years they’ve feigned split personalities, building their name and platform in jazz with straight-ahead trios or quartets, while nurturing their generation’s funk roots and mash-up aesthetic through side projects or hip-hop moonlighting gigs.

But new albums out this week from vibraphonist Stefon Harris and pianist Robert Glasper, both among the wave of premier bandleaders born in the 1970s, suggest that jazz’s 30-somethings are finding the confidence and the market space to make high-profile, major-label work that draws on hip-hop, funk, and electronica. And all this not in order to probe new frontiers but simply to express who they are.

Harris, 36, who grew up in Albany, N.Y., and came to jazz after classical training, is putting out “Urbanus,” the second release of his Blackout project, five years after its debut. The disc embodies each member’s life and style: There is a go-go track, for instance, supplied by bassist Ben Williams and keyboardist Marc Cary and reflecting their Washington, D.C., roots. Saxophonist Casey Benjamin also plays vocoder, the synthetic-voice device seldom heard in jazz since late-’70s Herbie Hancock, and more often associated with hip-hop, Euro dance, and sci-fi flicks.

Read More

Pushing boundaries: Buika

Boston Globe, August 18, 2009

Maria Concepcion Balboa Buika belongs to a wave of Spanish singers breathing fresh life into classic styles – flamenco, of course, but also the ballad form called copla, and regional folk songs. But Buika, 37, brings a background that sets her apart. Born to political refugees from the former Spanish colony Equatorial Guinea, she was raised with jazz and African music, and growing up on the island of Majorca, she forged her affinities with Gypsy and working-class kids. All this imbues Buika’s sound – most recently on the Latin Grammy-nominated “Nina de Fuego” – with an immigrant’s immersive commitment, but also a restless curiosity that pushes her to broaden her range. She answered questions by e-mail from Spain in advance of her appearance tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Q. With your voice, you could have gone into many different genres. What was the attraction of classical Spanish forms like copla and flamenco?

A. People just know what the record company has published from my work. But I also sing jazz, blues, I like electronic music. It is true that copla and flamenco belong to my childhood, it was the music people listened to in my neighborhood.

Read More

From book arts, a fresh look at fraught issues

WNYC News, July 30, 2009

Print journalism may be in trouble, but print in the arts is alive and well, and it’s taking on social issues. An exhibition up now uses “book arts” – artworks based on print and the printed word – to take on race and racism in some new and sometimes humorous ways. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.

Your cheatin’ heart

Soundcheck, WNYC, July 10, 2009

In politics, an extra-marital affair can jeopardize a career. But in music, cheating is the subject of some of the most popular songs ever, from Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” to the Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes” to TLC’s “Creep.” (Don’t get us started on operas. OK, do.) We look at some of the best, with Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette and WNYC cultural reporter Siddhartha Mitter. Plus, we take your calls (anonymously, if you wish).

Love for Michael Jackson knows no time or color

WNYC News, July 1, 2009

Spontaneous celebrations of Michael Jackson have gone on in the streets since his death last Thursday, but yesterday was the official tribute at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and New Yorkers came out en masse. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter was there.

Capturing the Cameroon sound

Boston Globe, June 26, 2009

If nothing else, history will retain that Andre-Marie Tala sued James Brown for plagiarism – and won.

It stemmed from a 1973 incident when Brown was touring in West Africa. In Cameroon, the young Tala – an emerging local singer and guitarist – handed Brown a demo copy of “Hot Koki,” a hard-funk number he had composed.

Two years later, Brown dropped “Hustle!!!” – with the same melody, beat, and arrangements, only with English lyrics. An American court found in Tala’s favor, ruling that the Godfather of Soul had used his work without permission.

But Tala deserves much more than just a footnote on music litigation. For his prolific output, influence, and longevity, he’s been as essential to Cameroonian music as a Salif Keita has been to Mali, or a King Sunny Ade to Nigeria.

Read More