Quirky, daring Mina Agossi turns jazz into adventure

Boston Globe, October 24, 2006

Purists, beware. You might not like Mina Agossi.

The 34-year-old French singer is that beautiful, dangerous thing, a jazz heretic. Based in Paris, and recording on the London label Candid, she has turned heads and befuddled ears in both cities with daring reinventions of supposedly locked-in-time standards and styles.

Agossi is a shouter and a purrer who works with just bass and drums, forgoing the piano. She’s a fan of America who sings in English and hangs out with unorthodox expatriates. She’s lived in France, in several African countries, and once, as a child, in rural Iowa.

Tomorrow, Agossi visits Scullers behind her latest album, “Well You Needn’t.” It’s a portfolio of standards and originals that includes a reworking of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” – suitable for a woman with family roots in Benin, voodoo’s cradle, and who gladly haunts the margins of the classically minded European jazz world.

Read More

These survivors of Sierra Leone’s civil war find deliverance through music

Boston Globe, October 20, 2006

The latest success story in African music began with a challenge to fate, a gesture of humanity by a group of people who had ample reason to give up on the species instead. When the Refugee All Stars formed in the Sembakounya refugee camp in Guinea, their country, Sierra Leone, was deeply mired in a civil war that raged from 1997 to 2002 with violence against civilians of a rare and grotesque brutality.

In 1999, when rebel forces reached the capital, Freetown, thousands of Sierra Leoneans fled to Guinea rather than risk being killed or, in the case of young people, abducted to serve as fighters or concubines. In the camps, lead singer Reuben Koroma encountered musicians he’d known before the war as well as new talent. Relief workers helped them locate some beat-up instruments, and the All Stars were born.

Some lucky breaks helped make the All Stars the global sensation they are today, with a documentary film by Zach Niles and Banker White on the festival circuit, a sleekly produced new album, “Living Like a Refugee,” and a touring schedule that brings them to the Paradise on Wednesday. But the original goal was something more fundamental and urgent, Koroma says on the phone from Conakry, Guinea, where the band was collecting its visas, because the US consulate in Freetown remains shut.

Read More

Preserving the musical spirit of New Orleans

Boston Globe, October 15, 2006

Six of the seven musicians lost their homes to the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. A year after the storm, only two of the seven have been able to move back to New Orleans. Yet compared to many other New Orleans musicians, the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band are the fortunate ones.

They have work.

The band is the touring outfit of Preservation Hall, a 45-year-old New Orleans institution devoted to nurturing and promoting the city’s musical tradition. The hall, a tiny, unpretentious venue in the French Quarter, only reopened in May. But the band has been touring all along, bringing to its regular circuit of prestige theaters not just the music of New Orleans, but testimonial to the Crescent City’s perseverance and hurt.

Read More

Master’s love for Indian kathak dance is in his eyes

Boston Globe, October 5, 2006

NEW YORK—After a long day teaching workshops in the ancient dance form of which he is considered the greatest living master, Birju Maharaj emerges into the glare of the lobby of the Alvin Ailey studios here, amid a cluster of students and musicians. A small man, and at 68 advancing in years, he appears tired from the hectic schedule of his US tour. People touch his feet in respect as they take their leave. He gives a thin smile, and stares into space.

To many, the Delhi-based Maharaj, who performs at the Somerville Theatre on Sunday, embodies kathak, the main classical dance of North India. Having evolved from Hindu temple to Muslim court to the modern stage, kathak is a dance equivalent of Indo-Persian miniature paintings, with which it shares elegance and extreme precision. Performing solo to a tabla drum, the dancer uses heavy ankle bells to echo and refine the beat. The arms and face tell a story, traditionally based on myth. A minute eyebrow gesture endows a character with personality and intent.

“The eye movement is the color of the dance,” Maharaj explains later at his hotel. “Without that, nothing. The footwork and the hands is not enough. We use the big brush to paint the sound: that’s the jingles. The hand for [smaller] things. And the color the last. The structure is OK, but the color comes from your eyes.”

Read More

Rolling “Thunder”

Boston Globe, September 22, 2006

Cassandra Wilson has long since cemented her place as one of America’s great singers. Hers is a music of confluence, in which the blues, jazz, and pop provide aesthetic guidance that’s all the more powerful because it’s so free-ranging and loose. On her latest album, “Thunderbird,” the Mississippi-bred, New York-seasoned Wilson turns to material that’s distinctly Western in spirit, evoking Native American symbolism, prairie expanses, and the open road. An inspired collaboration with producer T-Bone Burnett, of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack fame, “Thunderbird” laces Wilson’s famously smoky tone with contemplative slide guitars over relentless grooves: The result is a music that lingers even as it moves ahead, like clouds in an easy wind.

“Thunderbird” came out in April, but Wilson, who lives near New York but spent much of the year in her native Jackson, Miss., is touring behind it only now. Her five-city East Coast stint brings her to the Berklee Performance Center tomorrow, before she heads to Europe. We spoke to her by phone as she prepared to launch the tour.

Read More

She finds the key to Greek myths

Boston Globe, September 17, 2006

NEW YORK—Icarus flew too close to the sun. Orpheus unwisely looked back. Persephone was tricked by Hades. These and other Greek myths portray the aspirations and foibles of the human condition with such clarity that artists have returned to them for centuries, a creative feedstock that cannot be depleted.

Now add to the roster of artistic treatments “Mythologies,” the compelling new album by Patricia Barber and her quartet, who visit Scullers Thursday and Friday. In 11 vignettes of literary jazz tinged with rock ‘n’ roll feeling, Barber, a Chicago pianist-singer with a cool tone and cerebral method, gives new life to Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” with thought-provoking interpretations of the poet’s timeless character sketches.

Barber gives a clipped introduction—”We have some things from Greek myth for you”—during a recent weekend set at the Jazz Standard here. She begins a song vamping at the piano, bent over the instrument in a kind of mystical union before the band kicks in. Her hair obscures the sight of her face, and it seems that her cheek might graze the keys.

Read More

Multi-media work explores post-9/11 American identity

WNYC News, September 9, 2006

New York performance poet Sekou Sundiata has been compared to Langston Hughes and Marvin Gaye for his writing about Black America. But 9/11 left him confused about American identity. Out of that he’s built a multi-media work, a cycle of songs, poems and monologs, video and dance. Siddhartha Mitter reports.

Tania Maria returns to her roots

Boston Globe, August 17, 2006

Tania Maria has the soul of a rebel but peace in her heart.

At 58, and with more than 20 albums to her name, the pianist and singer has accumulated the wisdom and discography of a senior musician. Brazilian by birth, expatriate by choice, she’s conducted a long-running and sophisticated conversation between Brazilian music and North American jazz, whether or not people were listening.

“I’ve never been popular,” Tania Maria says on the phone from her apartment in Paris. “I mix modern Brazilian music with jazz, and I’ve been appreciated by people who knew music and were curious about this mix. But it’s true that I’ve never been commercial.”

Read More

Still heading west

Boston Globe, August 11, 2006

Versatile, inquisitive, indispensable: The adjectives only begin to describe the career and contribution to jazz of the bassist Charlie Haden. From free jazz with Ornette Coleman, through decades playing with virtually every major figure, to recent work on Americana, Cuban, and Mexican sounds, Haden’s discography is one of the most opulent in jazz as well as one of its most adventurous.

Haden’s main working group is the deeply melodic Quartet West, which celebrates its 20th anniversary with four shows tonight and tomorrow at Regattabar. Few jazz units of the 1980s have survived, but Quartet West has thrived, elaborating a rich, lyrical sensibility that doubles as a loving inquiry into aspects of the American psyche through the medium of song.

“The Art of the Song” is the title of one of the group’s five albums as well as a statement of purpose. Whether standards, Haden’s compositions, or those of the 1940s and 1950s film composers he admires, Quartet West plays unhurried music that infuses texture and feeling into relatively classic structures. What makes the results superior is the emotional maturity and the obvious connection the musicians share.

“You play together for that long, and it’s intuitive,” Haden says, on the phone from his LA home, of saxophonist Ernie Watts and pianist Alan Broadbent. He then awards them a classic Haden accolade: “They’re beautiful human beings.”

Read More

Rakim: It’s time for hip-hop to take a stand

Boston Globe, August 4, 2006

For lovers of classic hip-hop, tomorrow’s Peace Boston concert on City Hall Plaza offers a rare chance to travel back in time with some of the genre’s defining artists. The top draw is Rakim, considered by many the greatest rapper of all time. He’s joined by CL Smooth, Nice & Smooth, and an assortment of Boston acts from then and now. Los Angeles-based female MC Medusa and Boston’s DJ Nomadik will host the event, a production of the City of Boston and local hip-hop activists. With gun violence spiking in Boston this summer, the concert, a reprise of last year’s highly successful event, will highlight “conscious” themes of community building and civic peace.

Every artistic tradition possesses legends whose contribution to its development is so great it is impossible to imagine it without them. Ask hip-hop connoisseurs which artists, in the genre’s three-decade history, have had this sort of impact, and if there’s one unanimous pick, it is likely to be Rakim.

As the rapper and writer in the duo Eric B. & Rakim, which released four classic albums from 1987 to 1992, the Long Island- raised MC left a furious imprint, mixing intensity of purpose, lyrical imagination, and technique to a degree that remains unequaled.

Read More

Kekele merges Congo and Cuba

Boston Globe, July 28, 2006

In the beginning there was a rhythm. It crossed the Atlantic with the slave trade and came to thrive in Cuba. About 70 years ago, it found its way back to Congo (etched into the grooves of Cuban 78s), where most of the Cuban slaves had come from in the first place.

The rhythm was rumba, and once back in Congo it changed, eventually producing soukous, the high-energy Congolese pop of recent decades, with its segments of frenetic guitar riffs and barked-out audience exhortations. But memories of a sweet transition period endure: a time, mainly in the 1960s, when nations like Congo celebrated their newly achieved independence to the sway of a rumba beat.

The members of Kekele, the stunning Congolese band that visits the Lowell Folk Festival this weekend, are guardians of this musical memory. Their new album, “Kinavana” the title is a mix of Kinshasa and Havana, the capitals of Congo and Cuba stands as a definitive living tribute to the sound, with the benefit of the latest produc tion technology.veterans came together in 2000 to form Kekele the name refers to a creeping jungle plant it was a bit like the birth of the Buena Vista Social Club, only without an outside instigator.

Read More

The beats of their hearts

Boston Globe, July 14, 2006

There’s a little-known law in the music business that says that every few years, an anointed world music act seeps into the mainstream, where it becomes soundtrack material for coffee shop speed-dating events or grad-student dinner parties. Quality and shelf-life vary. The Cape Verdean doyenne Cesaria Evora, for much of the 1990s the world music artist most commonly found on tasteful CD spindles, never let fame dilute her output or intensity. The Gipsy Kings, by contrast, quickly devolved into hopeless cliche.

Today’s crossover champions are Amadou and Mariam, the singer- guitarist couple from Mali whose album “Dimanche a Bamako,” released last year, has been a huge global hit. It’s a little pop gem in which blues, reggae, rock, and African sounds nestle into producer Manu Chao’s shimmering backdrop of street noises and conversation snippets. This evening, the pair headline the French Library’s annual Bastille Day concert in the Back Bay. Joining them on the bill are the exciting Senegalese hip-hop band Daara J and Mauri tanian singer Daby Toure. It’s a lavish lineup that refreshingly presents the globalized, mash-up side of African music instead of hewing to orthodox “roots.”

The sound of Amadou and Mariam portrays an Africa marked by emigration and return, cable and satellite television, and the hustle and bustle that, no matter the social or economic differences, marks daily life in busy cities everywhere. It makes as much sense in Paris, where they are now primarily based, as back home in Bamako.

Read More

For Pyeng Threadgill, freedom to experiment

Boston Globe, June 25, 2006

The shimmering new album by singer Pyeng Threadgill, “Of the Air,” features eight original songs and two covers that, it’s safe to say, had never been juxtaposed before.

One is “Close to Me ” by the Cure; the other, Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz.” They may seem like strange bedfellows, drawn from completely different epochs and styles, but what the melancholy rock tune and the golden- age jazz memento have in common is in plain sight: They’re both good songs.

That basic truth, the integrity of the song, is something like an organizing principle in the music of Threadgill, who plays at Scullers on Thursday.

Whether working from a songbook, like the Robert Johnson classics she reimagined on her debut , “Sweet Home,” or her own originals, Threadgill approaches each piece with equal curiosity, trusting that honest performance will get the better of audience preconceptions about genre and material.

Read More

An original sound keeps evolving

Boston Globe, June 23, 2006

Calexico is coming home.

Since the late 1990s, the Tucson, Ariz., band has forged its own brand of music, a sometimes ramshackle, always exhilarating affair full of Mexican trumpets and plaintive country melodies. It has drawn inspiration, too, from traditional and pop music of Europe, where it frequently performs and enjoys an ardent following.

With “Garden Ruin,” the band’s newest album and its first in three years (the group is touring behind it now, stopping Wednesday at the Roxy), Calexico is taking stock and, to hear lead singer and guitarist Joey Burns speak of it, focusing on the concerns of home.

“The influences are not so much about other places,” Burns says on the phone from a tour stop in Portland, Ore. “It’s more about being at home, and picking up the headlines.”

Read More

He’s busy representing

Boston Globe, June 2, 2006

CAMBRIDGE—It’s been a busy season for MC Kabir. The local hip- hop stalwart has just released his third album, “Peaceful Solutions.” He earned an item in last week’s New Yorker, and MTV’s South Asian channel has asked him to guest VJ. He’s about to get married. And, of no less importance to this committed educator, his students at the uber-Cambridge Shady Hill School are honing their raps for their final concert presentation.

Kabir, 29, is a Cambridge creature, one whose domain extends from local stages to the genteel acres of West Cambridge, where he teaches hip-hop and physical education at the school and gives music lessons to individual students.

Affable, with a husky, gentle-giant presence, Kabir receives a visitor in the apartment he shares near Harvard Square with his fiancee, Rebecca Foy. The flat is an appealing disorder of keyboards, sound equipment, books, and records, amid which three cats lounge with authority.

Read More

Epicenter of soul

Boston Globe, May 28, 2006

LOS ANGELES—Of all the neighborhoods in this vast entertainment capital, the yuppie haven of Santa Monica is one of the last ones where you’d go in search of cutting-edge anything. Much less anything to do with soul music and the black experience.

Yet if there’s a secret laboratory where the next wave of American soul music is being concocted, it’s here, nestled into a generic shopping stretch of Wilshire Boulevard.

Just as neo-soul the late-’90s movement that bred such artists as Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Bilal made its spiritual home in Philadelphia, its successor is coming to life here. It’s a 21st- century soul: A restless, edgy sound that makes full use of new electronic possibilities, one that’s devoted to classic soul values but pushing in its lyrics and techniques into the future.

The scene is fiercely independent. Besides being performers, the artists are entrepreneurs who cut their own CDs and distribute their wares independently at stores, clubs, and on the Internet. To them, creative freedom and commercial viability need not contradict.

Read More

Ghostface has style and substance

Boston Globe, April 15, 2006

Not long after Ghostface Killah hit the stage Thursday night at the Paradise, someone in front reached up to hand the rapper a box. It contained a pair of sky-blue Wallabies, his fetish throwback footwear, and he beamed as he tried them on, the color enriching an already fruity outfit that included a robe, a tartan cap, and bombastic old-school gold jewelry.

Ghost, you see, brings to the table more than his ridiculously inventive, densely packed rhymes, with their strangely successful non sequiturs and effortless jumps between the sacred and the profane. He also brings a persona, idiosyncrasies, and a comfort with the outrageous that put him in the lineage of the greatest MCs. This fusion of substance and style saturates his new album, “Fishscale,” and makes him a superior live performer.

It showed in his swagger and looseness, and when he quieted the beats and his hype men and sat at center stage, engaging the packed, adulatory crowd in a back-and-forth a cappella medley of hits from the Wu-Tang Clan and his solo career. And it showed at the end of his generous 90-minute set when he filled the stage with women from the crowd and, to the tune of classic soul jams, let the night end as a dance party.

Read More

Turning Bollywood pop into global art

Boston Globe, April 8, 2006

A signature of Bollywood is its music: “Filmi” songs, by turns gaudy and graceful, have dominated Indian pop culture for a half- century. And of the great “playback singers,” so called because actors lip-synch to their songs, few others are as influential and none as adventurous as Asha Bhosle, the 73-year-old doyenne who performs with the Kronos Quartet, tabla master Zakir Hussain, and Chinese pipa player Wu Man tomorrow in a sold-out concert at the Berklee Performance Center.

Bhosle is a national icon who is as comfortable with Indian classical music and the Persian love songs called ghazals as she is working with techno producers or R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe.

Her album with Kronos, “You’ve Stolen My Heart,” features fine East-meets-West renderings of songs by R.D. Burman (nicknamed Pancham), a great Bollywood music director and Bhosle favorite who died in 1994. A new double CD, “Love Supreme,” offers US audiences a sliver of the diva’s reputed 12,000-song catalog. Bhosle answered our questions by e-mail while preparing to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Read More

Evora delights with simplicity

Boston Globe, April 5, 2006

Cesaria Evora is an icon: Her gorgeous albums of Cape Verdean morna and other Afro-Atlantic sounds are part of today’s world- music canon. At 65, she has brought the sound and sentiment of her rocky archipelago into even the sparsest CD collections.

Evora plays to full houses, as she did Friday at the Orpheum, filling its tattered confines with sodade the melancholy that infuses morna and with her own simplicity and grace. She sang from her new album “Rogamar” and her catalog, from her eponymous 1995 album’s “Petit Pays” to her version of the ballad “Besame Mucho.” “Africa Nossa,” a vibrant hymn to the continent, was a standout and reappeared as an encore.

Read More

By way of Russia, art-rock for art’s sake

Boston Globe, March 24, 2006

Ever wonder where art-rock went? Ambitious, literary rock music with an appetite for genre experimentation and an extroverted, theatrical stage personality? If you’re stuck in a rut, replaying your old Roxy Music or Talking Heads records, then you probably haven’t been looking to the east Eastern Europe, that is.

Art-rock is alive and well and living thriving, even in St. Petersburg, Russia. The infectious, brilliant band Auktyon, formed back in Soviet days and still a major force in the Russian musical scene, is here to prove it. It plays tonight at the Somerville Theatre.

Auktyon it means “auction” is an eight-member combo with a lineup that has stayed nearly constant since the mid-1980s. As with all great eccentric bands, its sound resists category. But the musical lineup, which leans to bottom-heavy horns such as tuba and bass clarinet, and the group’s demonstrative, jaunty style set up connections from ska to klezmer. At every shift of tempo, the connections meld or vanish as fast as they formed. Heard end to end, an Auktyon album is very much a journey.

Read More

On haphazard night, Cole barely bothers to show

Boston Globe, March 15, 2006

It was 1:30 a.m. when Keyshia Cole took the stage last Wednesday night at the Roxy, and the copious security presence made it clear that her set had zero chance of running past closing time. In any event, Cole, a popular choice for Next Big Thing in R&B on the strength of her album “The Way It Is,” took just 20 minutes to do her thing before thanking God and her fans and disappearing backstage.

Until then it had been a fun enough time, for a club night: Folks came to dance, and the DJ played a potpourri of radio jams. But this was billed as Cole’s concert. Her target audience young black women with romantic ideals and emotional grievances was present en masse, and the frustration was apparent. That so many stayed testifies to Cole’s appeal and to Boston’s chronic scarcity of major black- oriented events.

Cole’s set contained few surprises, other than a propensity, in her stage banter, to speak in the same breath the name of God and the N-word. (She worships the former, and calls men the latter.) Slender and unpretentious in a simple lavender top, she motored through her hits “I Changed My Mind,” “(I Just Want It) To Be Over,” “I Should Have Cheated,” and “Love,” many women in the room singing along in communion.

Read More

Mixing old songs and new, Fagen finds the groove

Boston Globe, March 13, 2006

No one has taken the place of Steely Dan. A generation ago, guitarist Walter Becker and singer-keyboardist Donald Fagen built an unmatched creative hub connecting rock, jazz, blues, and soul. Their taut sound, technical yet warm, and their lyrics, crucial vignettes of ’70s dystopia and Reagan-era dyspepsia, sped them into the pop pantheon. There’s a finality to Steely Dan, a sense of arrival, that wards off imitators and apprentices.

So it is left to Steely Dan’s founders to be themselves, both as a duo and individually, in what Fagen, performing Saturday night at the Boston Opera House, demurely called his “three widely separated albums over the past 25 years.” On tour behind the newest, “Morph the Cat,” out this month, Fagen and his characteristically excellent band delivered a generous two-hour set of some new and many old songs, plenty to feel the magic.

And magic it was, once Fagen, in imperfect voice due to a cold, growled through “Green Flower Street” from 1982’s “The Nightfly,” and into that record’s title song, eventually locating the right power and pitch. The residual hoarseness brought out the bluesiness of the next song, “New Frontier.” “Bright Nightgown,” a big guitar and keys jam from the new record, made the already loose band more so.

Read More

A star in South Africa is ready for the world to listen

Boston Globe, March 12, 2006

“If a little tree grows under a baobab, it will die a sapling,” an African proverb says. Applied to the music world, it means that sometimes the greats are so great that their shadow leaves little room for new artists to emerge.

That would seem to be the case for South African music, at least as American audiences get to experience it. Hugh Masekela and Ladysmith Black Mambazo visit the United States every year; they are undisputedly seminal artists, but also growing long in the tooth.

But in South Africa, the 12 years since the end of white rule have produced a bubbling cosmopolitan and multicultural arts scene, with waves of new musical styles and stars who by rights should have broken into the international market years ago.

With “Zabalaza,” released here last month after earning top honors last year at the South African and Africa-wide equivalents of the Grammys, soul singer Thandiswa Mazwai, a superstar back home, is ready to be known to the world.

Read More

A hot ticket but not the most exciting one

Boston Globe, February 15, 2006

When he’s not making music, Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae singer from Brooklyn, spends most of his time in shul, contemplating the Almighty. So it would have taken far more than a snowstorm, a mere terrestrial impediment, to stop him from delivering his scheduled performance at Avalon Sunday night.

It’s simply stating facts to say that the 25-year-old artist born Matthew Miller is the flavor of the moment, with tickets for the sold-out show trading online for as much as $100. The room was packed with a young crowd that included a smattering of yarmulke’d Orthodox Jews and an undercurrent of hippie energies.

They warmly received a workmanlike set featuring hits from the 2005 release “Live at Stubb’s,” such as “Chop ‘Em Down,” which tells the story of Exodus, “Warrior,” and perhaps Matisyahu’s most sophisticated offering, “Aish Tamid,” in which the singer finds grace amid the hubbub of the city. He also offered previews from his studio album to be released next month.

Read More

It’s not for purists, but his flamenco is full of passion

Boston Globe, February 10, 2006

Vicente Amigo looks the part. With his long, dark hair, high forehead, and brooding gaze, the Spanish guitarist appears ideally suited to express the drama and heat of flamenco. Through five albums and many collaborations, the 38-year-old Amigo has become a key name in the genre, earning a Latin Grammy in 2001 and Spain’s Ondas award in 2002.

But Amigo, who plays the Berklee Performance Center on Sunday, has forged a sound that appeals beyond flamenco’s traditional confines. His technique and panache have made him an international guitar star, his face splashed across the cover of music magazines.

Though he trained from childhood at the knee of flamenco masters such as El Tomate and Manolo Sanlucar, Amigo takes liberties with the form. His 2000 disc, “Ciudad de los ideas” (City of Ideas, referring to Cordoba), featured Algerian pop singer Khaled, as well as a harmonica.

Read More

Another Atlanta style shakes up the charts

Boston Globe, January 22, 2006

If you listen to urban music at all, chances are that you can’t get “Laffy Taffy” out of your head.

With its goofy refrain (“Shake that laffy taffy”) and barely- there synthesized beats, the infectious first single from the album “Down for Life,” by Atlanta band D4L, is topping charts and scoring relentless radio play nationwide.

“Laffy Taffy” marks the national breakout of snap music a style that’s been percolating within the Atlanta scene and yielding a string of lesser hits: “White Tee” and “Oh I Think Dey Like Me” by Dem Franchize Boyz, D4L’s earlier “Betcha Can’t Do It Like Me,” and popular street compilations by prominent Atlanta DJs.

Snap features party lyrics that are lewd but rarely scandalous. Its beats are as minimalist as hip-hop has known in two decades yet geared for the dance floor. Gentlemen perform a debonair dance punctuated by finger-snaps while the ladies, well, shake that laffy taffy.

Read More

Touré always has a new groove

Boston Globe, January 20, 2006

He’s been called an African Cat Stevens, which seems odd. For there’s little of the moody singer-songwriter in Daby Toure, the rising star from Mauritania who rocked Boston’s Bastille Day outdoor concert last July with a danceable, sweat-drenched set, and returns for a performance at the Somerville Theatre tonight.

It’s true that Toure’s first solo album, “Diam,” released in 2004 on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, found him in a familiar West African troubadour mode. The lyrics are mellow, even gentle. The themes heroes and ancestors, the human condition are timeless ones that trace back to griots and mystics.

Though enjoyable, “Diam” did not stray much outside the conventional confines of “world music,” where artists are expected to be authentic emissaries of their culture, sometimes at the cost of innovation.

Read More

Spirited rock, fastidious alt-folk make uneasy match

Boston Globe, December 10, 2005

Calexico is one of America’s best rock bands, a crew out of Tucson that makes exuberant, textured music steeped in the border sensibility yet never derivative. Iron & Wine is Sam Beam, an alt- folk hero with hushed voice and husky beard whose songs straddle the line between haunting and twee. The EP they recently cut together, “In the Reins,” has garnered a sort of ginger praise, with fans of one act not quite sure what to make of the other. Their performance Wednesday at Avalon did little to resolve this discomfort.

Instead, it showcased an uneven exchange. Calexico’s six members, multi-instrumentalists all, supplied most of the labor and all of the fun. Beam provided his voice, soft compared to the rough, energetic vocals of Calexico’s Joey Burns, and the bulk of a sold- out yet listless crowd heavy on the sensitive-male demographic. The joint set was a ramshackle affair, at its best when Calexico’s trumpets and pedal steel dominated, or when Mexican guest Salvador Duran sang in Spanish on “He Lays in the Reins.”

Read More

O’Connor’s reggae is righteous

Boston Globe, December 8, 2005

Sinead O’Connor doesn’t give a damn. At 39 and officially retired from the pop life, the stellar Irish singer has found a spiritual home in Rastafari and a renewed musical purpose in interpreting hallowed roots-reggae classics. Whether this personal evolution makes any sense to you is not her problem. And, considering the depth and searing authenticity of her performance Monday at Avalon, more power to her.

O’Connor hasn’t done things halfway. She enlisted for her latest album, “Throw Down Your Arms,” one of the world’s greatest rhythm sections, drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare, guardians of the tradition who do not pick their projects lightly. She is working with spiritually charged texts from reggae mystics like Peter Tosh and the Abyssinians. And by leaving the arrangements unchanged, she has challenged herself to inhabit the songs with the force of their originators.

Read More

Jean Grae stays true to herself

Boston Globe, November 29, 2005

“My name is Jean, and I rap. And I try to be really honest about it.”

That’s how Jean Grae introduces herself. Grae, a favorite of the hip-hop underground, has made honesty the north star of her journey to recognition and, she hopes, commercial success.

But despite three albums and dozens of cameo appearances, all to critical praise, Grae, who plays the Roxy on Thursday with Talib Kweli and Pharoahe Monch, remains little known.

“This Week,” released in late 2004, found Grae rhyming at the level of socially conscious rap stars such as Kweli, Mos Def, and the Roots over beats courtesy of 9th Wonder, among others, the producer-guru behind Little Brother.

Read More

The world according to Mike Ladd

Boston Globe, November 20, 2005

It’s a twisty road to pop success. All hard work and talent can promise is recognition by a few peers and a place in the purgatory called the “underground.” From then on, it’s usually about either “going commercial” or simply persisting.

But Cambridge-raised poet and producer Mike Ladd has found another way to proceed. One turning point was meeting jazz pianist Vijay Iyer at the now-defunct House of Blues in Harvard Square back in 1997. From that encounter would grow 2003’s “In What Language?,” a brilliant collaboration that explores the emotional content of globalization, portraying the thoughts of people as they come and go in an international airport.

“In What Language?” won lavish critical acclaim. It also introduced Ladd, now based in Paris, to an audience larger than the esoteric circles of intellectual hip-hop and poetry slams where he is something of a reluctant cult figure.

This month Ladd returns with a new disc, “Father Divine.” It’s a work of artful noise that blends inputs like Bollywood horns and shuffly Caribbean beats with the adventurous production spirit of vintage Public Enemy, and lyrics that explore Ladd’s ongoing preoccupations: with culture, migration, nostalgia, and the evolution of music itself.

Read More

Jones’s soul revue is stuck in overdrive

Boston Globe, November 19, 2005

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are immersed in ’60s soul, down to the band’s stage moves, retro hairstyles, and “young-fogey” outfits. They came to the Middle East Thursday to deliver an old-fashioned, gut-bucket, right-on soul revue. And they did, sort of.

The Dap-Kings play crisp, rump-shaking funk in the spirit of the Stax or Muscle Shoals house bands, on whom they are modeled. Jones, who was a corrections officer before her musical career’s belated takeoff, has a full, throaty voice and a strong stage presence.

The band’s two albums have earned critical acclaim, much of it to the effect that they are too good to be considered merely throwbacks. Still, both the fare and the delivery too often crossed the line between revival and pastiche.

Read More

Part urban, part traditional, completely contagious

Boston Globe, November 13, 2005

Cynics, begone! For all the depredations of commercial radio and the antics of add-water-and-stir instant celebrities, music still has the power to deliver the shock of the new. And every once in a while, a band comes along to prove it.

The Congolese outfit Konono No. 1, which appears at the Somerville Theatre on Friday, is such a band. It delivers to borrow a term of high praise from the glory days of hip-hop “the style you haven’t heard yet.” Best of all, it’s fully formed, as the Konono players have been honing their art for a generation, even though their 2004 album “Congotronics” is their first international release.

Konono is a nine-member street band that operates at high volume and speed, combining the likembe, or thumb piano, with percussion improvised out of salvaged metal. The amplification uses microphones made with magnets from car parts, and what the band calls “voice- throwers,” huge, conical megaphones that evoke a turbulent 1960s political rally. Augmented by repetitive, chanted lyrics, the sound is intoxicating.

Read More

Rodrigues belts out a cultural slice of Brazil

Boston Globe, November 12, 2005

The Afro-Brazilian diva Virginia Rodrigues is known for investing the music of Salvador de Bahia, her native city, with a poise and poignancy that can evoke gospel or opera. She opened her weekend engagement at Regattabar last night with a charismatic performance that showcased these traits, with the layering and cross-fertilization of influences that make Brazilian music so unique, yet so universally evocative.

Rodrigues’s most recent album, “Mares Profundos,” features material that suits her perfectly: the cycle of “Afro-sambas,” composed in the 1960s by Vinicius de Moraes and Baden Powell, two leading lights of bossa nova, white Brazilians who became fascinated with Afro-Brazilian culture.

Read More

They keep the Mississippi sound alive

Boston Globe, November 12, 2005

When you name your band after the place you call home, you’re making a statement. When the place is Mississippi, you’re also staking out spiritual ground, raising ghosts. Field hands birthing the blues in the ruthless Delta heat. The young Elvis Presley, cutting his teeth in Tupelo. Emmett Till, the Philadelphia Three, and the countless “strange fruit” of the famous song, still hanging from the poplar trees, anonymous and unavenged.

But Mississippi is modern, too. It’s the state with the most black elected officials. Its music is that of Cassandra Wilson. It’s rapper David Banner and his gutter-yet-righteous dual personality. And it’s the North Mississippi Allstars, who raised the flag of Southern rock only to color it thick with gospel and blues, and who bring the festive, organic results to the Paradise tonight.

The Allstars’ Luther and Cody Dickinson and the brothers’ high school buddy Chris Chew grew up in the Hill Country, the high ground east and away from the sweltering Delta. The region, which includes the college town and literary mecca Oxford, has long been good to creative eccentrics. Their mentors included dad/producer Jim Dickinson, bluesman R.L. Burnside, and Otha Turner, the curator of the area’s distinct fife-and-drum sound who was prominently featured in last year’s PBS series on the blues.

Read More

With carefree spirit, he raps on the high life

Boston Globe, November 5, 2005

For years Houston has boasted as vibrant and creative a scene as exists anywhere in hip-hop. The Boston audience has been slow to catch on, however, whether because of the overweening influence of New York styles or because the viscous beats of the Texas metropolis are alien to listeners deadened by subpar MCs who do little more than scream out instructions for tired call-and-response chants.

Whatever the reason, it was regrettable that the top-notch Houston MC Devin the Dude was not even the headliner for his Boston debut, Thursday night at the Middle East. That honor went to the far more ordinary Royce Da 5’ 9”, making Devin’s set, which itself followed the usual interminable series of local openers, little more than an entertaining interlude in an otherwise pedestrian, if listenable, program.

There was no question, however, that Devin stole the show. A lithe young man with a friendly manner, glazed eyes, and a constant sly smile, he possesses that refreshing rarity in hip-hop today: a style all his own. His flow is relaxed and his agenda unapologetically slack. Guns and jewelry are of no interest to him. What he cares about, deeply, is women and weed. The songs on his three albums, including last year’s excellent “To tha X-treme,” rarely stray from these familiar yet somehow inexhaustible topics.

Read More

Singer Pontes proves eclectic and electric

Boston Globe, October 31, 2005

Portuguese singer Dulce Pontes has constructed her musical identity from a combination of rock ballads, variety pop, and traditional folk music, all infused with fado, the music of melancholy that the late Amalia Rodrigues introduced to international ears. Making her Boston debut Saturday at Berklee, Pontes worked the range of this sonic palette in a compelling, if sometimes bewildering, performance.

The eclectic Pontes diverges from fado stars like the neo- traditional Cristina Branco or the gothic Misia, who sings wraith- like and immobile. Pontes is dramatic it’s a requirement of the genre but in a dancer’s expressive, kinetic way. The high theatrics dwell in her voice: she sings big, with a diva’s stamina and the eerie tonal warblings of a Kate Bush. The reverb effect applied for most of the show was wholly unnecessary.

Read More

Not your ordinary 70s soul group

Boston Globe, October 23, 2005

Amid the pantheon of musicians who took soul music to its creative peak in the 1970s sits the Average White Band, a bunch of white guys from Scotland who made their mark on the genre behind classics such as “Pick up the Pieces,” “Schoolboy Crush,” and “A Love of Your Own.” The rare white group to earn recognition and praise from the black soul audience, much covered and frequently sampled in hip-hop, AWB has made it through the years, its line-up reshuffled but its commitment to the music and to rousing, committed live performance intact. The band visits Scullers on Tuesday and Wednesday. From a tour stop in Seattle, AWB co-founder Alan Gorrie spoke about the band’s current identity, its place in the music market today, and its famous risque logo, which turns the “W” into a woman’s shapely backside.

Q. For those of us who weren’t old enough in the heyday, tell me how you came up with the name.

A. It was a bit of British wordplay, a mixture of irony and a spoof, that we were anything but an average white band of the time. It was my wife–then girlfriend’s–idea.

Read More

Soul mates

Boston Globe, October 23, 2005

Every Sunday morning from midnight to 2 a.m., sweet soul music seeps from an MIT campus basement into the city’s bedrooms, taxicabs, and prison cells, in a ritual of black Boston life that has gone on for years, even generations.

The songs are pure ballads, lush and syrupy as they want to be. You are my lady , croons Freddie Jackson. I’m giving you the best that I’ve got , Anita Baker answers. I could never repay your love , the Spinners testify. And Teddy Pendergrass the Teddy Bear, the Love Man simply suggests: Close the door .

Working the controls is a mountain of a man. He wears the regulation blue shirt of his day job driving an MBTA bus. Sweat glistens on his bald head and disappears into impressive cranial folds. The red light comes on. He leans into the mike and booms in a warm baritone: “Welcome to `Mellow Madness,’ baby boys and baby girls …”

P.J. Porter, who has broadcast for nearly three decades on all- volunteer WMBR (88.1 FM), is the Boston celebrity that few people know.

Read More

Gangbe’s fascinating rhythms

Boston Globe, October 21, 2005

Although a few ubiquitous artists dominate the “world music” canon and the racks of your favorite CD megachain, African music isn’t standing still. Across the continent, young musicians are experimenting with electronica, hip-hop, reggae, jazz, and new takes on traditional forms.

Just a fraction of this creative ferment finds its way to Western ears. Count the 10 members of Gangbe Brass Band, from the West African nation of Benin, among those lucky few. And count Boston fortunate to hear them when they make their local debut Sunday at the Somerville Theatre.

The basic ingredients of a Gangbe concoction are the traditional rhythms of the region, played on a range of African percussions, and classic trumpet-and-trombone Western brass. The result is wholly modern.

Read More

Zap Mama: often path-breaking, always funky

Boston Globe, October 5, 2005

World-music tastemakers are divided on Zap Mama. The Afro-funk outfit, led by Belgian-Congolese singer Marie Daulne, broke out in the early 1990s with a roots a cappella sound before throwing off the shackles of ethnic categorization with more international pop and funk efforts. While the pundits debate authenticity, the band has continued its march toward the multicultural future, bivouacking Monday at the Paradise for a rousing, rear-end-shaking performance.

Like Blondie, Zap Mama the band is often confused for its lead singer. But the beautiful, kinetic Daulne is part of an eight- member mix and just one of its polyethnic roster of dynamic women, which includes two superb backing vocalists, a crack bassist (looking super bad in camo shorts and black boots), and a keyboard player with a powerful singing voice.

Read More

Music, daughters motivate Shankar

Boston Globe,  October 2, 2005

Sitar master Ravi Shankar is a legend of Indian music at home and abroad. The era when he taught the Beatles and resisted the overtures of the hippie movement is long gone. More recent disciples include many young Indian virtuosos and Shankar’s daughter Anoushka, who excels in traditional ragas and in the contemporary, globalized sounds of her new album “Rise.” The other famous Shankar daughter is singer Norah Jones. Shankar, still an active and passionate musician at 85, comes to Symphony Hall tonight with Anoushka and a passel of other musicians. He spoke with us from New York a few days ago.

Q. Has Western appreciation of Indian music changed over the years?

A. It has changed so much. When I started in the mid-1950s, just a small audience was curious about Indian music. But none of the musicians had any concept of the Western audience. They would do the same thing as in India, playing Darbari Kanada [a very slow raga that can take hours to unfold] and so on.

We needed to edit, like in film. We already had this system in South India, of starting a concert with shorter items. I started performing in that manner. And I became very popular, which was good because it was attracting more audience.

After almost 11 years, George Harrison became my student I’m sure you know that whole story, and you know that I had a lot of problems with that. But I didn’t sell [out] I didn’t become raga-rock. I was very strong about preserving the traditional form.

Read More

Coltrane tribute is a love supreme

Boston Globe, September 30, 2005

The commemoration of John Coltrane is never a casual matter. The saxophone titan, who died in 1967, left not only a body of work unequaled in creativity and technique but a legacy of constant spiritual exploration. The 1965 album “A Love Supreme” is the best known but far from only manifestation of this quest.

So when musicians honor Coltrane, technical skills are not enough. Coltrane’s peaceful nature and striving toward the divine must also enter the room.

It’s a tall order. But Boston’s John Coltrane Memorial Concert which features piano master McCoy Tyner, the surviving member of Coltrane’s classic quartet has proved up to the task for 28 years and counting. The concert is tomorrow at Northeastern University’s Blackman Theatre.

Read More

Hathaway returns home in triumph

Boston Globe, September 26, 2005

She is blessed with what may be the most perfect voice in R&B and soul today, yet singer Lalah Hathaway has appeared far more often on other people’s records than she has under her own name. Three albums in 15 years does not a major-label, commercial career make. Hathaway’s quiet life as a sort of session musician appears to suit her fundamentally shy temperament. But when she takes center stage, watch out.

In a triumphant performance Friday at the Berklee Performance Center, Hathaway deployed her flawless pitch and exceptional range across a selection of her own songs, covers, and standards, delighting an ebullient capacity crowd that hung on her every half- note. Calls of “Right on!” and “Sing it, girl!” fused whenever she stretched out, scatting and vocalizing to turn even the most formulaic love song into a perfect piece.

Read More

A living legend nurtures his roots

Boston Globe, September 21, 2005

African music trends come and go. Nigerian Afrobeat and Congolese soukous, lively at home, are currently quiet on the world scene, but Senegalese hip-hop and coupe-decale from Ivory Coast are rising.

Yet amid the flux, the music of Mali never goes out of style. The landlocked nation is home to an age-old sound that can be as austere as its arid landscapes yet seems in a state of constant renaissance.

“There’s so many Malian musicians right now because they’re doing something good,” says the living-legend guitarist and singer Boubacar Traore, who plays the Museum of Fine Arts tonight. He’s referring to a constellation that includes Salif Keita, Ali Farka Toure, Rokia Traore, Oumou Sangare, Habib Koite, and more.

“Everywhere in the world, people are listening to Malian music. That’s because we play our tradition. We play our reality.”

Read More

An heirloom rice returns

Boston Globe, September 21, 2005

CHARLESTON, S.C.—In the Colonial era, this elegant seaport was the richest city in the New World, thanks to an exquisite variety of rice known as Carolina Gold prized as far away as China that blanketed the lowlands of the coastal era. The hallowed grains are on the rise again.

Carolina Gold’s revival has become important enough to warrant its own symposium, which was held here last month. Academics and foodies discussed the variety’s origins, its role in American history, and how best to grow and market the rice, while savoring interpretations by Charleston chefs of dishes that date to the plantation era.

The rice’s return makes it possible to render the sophisticated Creole cooking of the Lowcountry to traditional standards. At one time, slaves tended the rice under harsh conditions, battling malaria and typhus. But after the Civil War the plantations emptied, Charleston declined, and Carolina Gold faced oblivion. Carolina Gold seeds were preserved in several land-grant universities, including Texas A&M and the University of Arkansas; growers planted it in the mid-1990s to see if they could revive it.

Read More

Alluring Lura goes all out

Boston Globe, September 14, 2005

Bostonians whose awareness of Cape Verdean music begins and ends with Cesaria Evora had the chance to expand their horizons Saturday evening when singer Lura, the rocky archipelago’s current chart- topping sensation, visited the Berklee Performance Center.

Hers was a total performance. She covered styles ranging from ballads and batuku, traditional women’s music, to the fast-paced, Africanized funana, delighting an ebullient, multi-generational capacity crowd who came prepared to holler back and sing along.

To call Lura alluring is more than wordplay. In fact, she is fierce. Though petite, she gave out a commanding stage presence, underscored by lithe dance moves and her exuberant natural coif. She showed tremendous vocal strength and range, and worked both the room and her band with sexiness, grace, and authority.

Read More

Hip-hop fest breaks through

Boston Globe, August 4, 2005

The year was 1989, and in the cities of the East Coast, hip-hop was happening. MCs squared off on street and stage, mixing wisecracks and social critique to the cutting and scratching of DJs and acrobatic moves of breakdancers in matching outfits and high- top fades.

Countless records on fledgling labels offered witty takes on inner-city life. Big Daddy Kane spun tales of dealers and dropouts who end up “Calling Mr. Welfare.” Brooklyn’s Special Ed, 16, boasted, “I’m kind of young, but my tongue speaks maturity.” A no- nonsense MC Lyte burnished her credentials as “the dopest female that you’ve heard thus far.”

This Saturday Kane, Ed, and Lyte anchor a lavish lineup of national and Boston talent, including local heroes Ed O.G and the Perceptionists, at a concert on Boston City Hall Plaza. The show includes the final of a breakdancing invitational hosted by Boston’s Floor Lords, featuring teams from as far away as Chicago and Florida.

Read More

Listen. And learn

Boston Globe, July 31, 2005

At the close of a night of underground DJ performances at the Middle East in Cambridge, Paul Irish sidled up to the turntablist Diplo with something more important to tell him than a fan’s usual post-gig thanks.

“I downloaded your music online,” Irish said. “So here’s 20 bucks.”

In the months since that encounter, Diplo has gone from obscurity to sensation – both solo and with his girlfriend, M.I.A., the ultra- hot Sri Lankan-British pop revelation.

And Irish, 22, who lives in Allston and runs a website called Aurgasm, is one of a small coterie of fans who, in the course of sharing and chatting about music on their sites, built the online buzz that helped these artists break into the mainstream.

Irish is an audioblogger–one of a new breed of tastemakers who devote their spare time to disseminating, free of charge, music that’s obscure, unusual, cutting-edge, or on the verge of being forgotten. Irish calls it “the best music you’ve never heard.”

Read More

Still ubiquitous

Boston Globe, July 29, 2005

Roy Ayers is happy. At 64, the vibraphonist, singer, and jazzy soul pioneer is still at the top of his game. His mallets, as they stride across the vibes, conjure openness and possibility, with a dash of insouciance. His voice infuses the uplifting themes of his songs with an undercurrent of sly come-ons.

Ayers, who comes to Scullers on Thursday, exudes enthusiasm in an interview from his Upper West Side apartment, which once belonged to writer James Baldwin. The word “wonderful” is a staple of Ayers’s speech. His career, he says, is a continuing wonderful experience. His trip to South Africa last year was wonderful. Neosoul high priestess Erykah Badu a recent collaborator who shines on Ayers’s 2004 album “Mahogany Vibe” is a wonderful person both onstage and off.

Ayers has ample reason to be cheerful. His sound, elaborated amid the social and cultural ferment of black America in the 1970s, has enjoyed a second heyday since the early ’90s. His work has served as feedstock for samples by a dizzying list of rappers, soul singers, and DJs and as inspiration to the UK-based acid-jazz scene.

Read More