Raging at injustice, he rocks the Casbah and beyond

Boston Globe, July 3, 2005

“Tekitoi?”

Couched in the truncated urban French of text messages, police stops, and ghetto posturing, the title of singer Rachid Taha’s barnstorming new album poses an urgent existential challenge: “Who the hell are you?”

In-your-face exhortation comes naturally to the Paris-based Taha, who brings his six-piece Arabic rock band to the Paradise on Thursday. In true punk-rock tradition, he has always believed in the power of provocation and is a veteran practitioner of riling up an audience for its own good.

This is, after all, the man who in 1986 loosed a vituperative Arabic remake of the patriotic “Douce France” (“Sweet France”) by crooner Charles Trenet on a French culture tone-deaf to the hardships of immigrant life and unready for multicultural irony. Think Jimi Hendrix deconstructing “The Star-Spangled Banner” or the Sex Pistols vandalizing “God Save the Queen.” The name of his group at the time, Carte de Sejour (“resident permit”) was itself a political statement. expanded his range of targets. He’s taking on racism, repression, and war, along with corrupt Arab governments and the knee-jerk propensity of some activists to blame Third World ills on the West alone.

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Ndegeocello puts the groove front and center

Boston Globe, June 27, 2005

At this moment in her career, Meshell Ndegeocello is not a singer. She’s an expert electric bass player whose sense of groove and sonic construction sustains an all-star ensemble she calls Spirit Music Jamia, assembled from across the jazz, Latin, and R&B scenes. Her voice, however, is limited to introducing the band. Some at the Paradise on Saturday night were clearly unprepared for this, as the audience thinned during the set.

That was a shame, because taking place onstage was a demonstration of the power of groove-based music in the tradition of the great bands of Fela Kuti, Miles Davis, Roy Ayers, and Tito Puente, a collaboration of instinctive musicians working as peers. From Afrobeat to rumba, the richness of the music of the black Atlantic was on full display along with the unmatchable synthetic power of pure funk.

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Like his genre-bending music, pianist knows no borders

Boston Globe, June 26, 2005

If there is a jazz musician of the moment, Vijay Iyer may well be it.

The Indian-American pianist has gone in the past year from underground favorite to emerging mainstream sensation with a gripping, thought-provoking sound and a body of work that includes straight-ahead post-bop efforts, avant-garde collective improvisation, and collaborations with poets, rappers, and DJs.

Two acclaimed quartet recordings, 2003’s “Blood Sutra” and this year’s “Reimagining,” have burnished Iyer’s credentials among the jazz orthodox. And “In What Language?,” a genre-bending ensemble work written with hip-hop composer Mike Ladd, has proven a double success as a CD and an ambitious multimedia performance.

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When he conducts, the electricity flows

Boston Globe, June 12, 2005

NEW YORK—It’s a raw, damp Monday night in the midst of a miserly spring, yet inside Nublu, an East Village club devoted to edgy music, all is hipness and heat. Baton in hand, Lawrence “Butch” Morris is leading a 10-piece ensemble in collective improvisation, using the ambitious, unusual technique that has made him an icon in progressive jazz and new music circles.

There is no sheet music involved, no plan, just a starting point. Morris does not tell his musicians what to play, but rather how to play it, sculpting the sound in real time with a vocabulary of gestures that mean, for instance, “remember,” “repeat,” or “sustain.” In full-fledged performance such as his upcoming three- night stand at the Green Street Grill in Cambridge Morris might deploy two dozen such cues. At Nublu, a more casual gathering, he sticks to just a few.

Even simplified, the music is rich, unusual, challenging. It swells like a tide, the ensemble forging sonic hypotheses and testing them at once, then withdrawing to try a new angle. Morris throws signs, jogs memories, summons disruptions, until the energy in the room confirms that something a connection is happening. There are moments of great beauty, and others that are jarring, when the center fails to hold. The finished edifice is imperfect. But it belongs to the conductor, the musicians, and the audience an irreproducible shared space.

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Bilal is back, mixing jazz and soul playfully

Boston Globe, May 14, 2005

For the hybrid genre called “neo-soul,” 2001 was an exceptionally strong vintage, with Erykah Badu’s second album and debut efforts from Alicia Keys, Jill Scott, India.Arie, and Musiq released in the space of a few months. Somewhat lost in the shuffle was the young Philadelphia singer Bilal, whose witty, groovy gem of an album, “First Born Second,” earned critical plaudits but was largely ignored by the purchasing public.

Since then, while Keys and Scott have gone on to fill arenas, Bilal has stayed under the radar, devoting himself in large part to production work and teaching. And though a second album is finally near completion, it’s a different side of his considerable talent that Bilal has taken on the road lately his jazz side, where the emphasis on spontaneity and freedom to stretch out favor his pipes and his range.

Though reasonable from an artistic point of view, Bilal’s trajectory hasn’t exactly been the fast track to mass recognition. So it was a small but attuned audience that welcomed him to Regattabar on Thursday for the first of a two-night stand.

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Free Okra

The Oxford American #49, April 2005

It was at the age of seven, at my grandmother’s table in Calcutta, that I formed a taste for okra. Indians often call okra “lady’s fingers,” and the preparations that came off the charcoal fire that the village-raised cook preferred to the kitchen stove were everything that the name connotes: smooth, delicate, and perfumed. Mustard oil infused the okra slices and deepened their flavor. Cumin, turmeric, or chilies added zest. This was okra unabashed and uncut, the perfect offset to a classic Bengali meal of pungent river fish and simple steamed rice. The pods were rich, pillowy, and moist. I became hooked on okra for life.

In its Indian context, the green pod is ubiquitous and uncontroversial. So when I came to the United States, I was unprepared to find the vegetable in ill repute. Though commonly grown in Southern gardens, it is also roundly disliked. Its proponents seem to divide into nostalgics and militants. Everyone else is an okra hater.

I quickly discovered that okraphobia hinges on the pod’s characteristic texture. That lush, fertile consistency I loved as a child is known in American parlance as slime.  Even okra’s defenders have internalized the widely held notion that okra, if uncontrolled, is disgusting. Midway through chiding those who find okra’s texture unpleasant, food writer James Villas, a North Carolina native, adds parenthetically, “to be truthful, okra overcooked to a gummy, mushy mess is appalling.” One smart and uninhibited food critic, no stranger to okra, told me he avoids the West African okra stews available in his city because they resemble “green snot.” Cookbooks that include okra usually acknowledge that the vegetable is “slimy”—conceding the terms of engagement by accepting the language of the enemy—and make certain to offer okra selection and preparation tips to help defeat the ooze.

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Metheny’s fare satisfies many tastes

Boston Globe, March 29, 2005

Like all artists, musicians are best approached on their own terms. Anyone who took in the Pat Metheny Group at the Orpheum Saturday night with the goal of answering the eternal question that bedevils the group “But is it jazz?” received their just comeuppance. For close to three hours, Metheny and his crew shredded the question to bits, veering from relaxed, in-the-cut cooking to eerie synthetic whispers, and outrageous stadium pyrotechnics, much to the delight of a sold-out crowd heavy on beards and bald spots.

At its most compelling, the Metheny Group sound establishes itself somewhere in the middle distance, with Metheny’s trademark guitar tone round, slightly disembodied, lurching skyward methodically tracing the landscape. His acolytes then take turns beaming the message back in. Cuong Vu’s straight-ahead trumpet phrasings and Gregoire Maret’s thoughtful lyricism on the harmonica stood out for their emotional impact. At those moments the group achieved a level of play with distance and proximity not unlike some of Miles Davis’s later works.

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Exhilarating jazz, spoken word take off in airport setting

Boston Globe, March 28, 2005

AMHERST—For all the talk about the emergence of global culture, art that successfully explores the emotional content of globalization remains rare. “In What Language?,” a project of jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and writer, producer, and performer Mike Ladd, is a triumph of a genre that doesn’t yet exist. The 80-minute “song cycle” of human lives caught up in globalization’s swirl is a model of what makes good art connect: It is aggressively ambitious yet unfailingly accessible and deeply empathetic.

The CD version of “In What Language?” was one of last year’s best new releases, a forward-looking jazz hybrid with a global hip-hop sensibility. But as a large audience at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Fine Arts Center discovered Thursday evening, the project achieves its fullest impact as a multimedia stage piece. Eleven musicians and vocalists improvise to Iyer’s composition and Ladd’s libretto in front of a huge screen flickering with images of airports and the activities that take place there.

Iyer is one of the most exciting new voices in jazz, as comfortable with fragmented and spliced electronic production as he is with straight-ahead phrasings. He’s assembled a group of kindred spirits, mainly from the New York scene, including saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and an extraordinary cellist, Okkyung Lee. As befits the airport theme, the sound proceeds in gaps and rushes, reflective at points and at others exhilarating, particularly when Iyer drives his hypnotic piano chords to crescendo.

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Restless

Boston Globe, January 28, 2005

To a younger generation of music fans, the rootsy multi- instrumentalist Olu Dara is better known for his progeny than for his output. The father of acclaimed rapper Nas, he has appeared several times on his son’s records, most recently on “Bridging the Gap,” an enthusiastic genre-crossing duet that vaulted up the charts last November.

But an older generation remembers Dara as something else altogether: a stalwart sideman who wielded his trumpet on the avant- garde jazz scene in New York in the late 1970s. Between the two phases, Dara went almost underground, waiting until 1998 to record his first album as a bandleader. In the process, he’s concocted a slow-cooked musical stew that matches his personality willful, whimsical, and encompassing in almost an offhand way all the main strands of the black musical experience.

Dara, who brings his five-member band to the Regattabar for two nights this weekend, exudes charisma and a sly wisdom. A lean man to whom the years have been kind, his look is benevolent and ardent at once. He switches unpredictably from trumpet to cornet to guitar and sings in a husky voice that recalls a countrified Gil Scott-Heron. He is known to stroll into the audience as he plays, demand that people dance, and flirt with the ladies.

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Michel performs with polish and power

Boston Globe, December 4, 2004

SOMERVILLE – “I don’t know how I became a diaspora,” the Haitian roots diva Emeline Michel musedonstage, her novel use of the collective concept somehow sounding just right. “It seemed to happen all of a sudden.” Many in the enthusiastic, largely Haitian crowd gathered at Johnny D’s on Thursday night could surely relate to the New York-based singer. She brought them home with a polished performance that grew more organic as the night went on.

A poised performer, Michel was almost too prepared for the show. She introduced the early songs with whimsical recollections of life in Haiti that rang a bit false, as if overly scripted. And despite its sexy theme and fast, rootsy rhythm, “Il fait chaud,” an ode to undressing on the beach, fell a little flat, the dance floor not yet primed for such fare.

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Sax Greats Heat Up Regattabar Crowd

Boston Globe, November 30, 2004

The legacy of John Coltrane contains multitudes, and when two of his devotees take the stage together, there is no predicting how their musical approaches will meld. The prospect of this creative interplay drew a sellout crowd to the Regattabar Friday night to watch saxophone masters of two generations, Pharoah Sanders and Kenny Garrett, open a weekend stand with their gifted quintet. A dense, rewarding show ensued, roaming the Coltrane universe with ballads, loping blues, and furious sheets of sound.

Still, fans seeking the mystical sound Sanders pioneered in the master’s late years, and still explores today, may have been disappointed. Instead of cowbells and ecstatic shrieks, Sanders, in elder statesman mode, supplied the essential tenor grounding for Garrett’s ferocious alto attack. Resplendent in purple velvet, Sanders’s beard a shock of white on dark skin, he looked more the griot, the messenger of the music’s history, than the avant-garde crusader some expect (or want) him to be.

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Ebony and Ivoirité

Transition Magazine #94, October 2oo3. Reprinted at Alternet.

Jil-Alexandre N’Dia is living the Ivorian dream.

Eight years ago, N’Dia came to America. For the last five years, along with his childhood friend Daniel Ahouassa, N’Dia has run Abidjan.net, a popular Web site that caters to migrants from Ivory Coast, the West African nation of their birth. The site offers on-line editions of the country’s main newspapers, as well as message boards, recipes, and a store where visitors can order food, clothing, and music from back home.

Abidjan.net also features on-line personals for lonely Ivorians overseas. “We’ve had it all,” N’Dia tells me over lunch at a noisy Cheesecake Factory in suburban Maryland. “Relationships, marriages, guys who get girls pregnant and disappear, the whole works.” Best of all, the site turns a profit. It’s produced on a shoestring — as plain as any page on the Web, but crammed with the content its audience craves. Abidjan.net gets most of its revenue from advertisements, many of them placed by other immigrant businesses thrilled to find such a well-defined audience.

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