Category: Articles

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 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 […]

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 […]

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,” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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? […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Long-term relationship plays well: Metheny & Burton

Boston Globe, June 14, 2009 NEW YORK – It’s a cold, drizzly spring afternoon in Times Square, but in the hotel suite overlooking the dull hurry of tourists and umbrellas, Pat Metheny looks as if he’s just stepped in out of the blazing sunshine, in shorts and a T-shirt, tousled hair crawling out from under […]

From pioneer to ambassador: King Sunny Ade

Boston Globe, July 12, 2009 It’s a signal achievement in world music to go global – to achieve recognition and a fan following that fills arenas and festival fields in countries far and wide. But sometimes you don’t have to. Sometimes, the respect you garner at home affords you all the gigs you need, plus […]

Rapping on the door of opportunity: Kaysha

Boston Globe, May 31, 2009 “I’ve always had a double identity,” says Edward Mokolo, who raps, sings, and produces under the name Kaysha. And that’s a simple way to put it. Congolese by birth, French by education, American by affinity, Caribbean by adoption, Pan-African by choice, the 35-year-old Kaysha is a walking pop hybrid who […]

A “fresh wave” of sound: Jose Conde

Boston Globe, May 17, 2009 BROOKLYN – The elephant lumbered out of the forest and straight into the lobby of a luxury hotel. At the bar, an elegant woman, martini in hand, gasped, while the pachyderm, oblivious, settled down to feast on a mango. Absurd, amusing, and gently intimating some kind of ecological moral to […]

Kuduro shakes things up: Buraka Som Sistema

Boston Globe, May 9, 2009 So you’ve grooved to house, tranced to techno. You’ve shaken to ghetto-tech, Baltimore club, and Miami booty bass. Perhaps you’ve undulated to Brazilian baile-funk or hard-charged the floor to London grime or dubstep. In the process you may have noticed dance music getting faster – and its geographical origins blurring […]

Balkan Beat Box is on top of the world

Boston Globe, March 27, 2009 The band’s name is Balkan Beat Box. Its core membership is three Israelis who found their voice in New York subcultures and whose sound encompasses Arabic rap, Moroccan gnawa, mariachi, and dub in an electronically infused cocktail. And when the band hits the Paradise Wednesday, it’ll be fresh from Mexico […]

Her time has come: Lalah Hathaway

Boston Globe, November 7, 2008 Patience. Perseverance. Acceptance. They’re among the cardinal values of soul music, black America’s soundtrack of struggle and faith and economic striving. And they suffuse not just the latest album, but the whole career of Lalah Hathaway, one of soul’s most elegant and gifted exponents today. Now nearing 40, the perpetually […]

Three’s the best company: Keith Jarrett

Boston Globe, October 24, 2008 NEW YORK – “If this isn’t the best trio in the world,” jazz pianist Keith Jarrett announced last Saturday night to a packed Carnegie Hall audience that was clearly already on board with his premise, “then I don’t care what anyone wants me to eat – I’ll eat it.” The […]