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Current Projects
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Beyond the Pale, Postcards (Borealis Records), Tattered stamps and postmarks from disparate east European locales. Barely legible scribblings. An old-country wedding band of mustachioed men in bowlers crowding around a long-gone shtetl cottage. A serious little Polish-Jewish boy learning to play the violin... 05/09/09 >> go there
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Burnt Sugar, (LiveWired Music), “It’s the one format where you can take people who play in any musical tradition, any style, any era, any instrument, any approach, whether acoustic, analog, or digital… People from different backgrounds, or different ethnicities, and you can put them onstage; never met before, never played together before. But as soon as they learn the cues from conduction, they sound fully united.” 11/17/08 >> go there
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Chase Latino Cultural Festival, 2009, Ex-patriot soccer stars hang with modern dancers. Afro-Caribbean rituals collide with glamorous island pop. Japanese and Koreans tango past Chilean interpreters of avant-garde circus music. All tucked away in a corner of an outer borough. 06/10/09 >> go there
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Cheick Hamala Diabate, Ake Doni Doni (Grigri Discs), “The music we griots play is not just about making nice sounds for dancing, it’s about giving a lesson to people about their lives. You tell them about what their grandfathers did, and what they should do now,” explains Diabate, whose griot roots run deep as first cousin to kora master Toumani Diabate, and nephew to legendary Super Rail Band guitarist, Djelimady Tounkara. “People trust the griot more than anyone else.” 06/23/09 >> go there
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Federico Aubele, Amatoria (ESL Music), “It’s such a vast and huge theme, love. You can approach it in different ways,” reflects Buenos Aires-born songwriter and guitarist Federico Aubele. “Love is such an important thing for every human being, whether we notice it or not. We all experience it at least once in life. It’s one of the few things, along with dying, that is guaranteed to happen to you.” 02/27/09 >> go there
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Goran Bregovic, Alkohol (Wrasse Records), “In those times, Rock had a capital role in our lives. It was the only way we could make our voice heard, and publicly express our discontent without risking jail...” -- Goran Bregovic
05/15/09 >> go there
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Granada Doaba (Gnawledge Records), Instead of angling for a record deal, Canyon Cody sent his demo to the U.S. government and applied for a Fulbright scholarship. After he was awarded the prestigious grant, Cody headed to Spain with rapper/producer Gnotes and built a recording studio above a flamenco guitar shop in Granada. Over the next year, the Gnawledge Records duo collaborated with 16 local musicians, recording their open-invite jam sessions during the daily afternoon siesta. The result is Granada Doaba. 06/23/09 >> go there
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Hip Hop Hoodios, Carne Masada (Jazzheads), “We like to think of ourselves as the reverse Bernie Madoffs of the Latino Jewish music community,” says Hip Hop Hoodíos frontman Josh Norek, also known as Josúe Noriega. “How many times have you been ripped off and bought an album that sucked? There are tens of thousands of album releases each year, so we decided to cut through the clutter and do what no other artist seems to have the courage to do – refund people who don’t like the music.”
03/17/09 >> go there
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Inbar Bakal, Song of Songs (Electrofone Records), Bakal began singing as a child growing up in the vibrantly musical community of her mother’s family, Yemenite Jews who had come to Israel in the late 1940s, part of the two-year mass emigration of Yemen’s Jews to Israel to escape pogroms and persecution. With a unique religious approach and culture that evolved due to their isolation from other groups, many Yemenite Jews were artists and craftspeople, silversmiths and singers. 04/01/09 >> go there
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Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara, Tell No Lies (Real World Records), “Ah, the spirits are near,” Gambian griot Juldeh Camara told British rock guitarist Justin Adams as they finished a spontaneous song one night in Adams’ small garage studio. “It came from nowhere, went on an entire journey. I looked at him, astonished,” Adams recalls. 03/25/09 >> go there
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Kakande, Dununya (Jumbie Records), Eight hundred years of tradition is a heavy, daunting legacy. But for Famoro Dioubate and Kakande, tradition is picked up, dusted off, and fashioned anew. 05/20/08 >> go there
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King Sunny Ade 2009 Tour, Audiences at festivals across the continent—from Bonnaroo to Playboy Jazz—will witness King Sunny Ade's contagious 40-minute grooves that have been steeped in a modern-day tradition where playing for and reacting to the audience is paramount. 04/28/09 >> go there
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Lily Storm, If I Had a Key to the Dawn (Songbat Records), “If it weren’t for these traditional songs, I wouldn’t be a musician,” reflects Lily Storm, a member of an emerging generation of musicians who learned to navigate this sonic world by soaking up recordings from far off lands in the privacy of their rooms, undaunted by walls and cultural boundaries. Like many young record-raiders and wild-eyed musical alchemists bent on reforging tradition—from Balkan Beat Box to Slavic Soul Party to Beirut—Storm feels a new energy bursting from ancient songs, one relevant to personal experience. This new blood radically alters the Balkan and Eastern European music scene.
04/13/09 >> go there
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M. Nahadr, EclecticIsM (LiveWired Music), Even as an African-American albino, New York-based performance artist M. Nahadr has sidestepped the pitfalls of identity politics and cut straight to the soul: Everyone is unique and different. Once you see this fact not as a problem, but as real as the air we breathe, the entire world changes. 12/28/08 >> go there
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Mariachi Classics, Mariachi Real De San Diego, (Mardi Gras Records), Gunslingers and gadflies. Campfollowers and cowboys. Birth, love, and death. All in a human jukebox that makes the women sigh, the men holler, the children squeal, and the dogs bark. This is old-school mariachi, the troubadours of Mexico’s revolution and one of North America’s most beloved party traditions. 05/04/09 >> go there
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Melvin Gibbs' Elevated Entity, Ancients Speak (LiveWired Music), Afrobeat is rubbing against Hendrix-style guitar solos, hip hop has gone to Bahia and come back with the most primal electronic beats. Afro-Cuban spirits intermingle with the Holy Spirit. It’s a riotous gathering of all things African. 11/12/08 >> go there
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Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, 2009 Tour, This honest undertaking of African music—not afraid to weave in band members’ influences—is what has led The Occidental Brothers to develop an unexpected hybrid audience, from hipsters at the Pitchfork Music Festival to African expatriates, from public radio listeners to multi-cultural audiences enjoying local festivals in their homebase of Chicago. 12/18/08 >> go there
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Ocote Soul Sounds, Coconut Rock (ESL Music), Just a sliver of the ocote wood starts a blaze. A few pieces of this pine was all Martín Perna needed to get his cooking fires started in a small fishing village in Michoacán, Mexico. It was there that Perna—known for founding Antibalas, the NYC collective that sparked an Afrobeat revival—found a new direction. 03/18/09 >> go there
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Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Rare Elements (5 Points Records), The divine is everywhere, in the breath of a reed flute, the clank and hum of machines, or the slammin’ beats of an electronic track. This is Turkish virtuoso Omar Faruk Tekbilek’s message, and he hears it everywhere. 05/04/09 >> go there
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On Ka’a Davis, Seeds of Djuke (LiveWired Music), “The very first time I saw Sun Ra and his Arkestra was in Central Park,” On Ka'a Davis recalls. “They walked through the crowds, passing right by me. They were all wearing Egyptian make-up on their faces and I thought, ‘This is the Blackest band I have ever seen in my life. This is Deep Black music.’” 01/10/09 >> go there
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Salaam, Salaam’s wily innovations may raise a few eyebrows among hardcore purists—though they are the apple of many a Middle Eastern music aficionado and belly dancer’s eye. These experiments run deeper than merely jazzing up or rockifying Middle Eastern tunes, or following the approach common in Arab music today of throwing an electric keyboard behind an otherwise traditional arrangement. They are the products of years of research and a longing to bring ancient musics fully into a global and fluid world, while opening American eyes to what Moore aptly calls “the beautiful sides of Middle Eastern culture” that are too often overlooked. 06/24/09 >> go there
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Santero, El Hijo de Obatala (Siete Potencias Trading Co.), “During (dance) class, I started manifesting spirits," Santero recalls. I would get the shakes and regain consciousness three or four hours later. During that time an array of spirits would have come through my body. They speak and heal. It started getting really out of hand.” 04/13/09 >> go there
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Sunset Concerts, Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles), In a spacious L.A. courtyard nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains, a stage stands above an expansive pond. Here, as the sun goes down behind a hillside, just a few yards away from listeners as diverse as the city itself, a twirling feather- and bead-bedecked band breaks into old-school funk. A Sufi song played on reeds and strings flows in waves over the audience. A group of Gypsy-loving Québécois burst in raucous, harmonious chorus. 06/03/09 >> go there
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The Shin, 2009 North American Tour, At first listen, they may sound like your average rocking band from Georgia. After all, they play the good ol’ strings from way down South. And, of course, the funky drums from up North. But listen closely and you’ll catch the crunchy consonant clusters of the Caucasus instead of a Southern drawl. 04/20/09 >> go there
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Tribecastan, Strange Cousin (Evergreene Music), Welcome to Tribecastan, a country without borders tucked away in a corner of downtown Manhattan. This country of the mind is home to Uighur mountaineers and Croatian zookeepers. Drum and fife corps march alongside Slovakian shepherds with six-foot-tall pipes and Indonesian scales warp rock mandolins. Strange Cousin (Evergreene Music; July 14, 2009) captures the ancient future of this imaginary land where Swedish nykelharpas and Pakistani taxi horns can live together harmoniously both in peace and mayhem. 05/25/09 >> go there
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Väsen, Väsen Street (NorthSide), There’s a place where wild-eyed farmers whip through fiddle tunes with a yelp; Japanese Celtophiles jig and reel to Swedish dance numbers in a Tokyo basement; And, the nyckelharpa (a fiddle with a keyboard) becomes a deadly weapon, as tuned-down, spiced-up guitars give a sly wink to Turkish ouds. Here, brand-new tunes sound achingly ancient. 06/01/09 >> go there
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Watcha Clan, Diaspora Remixed (Piranha Musik), "Watcha Clan is one of the most exciting bands I've seen on the world music circuit. They were controlled chaos in action, at times sounding Balkan, others Brooklyn and then Egyptian. There were also Moroccan rhythms and Sufi trance mixed with the electronica. For all the reasons I've mentioned this shouldn't work - it should be a mess - but it does. It is the talents of these musicians and their magnetic and charismatic presence that makes it so". Bob Boilen, NPR Music. 06/08/09 >> go there
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