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Current Projects
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27th Annual Jewish Music Festival (SF Bay Area), There’s a place where Baghdad and Warsaw, Jerusalem and Berkeley merge. Where Civil Rights-era poetry speaks Yiddish, where tangled conflicts resolve on ‘oud strings and fiddle bows, and where justice rocks the mic. 01/16/12 >> go there
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Attwenger, 2012 Tour and SXSW Showcase, The Austrian duo Attwenger turn Upper Austrian folk music and wry local wisdom into madcap backbeats and funky, flaring accordion. It’s The Cramps parachuting into a mountain village street fest for a punk spree, or The Pogues punning in Alpine slang to dancefloor-friendly samples. It’s folk trip-hop, psychedelic and feral polka. 12/07/11 >> go there
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Auktyon, Top (Geometriya), Russia’s Auktyon is a lost folklore ensemble darting behind an avant jazz collective, hidden inside a hugely popular rock band. It’s Animal Collective tangoing through the salon with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, nodding its Radiohead. A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. 12/07/11 >> go there
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Brazilian Beat (Putumayo), Glittering break beats are at home with bouncing berimbaus while rolling Afro-Brazilian rhythms, retro samba soul and velvety bossa nova vocals mesh and groove organically. This is the unstoppable Brazilian Beat. 11/02/11 >> go there
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Catalyst for Peace, Wan Fambul/One Family, Around a crackling bonfire in a remote village, the war finally ended. Seven years since the last bullet was fired, a decade of fighting in Sierra Leone found resolution as people stood and spoke. Some had perpetrated terrible crimes against former friends. Some had faced horrible losses: loved ones murdered, limbs severed. But as they told their stories, admitted their wrongs, forgave, danced, and sang together, true reconciliation began. 11/01/11 >> go there
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Chiche Libre, Canibalismo (Barbès Records), It’s no joke: A Venezuelan, Mexican, two Americans, and two French guys walk into a bar. A bar that had been transformed into a control booth, while the backroom turned into a recording studio, with coils of effects pedal lines, quirky vintage electronics and homegrown synthesizers, a nylon-stringed cuatro, congas and a battery of timbales. 01/26/12 >> go there
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Dervish 2012 Spring Tour, The members of traditional Irish band Dervish met as most Irish musicians do: as strangers in a bar. "I'm a farmer's daughter," says singer Cathy Jordan, "and someone else in the band is an architect's son. Outside of music, we may have never met, but this is how Irish people have forged unlikely friendships for years, playing music together." 09/28/06 >> go there
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Eileen Ivers, 2012 US Tour, Groundbreaking Irish-American fiddler Eileen Ivers can keep up with classical virtuosi while keeping up the warmth of a kitchen party with her group, Immigrant Soul. She can shred, play reels through a cry-baby pedal, inspire with a bittersweet air and with her signature intensity, all while transmitting her deep love for tradition. The audience and stage become one through the interactiveness of the music, the joy of the musicians and the passion with which Ivers shares the stories of these traditions. 08/23/10 >> go there
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Fránçois and the Atlas Mountains, E Volo Love (Domino USA), In a centuries-old French church high on a hill, Malian-style finger-picked guitar riffs bounced off cabaret-ready piano lines. Whispering calabash brushed against shimmering minimal techno. All in service of a dreamy set of songs that became E Volo Love, tracks that straddle the catchiest of indie rock and electronica and the lush borders of globally inflected experimentation. 11/21/11 >> go there
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globalFEST 2012, Webster Hall (NYC), Malian roots rap and sensually fresh samba. Eerily avant jaw harps and 21st-century tarantella. Heritage never sounded so cool. Whether continuing famous musical lineages or pushing forward on new paths, the artists of globalFEST show how world music has matured from a quaint, catch-all niche to a meaningful, deeply rooted challenge to the musical status quo. Artists are crafting history into new sounds. 09/21/11 >> go there
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Henry Cole & the Afro-Beat Collective, Roots Before Branches, Quicksilver Puerto Rican drummer Henry Cole knows how Wayne Shorter might have jammed with Fela Kuti. Or what Miles would have done if only he’d gone Afro-Caribbean with his rock-jazz hybrids. He hears how jazz can grab the rootsy sounds of bomba, plena, and Cuban rumba, and sparkle with electro sheen and rock energy. 11/10/11 >> go there
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Kali Mutsa, Ambrolina (SHOCK Music) 2012 SXSW Showcase, Like Venus rising from the waves, the cat-eyed whirlwind of a woman rose from the magical earth and rarified air of myth-filled Chilean valley nearly a century ago. Daughter of Roma wanderers, protégée of the last remnants of the Incan aristocracy, holder of a secret dream, she gyrated across silver screens and dusty stages, chanting freedom and seduction with a polychrome wink. 01/05/12 >> go there
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KG Omulo, Ayah Ye! Moving Train, Singer, songwriter, and dance-floor instigator KG Omulo can do anything. He regularly packs American clubs with gritty calls for justice and hard-hitting Afrofunk. He has moved sold-out arenas with his baritone voice in his native Kenya. He takes on the dark ironies of politics, with anger in the groove, reveling in the potential to shake things up while shaking your thing. 08/12/11 >> go there
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New York Gypsy All-Stars, Romantech (Traditional Crossroads), A Greek bassist ducked into a little bar in New York’s Alphabet City and heard the Eastern Mediterranean and Southern Balkans pouring across the packed room. The clarinet was keening and singing, and he knew every tune. 01/05/12 >> go there
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Oka! Soundtrack (Oka Productions), Beats fly from drums made of the living roots of towering trees, or from the surface of flowing water. Songs, born of highly complex structures, spring from multi-part improvisation. Rhythmic cycles extend to lengths that baffle outsiders’ ears. Music both expresses and creates the moment, with spontaneous compositions leaping out in joy, or contemplative flute melodies drifting through the late night village to encourage dreams and peace. 11/03/11 >> go there
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Old Town School of Folk Music, Live From the Old Town School (Old Town School Recordings), On a stack of DATs in a shoebox lay the history of American music. There were local legends and major icons, global musicians and indie rockers. Some captured beautifully from the board, some gleaned quietly from the dusty archives of a radio station, the recordings held wildly creative decades of sound from Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, a roots-music touchstone for nearly 55 years. And no one had heard them. 10/12/11 >> go there
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Sagapool, 2012 Spring Tour, As the accordionist and clarinetist jammed together to The Godfather theme in the halls of the conservatory, they knew exactly what they had to do: Start a klezmer band. But what happened was a completely different story. Joined by a whole family of other instruments, Sagapool went from Balkan and Gypsy-inflected impromptu shows on the summer streets of Old Montreal to crafting acoustic original instrumentals as a six-piece band—one so in synch that it’s no surprise when the guitarist jumps up to join the bassist for a thumping four-handed riff. 12/23/11 >> go there
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Sauti Sol, 2012 SXSW Showcase, “Africans are put in a box, always squeezed into one category,” exclaims Willis Chimano, sax player and vocalist in Sauti Sol, “but we refuse to stay there.” The quartet can rock jangling guitars, blast the horns, croon in the sweetest harmony, and bring the Afrofunk with wry defiance and pop-friendly zeal. 01/12/12 >> go there
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TriBeCaStan, New Deli (EverGreene Music), News Alert. This morning Aljazzeera reported that the questionable nation of TriBeCaStan has made scientific breakthroughs in time travel. The unrecognized republic of nomads has broken the code of the time/space continuum. And by broken we mean: it no longer works. Applying sonic techniques once only known to a small group of punk rock shamans, the nation's most prestigious scientific entity, the TriBeCaStani FolkLorkEstra, uses sound alone to simultaneously place listeners in eras separated by decades and terrains separated by oceans. 08/12/11 >> go there
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Vishtèn, 2012 Spring Tour, From childhood evenings listening to music from the top of the stairs, to exuberant folk music sessions on Shetland busses and knockout performances at the Vancouver Olympics, Vishtèn evokes a world in tunes: the rocking boats and waltzing bows of remote island harbors; the unflagging creativity of step dancers and percussive piano, ancient ballads and striking new melodies flowing from vibrant Acadian and Quebecois communities. There, French and Celtic sounds—the same current that flows through Breton, Cajun, Irish, Scottish, and much American music—meet. 01/25/12 >> go there
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