|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Current Projects
|
Abaji, Origine Orients (Absilone Music), “I just can’t play a new instrument,” laughs Lebanese-born multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Abaji. “I always fall for the old broken ones. It’s like one broken heart speaking to another, and I feel I can transform these old instruments into the sounds I hear in my head.” 09/14/09 >> go there
|
Altan, 25th Anniversary Celebration (Compass Records), It all started when singer and fiddler Mairéad Ni Mhaonaigh was still in the cradle in her strongly traditional native region of Donegal, listening and trying desperately to sing to the songs her parents used to soothe her. Her family’s home was a hub for poets, musicians, and writers who would share their work into the wee hours. “People would come and stay at our house and tell stories and play songs,” Ni Mhaonaigh recalls fondly. “Sometimes it would end up like a party, with people playing outside the house until late at night. We were in the country, though, so we weren’t bothering anybody.” 01/26/10 >> go there
|
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, I Speak Fula (Sub Pop/Next Ambiance), On the sandy grounds near the Sahara of West Africa, where the ancient Malian Empire once flourished, where griots have, for generations, sang the praises of local kings and crooned stories of battles long ago, the unassuming musician Bassekou Kouyate stands plucking a small stringed instrument called an ngoni - the ancestor of the banjo. 11/02/09 >> go there
|
Beyond the Pale, Postcards (Borealis Records) Winter Tour, 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
|
Cedric Watson, L'Ésprit Créole (Valcour Records), Riding in from the dusty plains of Texas with a fiddle under his arm, an accordion on his back, and a song in his heart, a Creole cowboy named Cedric Watson recently swaggered onto the Louisiana music scene. When this outsider burst into local saloons, first locals were taken back by his mastery of tradition and then by his ability to seamlessly integrate polyrhythms and grooves from beyond. 11/17/09 >> go there
|
Cesaria Evora, Nha Sentimento, (Lusafrica), On the island of São Vicente, far from the coast of Senegal, in the port of Mindelo, a city that leans against the sea, in the Café Royal, she would gather in the company of Mindelo’s musicians in the late afternoon, preparing for a night performing in the clubs, where she quickly became a local idol. She sang the blues in the Cape Verdean creole, a punchy, silk-gloved West African Portuguese. Between trademark puffs on a Portuguese cigarette and shots of hard liquor, in front of the richest men in Cape Verde, a blooming Cesaria sang in an adult’s alto tones of the distances across the ocean. She mourned for love in the bosom of craggy and accidental islands washed warm by tropical currents. 10/07/09 >> go there
|
Chris Burton Jácome, Levanto, Sometimes it takes an outsider to innovate within a tradition. And sometimes that outsider is less outside than it appears. Flamenco guitarist Chris Burton Jácome, the scion of an old and pioneering family, is just that kind of outsider. 12/29/09 >> go there
|
Chuck & Albert, énergie, “Of 2000 MP3s, 1200 were songs or bits of songs. Some songs had four or five versions,” Chuck explains. “Our island is just a three-hour drive from tip to tip, but in different pockets of Acadian communities, you find the same song but maybe with a different melody part or refrain, or a variation in some of the verses, and we could use various bits and pieces. As was the tradition, the songs in Georges’ collection were sung using the feet for rhythm but otherwise unaccompanied. We’re the first to add chords and harmonies to the eight traditional songs chosen for this album,” often weaving together several tunes or new melodies as the arrangements evolved. 09/02/09 >> go there
|
Eileen Ivers, Beyond the Bog Road Tour, Virtuoso Celtic fiddler Eileen Ivers—founding member of Cherish the Ladies, original Riverdance star, and lifelong traveler of Ireland’s musical paths—brings to light the riveting world of Irish stories and sounds, ones that will amaze even the most seasoned travelers through immigrant history. 01/08/10 >> go there
|
Evie Ladin, Float Downstream, This is a girl who grew up falling asleep on a pile of coats in the corner of the music party or square dance; her childhood home in Northern New Jersey had an open door to folk musicians playing anywhere near. This is a girl who ran barefoot through muddy festivals, soaking up traditional American music and dance —in the rhythm of her step, in her sleep, as the backbone of life. 12/10/09 >> go there
|
Fat Freddy's Drop, Dr. Boondigga & the Big BW, On a distant planet floating in a sea of patched-together spaceships, Dr. Boondigga and the BW, a mad scientist and his sidekick robot, have kidnapped New Zealand’s high-tech soul mercenaries Fat Freddy’s Drop. 09/04/09 >> go there
|
Gabriel Johnson, Fractured (Electrofone Music), Gabriel Johnson’s creation calculates a new bearing in the world of jazz and electronic music, a fractured triangulation past the Islands of Electronica and into the open sea. This album is a new direction for serious trumpet music. 12/14/09 >> go there
|
globalFEST 2010, For seven years globalFEST has been the springboard festival for world music artists on the brink of North American national mainstage success, performers known in one community but ready to cross into others, and the marquee stars of tomorrow. 10/08/09 >> go there
|
Here Comes Trouble 2010, If you can no longer tell the cowboys from the Cubans, the rancheras from the rockers, and the Irish sailors from the mariachis, you’re not alone. As the dust settles from the mushroom cloud of globalization, the last standing musicians have found their music mutated into the only sounds they know: new hybrids that reference cultural traditions without fear, seamlessly switching from surf rock guitars to retro accordions, from New Orleans funk beats to Mexican polkas. 11/23/09 >> go there
|
Le Vent du Nord, La Part du Feu (Borealis Records), As the powerful wind whips across the Canadian landscape it brushes away layers of debris to reveal gems once buried and thought to be lost in the past, while it simultaneously fans the flames of innovation. Québec’s Le Vent du Nord (The Wind of the North) has rewritten a transatlantic francophone story of discovery and loss seeking to uncover their heritage while sailing along new paths of artistic discovery. 09/29/09 >> go there
|
Longital, Gloria (Slnko Records), They flip coins, heed dreams of tuba-wielding Herbie Hancocks, put bows to vintage guitars, grab onto sounds both everyday and distinctly exotic. They sound like Camille and Spoon smoking around a Slavic midsummer bonfire, like Animal Collective with a European pedigree. They flit between the old and the new, always traveling light (stuffing clothes into guitar cases, in their unique brand of D.I.Y. style) and always returning to a bluff above the Danube River that inspired their name and a musical breakthrough. 01/26/10 >> go there
|
Plena Libre, Plena al Salsero, Emerging over the chatter of a packed house at New York’s Lincoln Center, the warm tone and subtle rhythms of a hand-held frame drum quiets the crowd as it beckons to an assembly of drummers to join. Layering in one by one, soon the polyrhythmic textures of three panderos (frame drums) interweave and converse, echoing as percussionists materialize from behind the audience and march towards the stage. Atop this tapestry of rhythm, a melodious voice calls out, and a chorus of singers responds, providing the final elements of a music known as plena. 12/18/09 >> go there
|
Real Vocal String Quartet, They bang on their violins, stomp their feet, and allow African trance music to influence their take on old timey standards. It's not their sanity that's missing; what RVSQ has lost is the ability to abide the constraints of either the old school classical world, where musicians must frequently forsake their creativity for the overall sound of the orchestra, or the often unapproachable reaches of the contemporary classical world. 12/10/09 >> go there
|
SambaDá, Gente!, There’s a beach where one sunny afternoon you may witness an offering to an Afro-Brazilian Orixa spirit of the ocean, the next day watch master capoeristas practicing Brazil’s martial art dance form, and still another day join a gathering of thousands of surfers-cum-dancers rocking out to hybrid musical sounds informed by bloco afro (Afro-Brazilian percussion music), samba-reggae, surf-rock, and California funk. No, these are not the shores of Bahia, Brazil. This is Santa Cruz, California, home of the surf-and-skate, capoeira-kicking, scene-busting phenomenon known as SambaDá. 12/11/09 >> go there
|
Sones de México Ensemble, Fiesta Mexicana, What do a crawfish, a cowboy mouse, and a 100-year-old woman have in common? They are all characters in Fiesta Mexicana: Mexican Songs & Stories for Niños & Niñas and their Papás & Mamás (release April 24, 2010), the latest recording by Sones de Mexico Ensemble. The same band that three years ago ventured into uncharted waters with Mexican folk retoolings of Led Zeppelin’s “Four Sticks” and J.S. Bach’s “Brandenburg 3-2” for their GRAMMY™ and Latin GRAMMY™ nominated album Esta Tierra Es Tuya (This Land Is Your Land) now digs deep into Mexican folklore. 12/11/09 >> go there
|
Tinariwen, Imidiwan: Companions (World Village) 2010 Tour, The guitar hero, the tumultuous bard, the fierce philosopher, the young firebrand: Friends in the wilderness, who turned from comrades in arms in a bloody desert rebellion into dedicated artists, and finally into global messengers for the people of the Sahara. This is Tinariwen, the desert rebel rockers who transformed the hypnotic music of their homeland into a gritty new breed of electric blues and made die-hard fans of music heavies from Robert Plant to Bono. 08/06/09 >> go there
|
TriBeCaStan, 5 Star Cave (Evergreene Records), Kruth and Greene (of TriBeCaStan) continue their relentless quest to re-imagine the folk music of the world asking things like: What if King Crimson’s bus broke down in the Middle East? Or what if Miles Davis went country? 10/26/09 >> go there
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
