Paris, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles. You’d expect to find enclaves of African musicians there. But Portland and Seattle? You bet, and it’s not even a new development. Ex-Ghanaian Obo Addy came to Portland in 1975 and his countryman Kofi Anang settled in Seattle three years later, to cite…
North American audiences tend to romanticize (when we don’t simply trivialize or dismiss) both art made by women and art made by Latin Americans, particularly commercial art. While virtually all popular music, especially Latin-American music, trades in romance, it would be a great disservice to the unique Brazilian Divas performance…
The term mantra brings to mind many things to many people. Most think of it in the Hindu sense, in which a mantra is a series of words repeated continuously by a praying or meditating believer. Others remember the goofy scene in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall, when at the…
Recent albums by Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, and Trisha Yearwood have all hinted that commercial country music may finally be resolving its current pop sheen with its twangy hard-core past. No one, though, has negotiated this conflict as persuasively as Lee Ann Womack does on her third release, I Hope…
Is it possible to love the way a band sounds on record and at the same time loathe its audience and the milieu it inhabits? That is the dilemma when it comes to Medeski, Martin & Wood and the reek of hippie jam band that accompanies them. So far I’ve…
O Fortune, like the moon, you are changeable, ever waxing and waning. — Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana Faceless strawmen and shimmering goddesses flex their knees and fix their hair in the foyer between the front lobby and the auditorium of Havana’s Amadeo Roldan Theater. The dancers and musicians of the…
My first exposure to the music of Tito Puente came, as I’m sure most gringos would admit, via Carlos Santana. “Oye Como Va,” the massive hit single from Santana’s 1970 album Abraxas, boomed constantly from both sides of the radio band in my hometown of Memphis, its incessant Latin rhythm…
Six years ago, when the band known as Ed Matus’ Struggle (EMS) settled on its curious moniker, the whole thing felt like a joke. “There’s a lot of cheesy names out there,” notes guitarist Juan Montoya. “So we just named ourselves after someone we knew.” The real Ed Matus, another…
From the opening blast of distorted electric guitar that kicks off Start with the Soul, Alvin Youngblood Hart both distances himself from the blues purism of his first two albums and redefines the whole damn genre in ways even Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray never pulled off. That first…
The cover of the box set Dinner on the Diner boasts, “two CDs and 64 pages of recipes, photos, and travel adventures …,” and, sure enough, the first page of the liner-note booklet I flipped to contained instructions for Sea Bass/Salmon Baked in Salt from Mary Ann Esposito. Later pages…
Kirk Franklin may be acknowledged by some as the most important gospel artist of the Nineties, but his influence and his connection to pop history stake a claim for him as one of the most important artists in pop history, period. First, his mission to take the acceptance and challenge…
By recent definition “modern rock” is practically an oxymoron. With pretty teen groups and scantily clad Lolitas clogging the airwaves and charts, “rock” has become about as old school as they come. The age of the average audience member, upward of 22, clearly is outside Rolling Stone’s target demographic, and…
It’s got all the right ingredients for a huge disaster. Os Amores Libres by Galician piper Carlos Nuñez mixes up northern Spanish, Celtic, Moorish, Romanian Gypsy, flamenco, and Sephardic music. It amalgamates Jackson Browne with the Sufi Andalousi Choir of Tangiers, barricades Gypsy band Taraf of Caránsebes inside an Irish…
Its ideology was patently stupid and misanthropic, its cartoon gimmickry was just silly, and its eventual embrace of synthesizers produced some of the least funky dance music every released. But for a few years in the Seventies and early Eighties, Devo was a goofy, intriguing, and occasionally inspired quintet that…
On a crowded bus in Buenos Aires, a gaggle of teenage girls huddled in the back, giggling and gossiping as teenage girls everywhere do. Their exuberant youth was too much for a cynic in his early twenties, who stood clutching a pole in the aisle. He couldn’t resist baiting the…
Begin with a bouillabaisse of Zappa, Beefheart, and the Residents, add a liberal dose of Spike Jones’s comedy, and then throw in the best bits from sound-effects records you’ve borrowed from the library. That’s the recipe for entertainment — Mister Entertainment to you. Mr. Entertainment is Steve Toth, who’s prepared…
The band used to get quite the kick out of the fact that clueless promoters and hot-shot record-industry folk would ask, “By the way, which one’s Pink?” Pink Floyd was among the most successful bands of the classic-rock era of the Seventies (who from that decade doesn’t have a pot-seeded…
It strains the brain to think that Takashi Hirayasu and Bob Brozman had never played together, never met, never really spoken, and had no idea if they’d even get along before sequestering themselves for a week in a small wooden cottage on Taketomi, the most untrammeled of the Ryukyu Islands…
At a time when most indie labels have either lost their artistic punch, aligned with the majors, or simply folded, Chicago’s Bloodshot Records has consistently delivered some of the finest altcountry (as they like to call it, “Insurgent Country”) on the planet. Although by definition a limited genre defined in…
The U.S. Census has it all wrong. The question is not whether you are “white (non-Hispanic),” “black (non-Hispanic),” or “Hispanic.” The question is not even whether you are Latino, non-Latino, or none of the above. According to the Bacardi Salsa Congress 2000, the real question is: How do you dance…
Can’t we all just get along? Not if you look to the demise of Veruca Salt, which went down in flames two years ago after singer/guitarists Nina Gordon and Louise Post had a major falling out. The band scored big with its 1994 debut, American Thighs, and seemed destined to…
It’s become increasingly easy and respectable to create electronic music. Platinum-selling artists such as Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers have steadily worn down America’s innate resistance to sampled dance music, and in many ways, the challenge to create engaging new sonic forms of music now falls to the future…
