World Music News Wire

Musical Conductivity: Everyone Orchestra Catches the Improvised Moment in Serious Grooves

2012-05-29T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

One part fiery conductor, one part sonic ringleader, he wields a whiteboard, flying fingers, and a knowing, joyful grin. His gestures, expressions, hints, and jotted words get music flowing like electricity through a live wire, uniting musical strangers with an uncanny sense for spontaneous songcraft.

He’s Matt Butler, the force behind Everyone Orchestra, an evolving project that embraces the spontaneity and openness of an all-out improv jam, and the musical athleticism and sensitivity of high-powered conducting.

Directing a shifting cast of musicians in real time, on the spot, Butler has mastered the art of encouraging skilled musicians to dig deeper, listen closer, and compose stunning songs on the fly. He may wiggle his fingers, point, count instruments in or out, or dash off words on a small board designed to spark ideas.

Now, for the first time, Butler has taken in-the-moment composition from jubilant live shows to the studio on Brooklyn Sessions. Butler invited past collaborators—musical friends like drummer Jon Fishman (Phish), keyboardist/pianist Marco Benevento, Al Schnier (moe.), Jen Hartswick (Trey Anastasio Band), saxophonist Jeff Coffin (Dave Mathews Band), guitarist Steve Kimock, and bassist Reed Mathis (Tea Leaf Green), among others—to join him for several days of exploration and co-creation. The results range from hard-hitting grooves that take unexpected twists and turns (“Boots”), to sweet and expansive (“Pensive”), all guided by a spirit that is both liberated and focused.

“It’s a sacred sandbox,” Butler smiles. “The stage, or in this case the studio, is a sacred place to share the music. You’re fully improvising, and the only preparation you can do is to be in the moment, the way an athlete is during a game. Not to withdraw into yourself, but to be engaged, to dodge and throw the ball.”

{full story below}

Butler grew up in Oregon, hanging out with classical conductors who stayed with his family. His violinist mother was a founding member of the Eugene Symphony, and Butler got an insider’s view of conducting from maestri like Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Marin Alsop, and radio host and conductor Bill McGlaughlin. “They showed me what a conductor does, how they manifest and embody the music,” Butler recalls fondly.

Butler was also deeply moved by two very different traditions where improvisation played key parts in composition and performance: the rock/jam movement led by innovators like the Grateful Dead, and the gospel community the young Butler got to know through a close friend. He admired their openness and passion, the dedication and inspiration. They shaped his views on improvisation as a field everyone can play on, as a vibrant encounter between possibility and structure.

“Improvisation is something everyone can do,” he notes. “Chops help it sound better, but it’s about not judging and not getting stuck on what’s ‘right.’ There are no mistakes, only opportunities.”

These two threads came together after Butler spent a relentless decade touring as the drummer for 90s jam icons, Jambay. He began organizing open mic nights in the Bay Area, playing drums and inviting others to try their hand at conducting the spontaneous ensembles that gathered. It was fun, but Butler sensed it could be whole lot more.

He decided to start a new project, Everyone Orchestra, and for three years played drums as others conducted.

Then one night, he jumped into the conductor’s role himself.

“I conducted just to experiment,” recounts Butler, “and a bunch of people said, ‘This is it! This is what you need to do. This is your calling.’ It was like nothing I’d ever done before; I trimmed the chaos out of the previous experience, creating this fun musical environment that also got people on and offstage engaged. I felt that the conductor could be a new musical instrument.”

Soon Butler was brandishing whiteboards, inspiring swells and tight musical turns, and breaking down barriers with the audiences at major music festivals. The stories are legion: there were so many musicians who wanted to get involved at one outdoor festival, the organizers packed them on to two stages and set up a flatbed truck that Butler conducted from. He got diverse musicians—from prog rockers like Adrian Belew (King Crimson) to members of the Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars and The Grateful Dead themselves—to take the plunge.

Facilitating other musicians’ creativity isn’t about leading them around by the nose. It’s about teasing out elements and patterns for the whole group, to bring even experienced improvisers to new places. Butler’s approach may elicit deer-in-the-headlights expressions at first, but soon participants find themselves diving in. Singer and trumpet player Jen Hartswick, for example, had a look of pure panic the first time Butler cued her to leap into some lyrics in the studio. But soon she was singing off the cuff with real gusto.

Butler’s main goal is to bring out what’s already there and give it shape. “I’m listening for melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas that are launching-off points, something I can amplify or bring focus to,” he muses. “I’m cycling through the possibilities, so not all the performance is in the same key or tempo. I’m ready for what could happen next, and I can see it in their eyes when musicians have ideas.”

When he catches that inspired glint, he runs with it, finding moments of tension and release (like the bright cascade of horns at the end of “Take Off Your Clothes” or the suggestive polyrhythmic bassline of “Bass Blanket”). Butler strives to give everyone space to dig deep or rock out, and effective solos—from rippling mandolin to raucous guitar—highlight the striking abilities of Butler’s co-creators on the album. The studio provided a new avenue for composition; unlike the stage, Butler had some separation, more repetition, mixing, and minor edits to help shape the album tracks.

“I’m fully subscribing to the moment when I conduct, not to what I want personally from musicians,” Butler explains. “I’m producing the songs from the conductor’s seat, creating a space where musicians can do whatever they feel they need to. And we’ve found we can create beautiful, succinct music through improvisation.”

Mysterious Hybrid: Sarah Aroeste Unleashes Ladino’s Sensuous Feminist Power in Original Songs on Graci

2012-05-22T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

That’s right: Feminist rock in Ladino. The Judeo-Spanish language born in the Middle Ages is the perfect vehicle for articulating an utterly contemporary sensuality, defiance, wisdom, and love. It’s a living language, a lively tradition heard in a generation of new voices from New York to Jerusalem.

One voice leads them: American-born Ladino singer and songwriter Sarah Aroeste, who has spent a decade expanding the possibilities of contemporary Ladino song. The classically trained, pop-savvy vocalist channels generations of poets and wild women in a slow-burning, passionately produced original works on Gracia. Backed by flickers of flamenco and gorgeous pan-Mediterranean melodies, by lush strings and purring guitars, Aroeste’s airy, potent voice and intense engagement with her lyrics invigorate age-old wedding songs, hot love ballads, and tributes to history’s unsung heroines.

“It doesn’t matter that 99.99% of the world doesn’t understand Ladino,” Aroeste explains. “The themes are universal, the same themes people explore today: going off to war, unrequited love, crushes, death, family dynamics. The music has crossed geographic boundaries and political ones, and the songs are often very celebratory of women--and very sexy.”

{full story below}

“Too often, Ladino singers sing without really understanding the lyrics,” Aroeste reflects. “They sing the music because of its undeniable value as a tradition we all want to preserve. But I think if more people took the time to really examine and dig into the lyrics, they might see a different, more complex and intellectual side of the music. That’s why our treatment of the songs on Gracia is extremely detailed, finely crafted, and layered: Each one really tells a complex story.”

In original songs, Aroeste tells the neglected story of Dona Gracia Naci, a 15th-century Spanish answer to Harriet Tubman, who boldly saved Jewish families from the Inquisition (“Gracia”), who epitomizes the strength and courage of our foremothers. “It’s a Ladino feminist anthem of sorts,” smiles Aroeste, whose poetic tribute to Gracia is framed by a stirring sample of Gloria Steinem.

Using a traditional ballad as a springboard for her own poetry, Aroeste reimagines the wanderings of her Sephardic ancestors—and her own journey to discover her roots—through the eyes of the traditional figure of the morena, the dark-eyed nomad girl, traveling for centuries and drained of her beauty by a harsh world in “Chika Morena.”

Aroeste has a true passion for telling these stories, for the wry wit, pithy idioms, and poetic force of Ladino lyrics. Her own tale winds through family history, lost and joyously found. Aroeste grew up in New Jersey, but understood early that there was something a bit different about her heritage. “I remember visiting my great uncles and grandparents in Florida when I was five or so,” Aroeste recalls. “I was sitting in the front seat of one of their cars and playing around with the preset radio buttons. They were all set to Spanish language stations. I didn’t understand it completely at the time, but I carried that with me, that we had a unique tradition.”

This tradition was part of a longer legacy, the culture of Spanish Jews (like the beautiful 11th-century poetry Aroeste brings to life in “El Leon Ferido”). Subsequently forced from Spain in the late 15th century, they scattered across Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Though their language, customs, and music retained an Iberian core, they continued to develop under the influence of the many tongues and cultures surrounding the tight-knit families and communities. The result is a strikingly rich, multifaceted world of words and sounds.

“Ladino itself is so beautiful. It’s a truly pan-Mediterranean language, a mysterious hybrid,” says Aroeste. “Based in pre-1492 Castilian Spanish, over the years it absorbed bits and pieces of languages from the different countries where Jews settled. My family ended up in Greece and today’s Macedonia. Our version of Ladino is Castilian Spanish mixed with Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, Turkish and Hebrew.”

Aroeste, after learning repertoire in Ladino while studying classical voice in Israel, soon found herself drawn to the language of her roots. She taught herself Ladino, researched Sephardic songs, learned everything she could. She hung out with Ladino poets in Israel. She watched klezmer take off, but was stunned to see few artists working with Sephardic traditions.

So Aroeste singlehandedly set out to change that, setting aside her opera ambitions and forging her own path. She picked up a dusty guitar and started crafting Ladino rock songs. The move was unexpected, but perfectly logical: Ladino songs have enough grit, humor, and open sensuality to match any rock hit. Girls fall for bad boys, follow their lusty hearts, argue with parents about their amours.

“There’s a certain sensuality that came with the music and rhythms I began to explore,” Aroeste notes. “A lot of the folk songs don’t shy away from sex and love. I always really admired that.” Songs like the unusually dark rendition of “Avre Este Abajour Bijou” burn with unabashed desire, a side brought out by Aroeste and collaborator/producer Shai Bachar’s voluptuous orchestration and sly arrangement.

Aroeste’s openness to her roots’ sexier sides raised some eyebrows initially, but the singer-songwriter worked for years to forge a new sound for ancient roots and has proven a bellwether for a new generation of Ladino creativity. She remains one of the very few artists who compose and sing their own works, “I feel the music in a different, very personal way,” she states, “and there’s so much beauty and irreverence and humor in this music. I want the world to hear it.”

Channeling Zappa in Tirana: Edgy Rock Virtuosity Meets East Balkan Brilliance on Choban Elektrik

2012-05-15T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

If a prog rock power trio had ever sprung up in the mountains of Albania, it would have sounded like Brooklyn’s Choban Elektrik (“Electric Shepherds”). Using the vintage grit and funk of Hammond organs and Fender Rhodes to open up new facets of Albanian, Macedonian, Greek, and Armenian tunes, the band makes this unlikely pairing feel organic and obvious, thanks to their intense focus and anything-goes approach.

“We never set out to do this,” explains masterful keyboard player and arranger Jordan Shapiro. “But I’d bring in songs I learned in Balkan singing class or at the Balkan music camps, and we’d play them, just like anything else we’d tackle as a trio, as if they were jazz, funk, or rock.”

The results burst with crackling distorted guitar lines ripping through odd Albanian meters (“Beratche from Prespa”), traditional Greek dance tunes gone deeply funky (“Koftos”), and mysteriously dreamy space-outs for Caucasus wedding parties (the wonderfully titled “Mom Bar”). Slow-burning melodies unwind as whammy bars and Leslie speakers take old songs in a radically new, highly catchy direction.

{full story below}

“I had no exposure to world music my entire upbringing,” says Shapiro, who trained intensively as a classical pianist and oboe player. “My parents loved classical music and Broadway shows. This was the last thing I’d ever have imagined doing.”

Conservatory trained in piano and guitar performance and jazz studies, Shapiro arrived in New York and soon found himself working hard; like many multi-instrumentalist pros, Shapiro spent a decade performing in a diverse array of bands, as core member and as sideman. He started a progressive bluegrass band, Astrograss. He joined a Zappa tribute ensemble (which included original members of Zappa’s band), Project/Object, where he met Choban’s bassist, Dave Johnsen.

Like the rock maverick, Shapiro was always hungry for new musical challenges. He got wind of the Balkan scene, as many of his friends had gotten into playing music from Eastern Europe. After hearing some music at a party, he headed to the Golden Festival, New York’s annual gathering of Balkan fans and top performers. “It inspired me to get an accordion,” Shapiro recalls. “Lugging around vintage keyboards is not nearly as much fun.”

It was the unexpected beginning of a new, powerful passion. A year later, Shapiro found himself in a circle of twenty accordionists of all levels, staring amazed at the quicksilver technique and fluid ornamentation of Albanian accordionist Raif Hyseni (composer of “Steve’s Gajda”). He was hooked.

“Raif teaches by ear. He started playing a tune, this beautiful Albanian folk song,” remembers Shapiro. “That was a new thing for me, to be right in front of someone playing this complicated melody. I hadn’t done that kind of music by ear at that point.”

But beyond Hyseni’s stunning chops and easy grace, he opened Shapiro’s eyes to the East European approach to improvisation. Hyseni emphasized that soloists had room to express and expand on the theme. He pushed Shapiro to find his own, Balkan voice when playing. Over a year of subsequent lessons, Shapiro picked up not only Hyseni’s trove of melodies; he also explored the possibilities—both traditional and radical—suggested by the repertoire.

Though he first perfected tunes like “Valle e Shqipërisë së Mesme” on the accordion, Shapiro soon tried things out on his collection of vintage organs and keyboards. During frequent sessions, Shapiro worked closely with Johnsen (bass) and multifaceted percussionist Phil Kester (who plays everything from drums to riq to tuned bronze alloys). The trio discovered that songs meant for very different instruments and different contexts fit perfectly into their wide-ranging world of post-rock complexity and improvisatory pleasures.

With all the drive ofa power trio, they dove into the odd meters and nimble melody lines. Johnsen brought his flexibility and ability to make sense out of complexity, while Kester drew on his chops and musicality, combining hand percussion and marimba to create a percussive soundscape reflecting his early childhood fascination with the Greek music in his community.

Bending and blending genres is a major part of recent developments in Balkan roots music back in Europe, as well, like the jazz-inflected traditional arrangements of Bulgarian accordion master Petar Ralchev that inspired Choban’s grooving “Kopanitsa.” They opened up jams that fully showcase the keys’ timbre and that segue gorgeously into stirring songs like “Çobankat” (where Kotansky’s sweeping violin and Primack’s rich vocals form the perfect counterpoint to Shapiro’s psychedelic solos).

“The album starts off with a thirty-second exploration, an improvisation,” muses Shapiro. “It shows off the Fender Rhodes. But then it shifts into a different key and the traditional melody Raif taught me. That transition really reflects our approach beautifully.”

Soundeater: Chicha Libre Devours Tropical Sounds, Backroom Beats, and Analog Funk on Canibalismo and on Tour, Spring 2012

2012-05-08T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

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. Chicha Libre had taken over the storied Brooklyn music hub, Barbès (turning ten this year), where the regulars hail from all over the map and have gobbled up everything from Pet Sounds to Os Mutantes, from Willie Colon to Serge Gainsbourg.

From gritty backwaters and backrooms, from retro equipment and deceptive nostalgia, the multinational outfit (featuring members of Si Sé and Combustible Edison) returns with Canibalismo, an expression of the edgy craving that is fueling a pop rethink around South America and causing a stir in the rock-tired indie scene.

The album of originals, while tackling obscure mathematics and psychedelic inventors, took its cues from Peruvian chicha, a style that put surf guitar, rainforest psychedelics, and Andean flavor to a cumbia beat with open-minded exuberance. Chicha Libre has learned from and teamed up with the unsung mad geniuses of the music—such as Ranil and Los Shapis, who were featured on Roots of Chicha— then taken it as a springboard to join the international stream of tropical experimenters from Colombia to Argentina.

Like the legends of 60s and 70s rock sucked up and radically transformed the blues and jazz, today’s tropicalists are reshaping cumbia’s sound to suit their own unabashed, unconventional tastes. For Chicha Libre, this means vintage rock sounds rumble past irrepressible bursts of percussion, the Valkyries cavort to mellotrons, pan-Latin beats merge with curious lyrics, and the occasional passerby joins in with Guinean guitar or pedal steel riffs.

“Young Latin bands today, like chicha’s stars and like early rock innovators, cannibalize everything around them. They aren’t slaves to codes—the codes haven’t been created yet,” reflects Chicha Libre instigator and cuatro player Olivier Conan. “We’re part of a worldwide movement of people who have that kind of freedom. We don’t just play chicha. We can do whatever we want and absorb anything we like. We’re cannibals.”

“We are not making music from a distant place,” Conan insists. “We’re playing our own music, as much as the Beatles were playing their own music. We’re just using a different framework”

{full story below}

“Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The unique law of the world.”—Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade

When the French-born, New York-based Conan went to the curious city of Iquitos, Peru to make a film about the town’s most eccentric musician (and former mayoral candidate), he imagined himself digging through old crates in his spare time, hunting down lost chicha records, the radically omnivorous vintage music movement of the Peruvian hinterlands. He asked around, and a friend insisted he check out his collection. There, on his hard drive, he said, was a prime slice of chicha.

That crucial album was Chicha Libre’s debut, Sonido Amazonico. Conan realized they were part of a burst of trans-national madness, a continuation of the tropical movement that started with early 20th-century avant-garde South American artists, and continues to inspire young wild musicians in a now democratic Latin America.

The band’s brash creativity has jumped forward, as they leave musical reconstructions behind and gnaw the roots of everything from indie rock to European art music, merrily sending timbales through old guitar amps, inventing their own Tupperware-contained synths, and tossing everything into the tape delay machine.

Chicha Libre spits out a raucous cumbia rendition of Wagner complete with dubbed-out grooves, moseying surf guitar, and eerily quirky keys (“Ride of the Valkyries”). They reflect seriously on the delusion of the vintage and the nature of nostalgia for the good ol’ days (“L’Age d’Or”), while laying on the retro sound thanks to the copious use of old analog equipment. They sway through lush, trippy cumbias (“La Danza del Milionario”). Then they go off the deep end with a funked-up, Latin-edged tribute to 19th-century math genius Carl Friedrich Gauss and fermat primes (“Number Seventeen”); or with a slow-burning homage to the inventor of a certain popular psychedelic drug. (“Lupita en la Selva y el Doctor”).

But make no mistake: Tropicalism, like rock, isn’t about warm, fuzzy fusions or novel global convergences. Tropical musicians from Bogata to Bushwick hunt down old notions of “world” music and eat them for supper. And they are dragging burned-out indie rockers along for the ride: it’s no surprise to find Animal Collective members crate-digging in Lima.

“The tropicalist movement and its idea of cannibalism is not some gentle global all-inclusive way of making new music,” Conan states, using de Andrade’s metaphor to describe Chicha Libre’s own experience. “It’s more about blurring the line between exploitation, acculturation, and genuine discovery. There are, after all, sinister aspects to cannibalism.”

It may be complicated, but sonic cannibalism feels to Conan and company like the easiest way to understand the cultural forces that led them to the Barbès backroom, to rural Peru, to club stages all over South America. “I grew up in France without an indigenous musical culture, one that was my own. There was no interesting pop music related to any tradition at the time,” muses Conan. “So I completely devoured other people’s culture, rock and Latin, which has always been an important part of the French pop scene. The cannibalizing instinct didn’t come in a cynical manner, as a desire to be other people. There was no second guessing it.”

When Conan reached New York as a young man, cumbia was hard to find—unless you went to ma-and-pa record stores in Queens. But he eventually found himself drawn to the few traces he came across of Peru’s cumbia permutations, including the long-ignored chicha. With its electrified rocking approach to the music of the Amazonian borderlands, the genre felt to Conan like the music he’d always heard in his head—and he was fascinated by cosmopolitan musical influences working-class chicha musicians absorbed without thinking twice about it. “It was postmodern in a way, but not self-conscious. The musicians just did it,” Conan recounts.

He released collections of vintage chicha tracks and started his own tribute band, “a fun musical exercise at first,” he notes. Conan and his fellow chicha-philes soon discovered they could take the wah wah-ing, swirling sounds and swallow them whole—and they wound up with a cult hit debut album and a deluge of offers to play in South America. The band took off, playing hundreds of shows across Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., gaining a following in and out of the Latin scene.

“Our music is not an attempt to imitate someone else's music but rather an attempt to merge what we do in a cohesive way,” Conan reflects. “It's a constant cultural negotiation between the band members’ backgrounds, with tropical music at its core and as its template.”

Fall of the Moon: Marcel Khalifé Pays Homage to the Late Poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Spirit of the Arab Spring on New Album and on U.S. Tour, Spring 2012

2012-05-01T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

The poetry of Palestine, the melodies of Lebanon. Uniting across national, ethnic and religious lines, resounding above the din of bitter politics, rockets, poverty. Singing instead of the shade of grapevines, the bright eyes of loved ones, the heartache of divisions and decline that could be healed, love that could be returned.

Marcel Khalifé, Lebanese master of the oud (lute), evokes this world, honoring the spirit of his late friend and collaborator Mahmoud Darwish, a strikingly original poet born in Galilee. Khalifé’s oud trembles, rumbles, sighs, and resonates beyond cultural specificities. Too often compared to Bob Dylan because of his firm counter-mainstream stance, Khalifé’s work can shift between the sweet melodic sensibility of Cole Porter and the gravitas of the best of Western chamber music, between the heady daring of jazz experimenters and rock defiance.

Now, as protesters rally in the streets across the Middle East, they sing his songs. Khalifé has come out as an ardent supporter of the Arab Spring. “I sang for them,” Khalifé explained in a recent statement protesting government crackdowns on protesters in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and across the Arab world, “and they gave me the feeling that they were my kin, that they were the source of strength to bring about the impossible.”

Khalifé has translated his profound sense of kinship with his fellow Arabs and with humanity writ large into stirring, eloquent music on Fall of the Moon. Revisiting some of his earliest engagement with the words of the late exiled and revered Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, Khalifé once again turns personal loss, alienation, and love into a universal, soulful call.

“On the stage, I’m in my natural milieu, saying what I want,” Khalifé states. “There’s no censorship of what I say.”

{full story below}

It began with a young man, confined by war and persecution to his home in Lebanon, awestruck by the raw, eloquent words of a Palestinian poet. He picked up his oud and restlessly plucked out pieces that would go on to shake the Arab world.

The connection to Darwish began the first moment Khalifé opened one of his early books of poems. Over three decades, it evolved into a bosom collaboration that was more than the sum of its parts. “Our respective corpora have grown to be reminiscent of each other, so that the name of each of the twain, instantly and without reflection, would evoke the name of the other,” Khalifé reflects. “Even before we got to know each other personally, I felt as though Darwish’s poetry, with its divine assertiveness and prophetic cadences, had been revealed to me and for me.”

The feeling was mutual: Darwish often referred to Khalifé as his “heart’s artistic twin.” Though from different countries and religious backgrounds, both artists shared a sense of desperation about the state of their homelands and the world. From the beginning of his musical life, Khalifé has sought to restore the neglected beauty and adventuresome roots of Arab musical culture, founding a groundbreaking ensemble in his home village, teaching a new generation of musicians, and composing pieces that redefine the music of the region.

Khalifé takes traditions and transforms them according to new, yet deeply appropriate rules: While the text dictates the tenor and shape of his pieces, the music retains an edge of the avant garde. In the free-flowing bittersweet sweep of pieces like “In Exile,” pensive vocals intertwine with hints of jazz ballads and classical lieder, mirroring the haunting journey of Darwish’s words through sorrow, reflection, and joy despite mortality: “And tell absence: You lack me/ yet I am present…to make you whole.”

Both Darwish and Khalifé sought elevation through technical mastery and passionate honesty beyond the morass of politics, into the realm of the human, the vitally connected. Darwish’s complicated life of activism, exile, imprisonment, and marginalization did not prevent him from producing stunning poems that chronicled his travails with a freshness and precision similar to Khalifé’s musical approaches.

“Marcel eliminated the gap created by the poets between poem and song. He restored to exiled emotion its rescuing power to reconcile poetry, which glorified its distance from people and was thus abandoned by them,” Darwish explained in a statement before his passing in 2008. “Poetry, therefore, developed the song of Marcel Khalifé, while Khalifé's song mended the relationship of poetry with people. With this, the people on the street started to sing, and lyrics need not a podium, as bread need not announce itself to the hungry.”

Together, these two iconic figures of contemporary Arab art and culture achieved one of Khalifé’s life-long goals: to give voice to the voiceless. His art has won him recognition from UNESCO, who declared Khalifé an Artist for Peace in 2005. It has been featured on the world’s most prestigious stages and in major feature films like 2007’s Rendition. In a newly awakened Middle East, Khalifé’s works continue to inspire and transform, reminding singers and listeners of their innate humanity and dignity.

“Music is my oxygen,” Khalifé told Democracy Now host Amy Goodman in an interview. “Without it, I feel life is lacking something. I wish that these politicians who control the world would listen to a tune before they go to bed. Perhaps then, instead of declaring war, they would declare love.”

Blues Reunion: African, American and European Musicians Connect and Transform America’s Quintessential Music on Putumayo’s African Blues

2012-04-24T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

The blues has long been about storytelling, about raising a voice from the margins and edges of American life. As it spread from the Deep South to Chicago and beyond, the blues incorporated a powerful musical groove which has influenced music around the world. Now, musicians are reaching across the Atlantic and finding that they have a common story to tell in shades of blue.

Putumayo’s African Blues chronicles the return of the blues to its African motherland. It also demonstrates the burgeoning connections between West and East African musicians and performers from the blues’ traditional heartland in the U.S., as well as converts in Europe—and shows how these connections are revolutionizing traditions on both continents.

Taj Mahal, together with the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar, gets down and deep in a slow-burning meditation on the beauties of Dhow Countries. Mali’s Issa Babayogo brings his characteristic, sparkling knack for gritty, melodic grooves. The ever-evolving Playing for Change band—this time featuring hip desert rockers Tinariwen and Keb Mo—reveals how globally malleable a good old 12-bar blues can be. And as always, the collection is filled with engaging new discoveries like hard-hitting Tuareg singer-songwriter Amar Sundy, unfolding and grooving collaborations like the Belgian-Malian project Kalaban Coura and the unexpected blend of Mali Latino.

“It’s like two halves of a circle,” muses Putumayo head Dan Storper, a passionate collector of music from around the world. “The blues’ roots are in Africa but emerged and evolved as a powerful musical style in America. Now they’re reuniting in new and exciting ways.”

{full story below}

“When we worked on Mali to Memphis, we recognized the powerful connection between the bluesy music of West Africa and the Mississippi Delta,” explains Dan “That began my search for American and African blues and blues-influenced music and led to a series of successful CDs including Mississippi Blues, American Blues and Blues Around the World.”

Storper, a blues fan who lives in New Orleans and his staff found a growing number of collaborative projects based on close musical friendships British guitarist Ramon Goose teamed up with kora (West African bridge-harp) whiz Diabel Cissokho (“Totoumo”), while respected Latin keyboard player and producer Alex Wilson found the sweet spot where Afro-Latin beats and roaring organ lines jive with kora, percussion, and other sounds from West Africa (Mali Latino’s “Ni Koh Bedy”).

As the various currents of blues have flowed back together—the developments in the U.S. and Europe, and African musicians’ responses to the American blues records that arrived midcentury—a new depth and richness have come to this storied musical form.

“It’s natural since the collaborations between Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo,” reflects Storper. “There’s something magical when two musical cultures collide and bring the best of each world to a song.”

Migratory Funk: The Celebratory, Border-Free Back-and-Forth Sounds of LoCura on Semilla Caminante and on Tour, Spring 2012

2012-04-17T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

Drive down a barely noticed dirt road, in the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais or deep in the hills of gold rush country. Turn right at Granada, left when you hit Havana, and you’ll find there’s a party going on. There’s a bike-powered sound system, a friendly mosh pit, blasts of bright brass, skanking bass, flamenco flourishes, and a big slice of madness that’s simultaneously the musical cure for alienation and loss.

At the center is San Francisco’s LoCura, a band that crafts upbeat anthems and chronicles the round-trip travels of Latin and American sounds. Movement between continents informs the lush variety of LoCura’s tunes on Semilla Caminante, inspired by ida y vuelta, the notion in flamenco of musical forms that have traveled to the New World and returned transformed.

“We mix everything from funk to son cubano into our own songs, to show how diverse our communities have become and to show the common roots these different styles have,” smiles LoCura singer Katalina Miletich. “Semilla Caminante, the idea of ‘traveling seed,’ is a reminder of this movement, this interchange, and of the creative resistance that continues to transform our lives and is tangible in our musical expressions.”

LoCura’s jubilant sound of resistance and restored connections will be traveling up the West Coast this spring, as the group embarks on its first major tour of the region. Cities include San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Sacramento.

{full story below}

LoCura may rock one of the more traditional flamenco palos (“Desde las Entrañas”) or a full-on, punked-out ska anthem for occupiers (“Squatter’s Song”). They can throw a party while celebrating the power and activism of Latinas (“Guerriller@s”) or toss out a growling, tongue-in-cheek critique of self-absorbed greed (“To’ Pa’ Mi”).

“One big inspiration for the ways we consciously and unconsciously connect different music is this idea that styles and rhythms travel from Africa and Europe to South America, Cuba, America, mixing with French, Italian, indigenous sounds, and then travel back,” Miletich notes. “Culture is alive in so many different ways, and shows up in different places to tell a story.”

LoCura’s members have experienced this transformation firsthand. Born and raised in Spain, Miletich landed in the small California town of Angel’s Camp to visit family, and was soon “at loose ends, not sure what to with myself,” she recounts. She had no idea she was about to become the lead singer for an eccentric local band. Though she had a background in theater, she had never done any singing or songwriting in her life.

Then one night, Miletich wound up at a wild party, way down a rural dirt road. “There was this band in these crazy costumes, these amazing, fun people,” recalls Miletich fondly. “I thought, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for.’” Before long, she found herself gripping a mic and free-styling in Spanish. The band asked her to join on the spot.

Guitarist and bassist Bob Sanders also happened to be playing with the band that night. A native of the Sierra foothills, he had gotten hooked on flamenco early. He met Miletich, and it was an instant musical connection. After the crazy night in the hills, he and Miletich struck up a close musical friendship. They eventually moved to the Bay Area. There, they founded LoCura.

Miletich and Sanders found inspiration at the intersection of Bay Area bohemia and the active, outspoken Latino arts community. They played packed arts spaces and Occupy camps with bike-powered speakers. In this fertile community of artists, they found Flamenco dancer Stephanie Narvaez, renegade klezmer/reggae bassist Izzy, "el Rumbero de la Mission" Sergio Duran, San Francisco native and trumpeter extraordinaire Danny Cao, and, most recently, drummer Carrie Jahde.

LoCura’s roots also lie deep in the literary, innovative voices of San Francisco’s Latino artists, writers like multilingual poet Agustin Palacios (who penned the lyrics that became “Manzanilla) “Being raised bicultural by an American father in Spain and learning my own form of Spanglish, it was impacting to arrive to California and find validation and common experiences in Chicano culture,” Miletich muses. Her lyrics dance between languages on soulful songs like “Préndela.”

The band itself has traveled between scenes, between packed art venues and major festivals, between Mission street corners (where they’ve debuted songs like “Te sigo”) and storied plazas in Granada, where they traded licks and lived with Gitano street musicians. Marked by Miletich's infectious voice and way with words, the band has grown from a trio to a bumping seven-piece band. Channeling the genre-defying, Latin-rooted spirit of musicians like flamenco innovators Ojos de Brujo or bold songstress Lila Downs, LoCura has shared the stage with everyone from reggae scion Ziggy Marley to the global bass music masters Beats Antique. They have sold out Bay Area venues like The Great American Music Hall and The Independent.

“LoCura's music is filled with a sense of longing and hope. We want to evoke a world without borders, a time where we begin to recognize each other and our common grounds,” Miletich reflects. “With our music we hope to bring people from diverse experiences together in one space of celebration and reflection, and open up dialogue.”

The Great Wild North: Sagapool Brings Tales of Raucous Romps and Wintry Meditations to Life on New Album and on North American Tour, March-April 2012

2012-04-10T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

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. It’s a gang of good friends and relatives sharing long, winding stories (the sagas in Sagapool)—but with stunning chops.

Now the inventive ensemble turns inward, adding a Northern note to their wild and swirling romps on Sagapool, a gentle reflection on everything from Quebec’s remote and windswept reaches to quiet winter mornings. Nonetheless, Sagapool can’t help but add an ample dose of the group’s characteristic, sustaining quirky humor, chronicling bittersweet grooves for synth-addicted cousins and last-minute leaps on stage.

“Early on, we were bringing heat to the cold winter, but now we’re assuming our northerness,” exclaims clarinetist and co-founder Guillaume Bourque. “I think the result is really well balanced. We’re known for our energetic pieces, when people switch instruments—we all can play all the instruments involved. And we keep that energy, even if our music feels more introspective.”

This mix of good-natured shenanigans, striking musical skill, and Northern thoughtfulness has won Sagapool a Canadian Folk Music Award (Best Instrumental Album, 2008) and gained them showcases at major music events like WOMEX (2010). Their dynamic, freewheeling show will reach the U.S. and Canada, as the group tours in March and April 2012. The band’s journey will take them from North Carolina to Northern New England, with a stop in New York (Living Room, March 29), and to the Maritimes.

{full story below}

If Sagapool’s music has a wry bent, it’s because the band is always making a friendly bit of mischief.

The group has been known to make a double bass explode, or to shock an audience—and a baffled stage manager—by leaping on stage just in the nick of time (a humorous, if unusual event, that musically transformed into “le Fil boréal”). They can make it sound like the Hot Club has been occupied by jubilant beatboxers (“Mon cousin joue du synthé”) or that a new music ensemble has been airlifted tenderly into a far-off village wedding party (“De cordes et de bois”).

Sagapool has grown up together, and gotten serious. And seriously melodic: thought rocking many a rollicking tune, it’s melodies—not grooves or beats alone—that truly guide the band. They spring sometimes from a single note, inspired as much by film scores and classical gems as Gypsy and Eastern European roots music.

“We want people to get up and dance, but we also want them to think,” Bourque explains. To do this, Sagapool draws on its many family ties. “The name ‘Sagapool’ doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t refer to a style. But in French, it sounds like a family story, an old story passed down,” smiles Bourque.

The story is rich with characters and intriguing settings. With members from Hungary (percussionist Marton Madersparch) and Italy (second-generation accordion whiz and co-founder Luzio Altobelli), with links to Quebec’s remote, stunning Magdalen Islands (“Le vent des Îles”) and to the culturally vibrant northern reaches of the St. Lawrence River, the band knows exactly how to capture the spare outlines and rich textures of hyperborean places and people. The pieces evolved into little stories of their own, telling tales from the cosmopolitan hub of Montreal and from the outer edges of northeastern Canada, with its still expanses punctuated with leaping, bubbling energy.

The original fascination with the intersection of movie music and European roots, with the flash of Balkan exuberance and the stately skip of klezmer lines, may no longer be the sole animating force behind the band’s music—though it’s still a major element in its high-intensity, spirited live shows. But the cinematic, and it’s the suggestion of narrative, continues to inspire Sagapool.

“I think a lot of the power of our music comes from the melodies,” says bassist and pianist Alexis Dumais. Melodies that unfold with quiet intensity in solo piano pieces and charming ensemble moments that use the contrasting colors of strings and reeds to emotional effect (“45.56°N 73.58°O -90°N”). “We jammed more for this album,” Dumais continues. “We took the material and melodies different members of the band brought in and just played. As we did that, the songs came to life.”

Shopping Cart Sound Systems and Floating Cities: Filastine Walks Gently on a Planet of Discovered Beats, Radio Static, and Low-End Power

2012-04-03T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

In a commandeered shopping cart strung with contact mics, in an old-growth Indonesian forest a mile’s walk from the nearest dirt road, it begins. Dreams of two-way radio static direct from future floating cities fade in and out, trading licks with ecstatic idiophones, the buzz of gut strings. The world is coming apart at the seams, ripped by injustice, craven stupidity, global weirding.

Filastine belts a siren call to salvage and unite the brilliant sonic pieces. At the intersection of unabashed globalism and bass music, the wandering arts instigator takes dance music to its outer-national limits on £00T, incorporating and dismantling lush sounds from North Africa, Brazil, Java—and from down the street where all the noise and protest hum.

An audio-visual nomad and percussionist, Filastine can simultaneously command the dancefloor, start a sonic street insurrection in Tokyo or Barcelona, and win over xenomaniacs worldwide with found objects, North African and Indian percussion, custom software, and video collage. He makes low-end rich, organic beats and images that speak to our ethical bankruptcy, pending environmental collapse, and alt-globalization possibilities. It’s Occupy breaking into bhangra shouts and samba parades, as gamelans and glitches multiply.

Filastine brings the beautiful global noise and vivid audio-synched video to clubs across the U.S. this March and April, hitting San Diego, LA, Portland, and Seattle.

{full story below}

Filastine has driven taxi cabs, raised hell with marching bands, spontaneously kicked out the jams from the back of a van with local MCs on the streets of Tokyo. He’s mounted a salvaged, blast-ready loudspeaker on a shopping cart and marched through the streets, creating illicit urban soundtracks with snippets from field recordings he’d made from Bangladesh to Brazil.

The shopping cart, eventually festooned with mics and transformed into an instrument, became a Filastine calling card. “It’s an indigenous instrument, like a tube hollowed out by termites became a tool for music in Australia. The metal shopping cart is a perfect modern instrument, because it’s a piece of debris you can find anywhere,” Filastine explains. "Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes harder, but I managed to get my hands on one, even in Borneo or Morocco.”

It’s that same portability and mutability that attracted Filastine to electronic music, once the laptop revolution completely changed the way dance music is created. “You used to have a pile of specialized gear, and you’d spent your time geeking out. Then laptops and new software came along. Before starting I didn’t know anything about making electronic music, but I just wasn’t hearing anyone making the sound I wanted to hear. Someone had to fill this niche for more polyrhythmic compositions, to make something less cold and quantized, using more gritty acoustic inputs.”

Filastine generates these inputs himself, using tabla techniques he studied in India, playing the hand drum (though with drumsticks), laying down rhythms picked up from hours of samba parade marching down Rio’s rougher streets. He takes a few seconds of decades-old orchestral string hits or a mere breath from a Bollywood pop chorus, chops them into tiny digital bits, then realigns them to create ingeniously off-kilter, ear-catching lines.

These altered moments are then overlaid with analog instruments: Cellos, trumpets, and guitars recorded from Lyon to New York, or Filastine’s own drumming, finally mixing it all together at his rooftop studio in the Muslim quarter of Barcelona. The beautiful tension between the electronic and organic, the time-twisted and real-time, give Filastine’s tracks a distinct sonic depth.

On “Shanty Tones,” a rolling cumbia shatters and reforms, to bittersweet pulses of brass and cello strikes, a growling shout out to friend and cumbia-proponent DJ Rupture. Sirens and samples of Glenn Beck and postmodernism’s poster boy Michel Foucault (“May I Interrupt?”), bent keys and rapid shakers collide with purring Chicago-style juke beats (“Circulate False Notes”) and bursts of avant-garde beauty (“Spectralization”).

No accidental tourist, Filastine’s global side comes from powerful connections on the ground. He encountered Japanese avant MC ECD during a street show organized by an arts collective taking full advantage of Japan’s election laws, which allow candidates to blast music from specially tricked out trucks. “ECD’s a maverick. He really blew up hip hop in Japan, but with him, there’s no fronting. He’s just a creative, interesting person with a precarious quotidian existence,” Filastine recounts. “He’s got a strong political perspective, but he’s also into Dada and abstraction.” ECD leaps into Filastine’s mix and waxes poetic about the tragedy at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in “Lost Records.”

Filastine met striking Javanese vocalist and storyteller Nova when she organized a generator-power gig for him at a Jakarta artist squat. The two hit if off, and their friendship eventually led to several of £00T’s tracks, including “Colony Collapse” and “Gendjer2.”

“Gendjer2” resurrects the lyrics of a midcentury soul anthem associated with the women’s movement of the Indonesian communist party, crushed during the notoriously violent Year of Living Dangerously. It’s a ghost song, banned for forty years and still semi-taboo. “Colony Collapse” interweaves a spectrum of Javanese gamelan instruments with echoes of low-frequency dubstep grind, while Nova’s lithe voice tells a multilingual tale of environmental implosion.

“The motor bikes in South East Asia are everywhere,” Filastine notes. “We worked on those tracks on a country road in an old wooden house, and even there, there were scooters roaring by all day long. I spent two days walking around, looking for a quiet place. We had to wait for a break in the rain, rush out, and set up our recording studio thirty minutes from road to avoid the whining engines. We did get some really loud insects, though, and the call to prayer in the background.”

“It’s a balancing act: to split my efforts between activism and being a full-time artist,” Filastine reflects, “but often I can bring a political element to people who are just looking for music, as a kind of carrier wave alongside the music. What I do is life art: to treat the way I travel, survive, collaborate, learn and compose as one coherent method.”

Family Album: Wan Fambul/One Family Celebrates Catalyst for Peace’s Grassroots Peacebuilding and Groove-Oriented Creative Spirit

2012-03-27T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

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.

This is the story of “Fambul Tok” (Krio for “family talk”), and the world is hearing it because of Catalyst for Peace. Catalyst, a U.S.-based international collaboratory, seeks out and supports grassroots peacebuilding that springs from local practices and culture: from the songs and tales, from the town meetings and ceremonies, from the liberating truth-telling, apology and forgiveness that end bloodshed, enmity, and endless cycles of bitterness.

Now, Catalyst is celebrating these breakthrough moments, and the creative spirit that can accomplish the seemingly impossible. This spirit dwells in music: Wan Fambul/One Family unites the diverse voices of artists from conflict zones. The result is a high-energy, urgent call for forgiveness and deep dialogue from edgy DJs and soulful singer-songwriters, from hard-hitting reggae outfits to transnational pop explorers. The groove-powered compilation features tracks by global music heavyweights Vieux Farka Toure, Idan Raichel, Vusi Mahlasela, and Dengue Fever.

“The lessons we are learning from Sierra Leone are universal lessons,” explains Libby Hoffman, founder and president of Catalyst for Peace. “The processes are applicable in other places and settings. What people in Sierra Leone are illustrating, artists in other communities—like the ones on Wan Fambul—are capturing and expressing in their own meaningful ways.”

Wan Fambul serves as a sonic companion and counterpoint to Catalyst’s Fambul Tok (see FambulTok.com), a stirring documentary film and book on the groundbreaking work of Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone that brings former adversaries, perpetrators, and victims together for community discussions in a traditional setting.

Fambul Tok will have its world television premiere February 22nd on EPIX cable channel (see EpixHD.com, FambulTok.com or your cable listing for details).

The benefit album will be available for a donation at FambulTok.com. All proceeds will go directly to support the grassroots peacebuilding work of Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone.

{full story below}

“We believe that music is the fastest way to pass the message,” exclaims Sierra Leonean pop icon Bajah whose two tracks with his Dry Eye Crew (“We Na Wan Fambul,” “Gun Thing”) emit an upbeat optimism in service of preventing election violence. “Music can go where you can’t go. Music is circulating and it can be in more than one place, and that’s the power that we’ve got as musicians. The power to preach positive music, to give voice to the voiceless.”

Hoffman, like Bajah, has been working to do just that for nearly ten years. A former academic, Hoffman longed to tell the world about the bold yet unsung community-based peacebuilding efforts she had seen across the world, and particularly in some of the most tragic conflict zones in Africa, and to help these efforts grow in strategic impact. She eventually teamed up with visionary Sierra Leonean human rights activist John Caulker, who had an unprecedented plan to bring people together at the most intimate level, using long-held traditional meetings, ceremonies, dances, and musical practices to foster spaces for forgiveness. The forgiveness that seemed to elude communities, despite national efforts, courts, and truth commissions organized to deal with the aftermath of a brutal civil war. Through their collaboration, Fambul Tok came into being and quickly began holding community meetings.

Hoffman was astonished when she witnessed her first ceremony early on in the Fambul Tok program. In a tiny village in the Sierra Leonean hinterlands, people gathered around a fire in the center of a dusty circle. “No one knew what was going to happen, who was going to come forward,” Hoffman remembers. “A man stood up who only had one arm and told his story of how a rebel soldier had cut it off. The chief said, ‘Do you see the person who amputated it?’ He did, and the other man stepped forward and apologized. They hugged, and the man forgave him. At first I thought, ‘They must be dramatizing it.’ But as this happened again and again, I realized that people were not acting. This was in fact the first time they’d ever talked about what had happened to them. Not only were they telling their stories fully and truthfully, they were forgiving. Someone would admit and apologize, and their victim would openly forgive them.”

Forgiveness and a new sense of unity in a fractured community are forces the artists on Wan Fambul all hope to channel. “Most conflicts are based on a lack of understanding and communication,” explains the globally-inflected Iranian pop duo Abjeez. “Music creates unanimity. No matter what religious or political view we might have, music resonates in the very same way in our bodies.”

And forgiveness has a power that defies high-level politics, the talks and treaties that too often seem unable to bring about peace alone. As Israeli Idan Raichel, who collaborates with Malian blues innovator Vieux Farke Toure on “Say God,” notes, “Peace will not be reached by signing a peace treaty between our great leaders and their great leaders. Ultimately, it will be achieved through knowing people from other countries as neighbors–because a neighbor is not your enemy.”

“All these musicians reveal the creative power that can’t be squelched, the same power that we encountered in Sierra Leonean villages. Decades of war and poverty and systematic disenfranchisement can’t kill it,” Hoffman says. “The artists on Wan Fambul are expressing the same reality: making music affirms the creative force that is the basis of what heals and unites us.”

The Wan Fambul Artists:

Abjeez: Iranian sister act makes bright, melodic global pop that address on social issues with wit and grace.

Bajah + Dry Eye Crew: Sierra Leone’s stadium-packing answer to Sean Paul thanks to joy-filled, Africa-rooted hip hop.

Bhi Bhiman: Soul vocals and chilling storytelling, Sri Lankan Tamil roots and a St. Louis upbringing meet in thoughtful songs.

Bombino: Spare yet lush Tuareg guitar heroism from Niger.

Dengue Fever: LA-born band explores vintage Cambodian psychedelia guided by the pure, elegant voice of a Cambodian singer with a serious pedigree.

Idan Raichel: Groove-laden international hit maker known for his catchy songs, collaborative energy, and calls for peace and tolerance.

Mashrou’ Leila: Passionate young Lebanese rock experimenters defy social mores and conventional notions about Arabic music.

Noble Society: Bounding between reggae and hip hop, Noble Society’s Guyanan front man and diverse band insist on self love, community, and justice.

Saba Saba: A veteran MC with a massive following in Uganda and among hip DJs, Saba Saba pioneered rap in Luganda and fought for cultural revival while fighting corruption and violence.

Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars: Founded in a refugee camp, the All-Stars wound up inspiring the world with their clever, intense grooves.

Vieux Farka Toure: Son of revered Malian bluesman, Vieux carves out his own path with compelling vocals and striking guitar work.

Vusi Mahlasela: A powerful, deep blue South African voice rich with hope and creativity, backed with whirling Afroblues guitar and delicate bursts of percussion.