World Music News Wire

Trans-Mediterranean Blues in Five Languages and the Instrumentarium of Abaji

2009-11-10T00:01:00-05:00

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“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.” These sounds and the adapted, revived instruments that make them reverberate on Origine Orients, as Abaji reimagines his lost-and-found trans-Mediterranean roots and draws on a wildly inventive “instrumentarium,” a deep sense of the global blues, and the five languages and traditions that shaped him.

For the young Abaji, “Everything was music. When I was ten or eleven, I got really involved with sounds. Not just the guitar, but the sounds themselves,” the special sonic melting pot of Greek and Turkish his family spoke at home, the Arabic he used in public, and the French he used at school. From a musical family—Abaji’s Armenian grandmother played the oud (lute), his great-grandmother the kanun (zither), and his six maternal aunts were all passionate and contentious musicians—Abaji started playing and experimenting on an inexpensive Chinese-built guitar alone in his Beirut bedroom, listening to Cat Stevens, Credence Clearwater Revival, and Bob Dylan while strains of Oum Kaltoum and Turkish music drifted in the window.

However, his musical education began in earnest on his fateful first day in Paris, where he fled when conflict erupted in Lebanon in the mid-1970s. “I was saved from war, but war also saved me,” Abaji reflects.

He had lost paradise, the peculiar mix of languages and the dozens of musical styles that echoed on the streets of his native land. It was something the rock-and-blues-loving teenager had never grasped while still at home. Yet at the same time, he realized that music was his calling and began studying percussion with an inspiring Brazilian player, soon moving on to voraciously explore dozens of other instruments. “I went through a whole life of instruments,” Abaji muses. “I’m still buying instruments. Sometimes friends tell me, ‘Hey, you don’t know how to play those instruments! Why did you buy them?’ My answer: Because I don’t know how to play them! ”

Abaji’s passion for instruments—and he has more than 250—stems from his deep desire to take the sounds he began to hear as a young man and turn them into uniquely vibrant, uniquely personal music. As he devoured everything from the bouzouki to the Colombian bamboo saxophone, however, he saw he needed to more than just play them; he had to reinvent them.

“I always have a sound in mind, and one question: How can I bring it to life through an instrument? I had to talk to instrument builders and get them to change things, but I didn’t have a dime to my name,” Abaji recalls. “I had to find solutions with luthiers that weren’t so expensive.” This frugality-forced creativity breathed new life into old instruments on their last legs, transforming them into cross-cultural amalgams.

The result: one-of-a-kind hybrids like the resonant sitar-guitar or an invention that appears on Origine Orients, the oud-guitar. “It made perfect sense. I took an old classical guitar headed for the trash, removed the frets so I could play quarter notes, and doubled the nylon strings to have the lute effect,” Abaji explains. “It was my first step back into paradise. I’m not Spanish. I’m not Lebanese. I’m a Mediterranean guy whose ancestors traded along the Silk Road, the missing link between the two, and the oud-guitar is my double.”

Another missing link unites Abaji’s diverse roots and musical visions: “Everything is related to the blues. People say the blues were born in Africa, but really, they appeared when humanity was born.” For Abaji, the blues is a worldwide phenomenon, a sonic trade route stretching from Afghanistan to the U.S. “The blues are everywhere: Before America, it came from Africa, but in Africa, it came from the Eastern people who arrived with Islam,” he explains. “People talk of the banjo coming from Africa. But before that came the rebab from Afghanistan, the great-grandfather of the banjo.”

Abaji has worked to capture his own trans-Mediterranean brand of the blues, not only by creating new instruments, but by developing a unique approach in the studio. For Origine Orients, he decided he needed to record all his songs in a single take playing all the instruments himself, without overdubs. Abaji turned himself into a global one-man-band, in part thanks to the acrobatic aplomb and grace he developed as a tai-chi instructor. He began playing piano with the Colombian sax (“Origine Orients”), or oud-guitar with stomp boxes and rattles (“Min Jouwwa”), singing all the while in a deep voice reminiscent of one of Abaji’s favorite folk-blues performers, Greg Brown.

On “Desert to Desert,” he recounts, “I had the bouzouki on my lap like a lap steel guitar, with my right hand on the strings. In my left hand was a Balinese bamboo flute I was using as a bottleneck. That meant I could also use it as a flute. And while I’m at it, why not use this as a stick to bang on the daf drum?” Abaji laughs. “After I recorded the track, I thought I was in deep trouble—that I’d never be able to reproduce it!”

Along with unexpected instruments and intuitive techniques, Abaji also intertwines all the languages that have shaped his life: the Turkish of heated family discussions and secret maternal cursing; the Greek of parties and celebrations; the French and Arabic of everyday life; and finally, the Armenian of Abaji’s long-lost roots, a heritage that he was not aware of until his brother did some genealogical digging.

This rediscovered language forms the heart of the album, and the song “Menz Baba” emerged from a bluesy exploration of Armenian’s sound and the life of Abaji’s Armenian grandfather. “When I started working on this song, I began to write some words in Armenian with help from an Armenian friend,” Abaji notes. “Then she taught me some words. I asked for a translation of certain words, choosing words by the way they sing. Because the words sing, not only the voice.”

Even after regaining paradise, the search for the ultimate soulful sound and deep link to the past continues for Abaji. “Sometimes you are happy because you think you’ve got it, that this is just the thing. But you always have to improve. In my head, I’m always searching, opening doors, going left or right. It can be a bit tricky to live with sometimes,” Abaji chuckles. “But I made this album exactly the way I wanted it, totally and completely, and hopefully now people can understand my music totally.”

A Cosmic Dreamscape: The Haunting, Intimate World of Eastern European Lullabies Unfolds on Kitka’s Cradle Songs

2009-11-03T12:01:00-05:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

The mother, the cradle, the voice, and the universe. Melodies born on dry slopes and in deep boreal forests to the joys and sorrows of families from villages in the Russian Far North to Armenia and Greece. This is the lullaby as revealed by America’s preeminent Eastern European vocal ensemble and creative collective, Kitka. Kitka’s latest album, Cradle Songs, is an unexpected, gentle journey through the traditions that shaped young dreams along the eastern edges of Europe, and a song-cycle that embraces the ensemble’s personal sonic memories of childhood.

The pastel smiles and hush-a-bye ditties many in the West associate with lullabies and children’s songs are a world away from the pensive, magic-steeped, and sometimes dark songs sung over the cradles in Slavic, Balkan and Caucasian cultures. “These songs were not only about putting a baby to sleep. They summon something bigger, something cosmic," muses Kitka singer Shira Cion. “We wanted to create something different than a purely sweet and sentimental album. We envisioned an album that captured all the depth and dimensions of motherhood.”

This quest for a different kind of lullaby project was sparked by Kitka’s audiences, who urged the group to record a collection of the most elemental genre of woman’s songs. The project took flight in a series of serendipitous meetings with the extraordinary Armenian singer, Hasmik Harutyunyan, who unveiled an entire landscape of lullabies that departed from the cute and cuddly. “The Armenian lullaby texts have stunningly beautiful poetry, with a lot of powerful, natural and cosmic imagery. But there are also lyrics that convey intense sadness and longing,” Cion explains. “The songs tell histories of children and parents lost, of cultural genocide. In many Eastern European lullabies, the mother pours out all the grief, fears, and hopes in her soul when she sings to her child. Our close friend and mentor in Ukrainian folk song, Mariana Sadovska, even jokingly refers to some of the cradle songs from her native tradition as ‘sadistic lullabies.’”

"At first, I found these lullabies really challenging,” reflects Kitka singer Janet Kutulas, whose Greek family sang her one of the songs the group wove into “Nani, Nani, Kitka Mou.” “They seemed almost inaccessibly dark. But the more you listen to them, the more and more beautiful they become. They aren’t your stereotypical tra-la-la lullaby.”

As Kitka mined libraries and recordings, worked with traditional singers, and summoned early musical memories, they discovered more striking melodies that went far beyond simple, purely innocent tunes. The Georgian lullaby “Megruli Nana” harkens back to the ancient goddess of light and fertility, called Nana in Western Georgian languages, who is asked to protect the infant as they drift into the dangerous liminal place between wakefulness and dreamtime. Another Georgian song, “Es Ak’vani,” is sung as a circle-dancing chorus ritually lays a baby in his cradle for the first time. “Oj Jano, Jano,” from Macedonia, is almost an anti-lullaby, depicting a young husband asking his wife why they cannot conceive a child. The wife answers that when she was an infant, her mother cursed her with childlessness because she slept all day and wailed all night.

“Dzurk, Dzurk,” a lullaby of the Komi—the Finno-Ugric peoples of far northwestern Russia—mimics the sound of the birch cradle creaking as the baby is rocked. The ancient song came to Kitka as a serendipitous gift facilitated by 21st century technology. Kutulas discovered the melody in an old book, and with Cion, tried to learn more about the unfamiliar language. The key to unlocking the mysteries of the Komi-Zyrian language came via email, when one of Komi’s most beloved singers sent mp3s of herself singing the song as she recalled it from childhood. “Here’s this woman we’ve never met who somehow had access to a digital recorder,” Kutulas gushes. “We were so enamored with the soundbites she sent that we seriously considered putting them on the CD.”

Yet the stark beauty of the Komi singer’s performance and the other lullabies the group had gathered presented a unique challenge to Kitka: how to transform songs traditionally sung by a single mother’s voice into pieces for an eight-voice ensemble that would capture listeners’ imaginations and not lull them deeply into dreamland.

“We really grappled with the idea of what the album would be like,” Kutulas explains. “A lot of people had come up to us at concerts and said, pointedly, ‘I hope you are making a CD we can put on so our child will go to sleep.’ We said, ‘yeah, sure, sure.’ But when we thought about it, we wondered if we really wanted make an entire CD of slow sleepy songs. We went through a whole exploration, and settled upon a more varied, dreamscape-like collection of songs”

The process unfolded over several years. The group sought a variety of creative solutions to the solo lullaby-vocal ensemble challenge. Kitka even commissioned an original by Bay Area composer Dan Cantrell: “Slow to the Dawn,” based on Sephardic lullaby texts. New arrangements of traditional melodies were created, some involving weaving lullabies from different regions together. Three of Hartyunyan’s lullabies became a hypnotic tapestry of songs in “Three Armenian Lullabies,” in which three Kitka soloists overlay individual melodies above an ensemble vocal drone that recalls the warm, soothing, plaintive timbre of the traditional Armenian double-reed instrument, the duduk.

Sometimes, finding the right arrangement meant playfully intertwining songs from Kitka members’ families with unexpectedly related traditional tunes. “Butterfly Songs” unites a joyful folk song singer Caitlin Tabacay Austin had learned in Bulgaria and a fluttering, hocketing duet composed by Kutulas’ five-year-old niece. “Bedtime Story” combines Russian and Ukrainian lullabies with a pleasant meandering mix of folk and fairy tales, a spoken-word first for the group.

Other arrangements emerged in surprising moments of play. The ensemble discovered a whole new side of one of Cion’s favorite childhood lullabies that forms the heart of the opening track “Cradle Song,” a Russian Jewish tune sung as a round. “We were going to record it in its original form,” recalls singer and co-producer Briget Boyle. “Janet and Caitlin found a toy piano and Fischer-Price glockenspiel in the studio lounge. We decided, just for fun, to record them jamming on the Komi lullaby melody. It turned out creepy and interesting. When we came back to record the Russian lullaby, four or five of us simultaneously realized, ‘Hey, that toy-instrument track would work really well with the Russian-Jewish lullaby!’”

Kitka did discover several lullaby genres that were polyphonic. In Georgia, Cion discovered why some folk lullabies are sung by multiple voices. “I was in a centuries-old house in the high Caucasus,” Cion recalls. “These dwellings are built around a hearth, and because winters are incredibly cold, the extended family sleeps together around the fire. When a baby won’t sleep, it’s a whole-family issue. So Granny, Mama, Auntie and the sisters lull the child together, often in luscious three-part harmony.” Another selection that showcases a lullaby traditionally sung by an ensemble is the startlingly bold “Nanourisma” from the Greek-Albanian mountain region of Epirus where multi-part lullabies in primeval-sounding pentatonic scales produce a mesmerizing effect.

The nature of lullabies dictated that even with innovative arrangements, the sequence of songs would spell the difference between an evocative soundscape and an overly soporific CD. “We came up with a balance between the soothing and the edgy that we hope will encourage kids to sleep and adults to relax,” smiles Kutulas. “We put a lot of consideration into which songs would follow which, so people could easily move in and out of the different moods.”

“Everything had intention. Before recording, we had 60 songs to choose from. The ones that made it on the album had so much purpose and thought behind them,” Boyle adds. “The weaning down was the most challenging part. There were so many beautiful lullabies we all loved. Eventually, it became about what we needed to do to create the most compelling dreamscape.”

Flying Tortillas, Stilt Walkers, and Musical Mayhem: MarchFourth Marching Band Comes to the People

2009-10-27T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

A decommissioned fire engine pulls up, and out pour dazzling stilt walkers, flamenco-skirted fan-wielding dancers, brass players of all kinds, a lone battery-powered bass player, and drummers wearing harnessing made from bike parts, all decked out in costumes that range from Village People camp to steampunk goth glam.

They may start marching down the block, playing on the upper deck of a ferry or at a major stadium, or dancing a hole in the dance floor. They may break into wild Balkan dances, down-and-dirty New Orleans-style jams, madcap circus romps, or the theme song to Rocky. They may do just about anything.

This is the MarchFourth Marching Band, often called “M4” by fans, a quirky, funky instant party of a group whose twenty-five odd members make, sew, build, drive, design, choreograph, compose, and mix everything themselves. This includes their latest album, Rise Up and their upcoming national tour this fall. The band’s DIY ethic is epitomized with the customized bus that they bought on Ebay and lovingly refitted, from its kitchenette and Wi-Fi to its seat cushions and curtains (the fire engine is just for local transportation).

The carpenters, stonemasons, artists, business owners, metal workers, physical therapists, and lawyers of March Fourth have similarly transformed the staid conformity of the good old marching band into a sparkling celebration of vibrant individuality. “There’s no uniformity to our uniforms,” laughs dancer, stilt walker, and long-time M4 member, Nayana Jennings. “It’s really individual. There’s no dress code. We don’t tell people what they have to wear. It depends on the person and how long they’ve been with the band. The longer they play, the more costumes they have.”

The group never meant to become a huge touring ensemble. Born at a March 4th Fat Tuesday celebration several years ago, the band’s founders—including a New Orleans transplant who contributed 100-year-old Mardi Gras flambeaux to their first performances—had such a good time and made such a strong impression that soon they were performing at dozens of block parties, rallies, corporate parties, and weddings around Portland, OR. Before they knew it, the band had swelled to nearly three dozen performers and was playing major West Coast and world music festivals, including a guest appearance at the Hollywood Bowl with friends and fellow Portlanders Pink Martini.

While keeping a countercultural edge, MarchFourth strives to remain “accessible and approachable,” as Jennings puts it, walking a tightrope between sensual and family-friendly, Clockwork Orange and bigtop mayhem, carefully orchestrated performance pieces and barely contained chaos.

The band’s music bursts with this eclectic energy, in songs like “Dynomite!,” a Latin-flavored electro-house anthem with a sly nod to ’90s rapper Coolio. Or the off-kilter Balkan meters of “Simplon Cocek.” Or the tongue-in-cheek fiesta of “Contada Ridiculata,” which inspired one M4 member to toss package after package of corn tortillas into the crowd as the dancers swirled flamenco-style skirts. “Our mission is to cover every possible genre of music in the world,” bandleader John Averill exclaims.

Just as MarchFourth has never met a style of music they didn’t like, they’ve never met a performance opportunity they couldn’t handle. “Other bands are stationary in one location, and people have to come to the band. We can come to the people and move them from place to place,” explains Jennings. “That flexibility is our biggest asset, not having a stage or a spatial difference between us and them. We get really close to the audience. There’s an inclusiveness to our band that people don’t get from other performers. We can march off the stage into the crowd after the show and literally rub elbows,” even in 106-degree heat in the California desert or after hours of parading uphill through a suburban L.A. canyon.

There’s a spontaneity, too, that flows from having a very large group of very creative people marching together. MarchFourth has taken to the streets to celebrate momentous occasions like the election of Barack Obama and has turned rides on subways into impromptu concerts. “The drummers were banging out percussion on the window and walls, and the brass players were all singing their horn parts and things like that. People on the subway were wondering what was going on,” Jennings smiles. “Surprisingly, we’ve seldom been shut down.”

Quite the opposite, in fact: some of the band’s most exciting performances have been completely spur of the moment. After the bus broke down on Vancouver Island during a recent tour, the group spent all day working with mechanics to get their ride up and running. They missed their ferry back to the mainland and were poised to miss their next gig.

“We had to take what ferry we could get,” Jennings recalls. “We realized we were going to miss the festival we were supposed to play next, the first time we ever missed a show. So we decided to put on a show on the ferry. Everyone got in costume, got out their instruments, and played for an hour. The ferry operator and crew were so enthusiastic and people got really into it. We wound up selling forty CDs and made hundreds in tips, more than we have at some festivals.”

The enthusiasm is contagious when MarchFourth kicks in -- sometimes a bit too contagious. At a recent celebration of the group’s birthday at Portland’s historic Crystal Ballroom, things got a bit out of hand. A special stage had been set up for M4’s dancers on the venue’s renowned “floating” dance floor, which bounces gently as dancers move across it thanks to its unique mechanical construction.

When the band called for audience members with a March 4th birthday to come up on the dancers’ stage, so many people piled on and boogied that the stage legs poked a hole through the floor. “We literally danced a hole in the floor,” Jennings laughs. “They had to repair the old wood with a copper plaque, and we wondered if we could get it engraved to remember the occasion.”

Yet the collapsing stages, forced canyon marches, and various other breakdowns and train wrecks work only to add more creative fuel to the fire for a group whose size and diversity would seem to doom it to entropy. “Humor is what helps keeps us sane in all the chaos. We laugh a lot on tour,” explains Jennings. “That, and love. That’s why we do this.”

Devotion Embodied in Song: A Musical Story of Mystic, Heretic and Pious Indian Poetess Meera Bai

2009-10-20T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

It all started when adolescent Meera Bai witnessed a marriage procession and asked “Who will be my bridegroom?” Her nanny playfully showed her a miniature idol of Krishna and said ‘Him!’ Thus began this Indian girl’s lifelong fascination. What started as an innocent childhood fantasy, led to her fervent love of Lord Krishna. Meera’s obsession became the defining factor in her life, causing her to leave behind wealth and royalty and become a wandering mystic with a great following. Now, five centuries later, her poetry is well-known throughout India and celebrated worldwide.

The intriguing story of Meera Bai’s mystical, fascinating, and tragic existence, comes to life on Meera - The Lover…, the debut album from Canadian-Indian singer Vandana Vishwas, whose own life story adds poignancy to the recording.

Beautiful and intelligent Meera Bai was a poetess of exceptional caliber from the western Indian province of Rajasthan in the sixteenth century. She married a handsome prince at a very young age. During her marriage, she never lost her childhood infatuation towards Lord Krishna, and prolifically wrote poems of her love for him. Her husband soon died in a war, and although she was expected to burn in his funeral pyre, Meera Bai refused to participate in the then prevalent widow-suicide tradition of sati, publicly declaring that her husband Lord Krishna was still alive! This stance caused her significant duress in a patriarchal society where public expression of romantic feelings was taboo, even if for a divine idol. She was ostracized for her choices and her poetry by her in-laws, but she developed a following of many devotees who joined her in her loving devotion to Krishna. Vandana’s musical exploration of Meera Bai’s life follows her poetry chronologically, with each poem representing a distinct moment in the emotional state of the spiritual leader.

Meera Bai’s songs have often been recorded and sung as Krishna bhajans – religious devotional songs in honor of Krishna. However, Vandana’s compositions emphasize the romantic side of Meera Bai’, hence the title, Meera - The Lover… “Meera’s poems are very, very impressive in terms of literature and expression,” says Vandana. “Whenever I read her poems I feel like composing music for them. Her poetry is so strong. The way she talks about Krishna…as if not about a god, but about a lover. There is this fine line between devotion and romance which is transcended in her poems.” Today, Meera Bai’s poems are recognized as exceptional works, part of the literature in Indian schools, and are gaining international popularity as devotional songs among kirtan enthusiasts and yoga practitioners.

Vandana’s own life story, with its tragedies and triumphs, has brought her to develop a fond affinity with Meera Bai. Vandana’s connection with Meera began as early as her teenage years, when she was an All India Radio contract artist, and, along with her Guru Mr. D.K. Gandhe, she composed some of Meera Bai’s songs. Legendary Indian songbirds Lata Mangeshkar and Kishori Amonkar, who each beautifully sang Meera bhajans, also inspired her fascination with Meera Bai.

Vandana’s dream as a little girl was to be a Bollywood playback singer, but the lasting effects of a painful and immobilizing physical disability, inflicted upon her barely two days after her birth by a nurse using an unsterilized syringe, prevented her from being able to pursue that dream.

Now, Vandana is fulfilling that dream all by herself. While there is no actual movie in the making, Vandana sings the story of Meera Bai’s life in a way that invokes a visual story. Meera’s love for Lord Krishna can be summarized in broadly distinct phases: innocent devotion; longing; realization of romantic feelings; requisition;indifference to world; declaration of love to family; and finally, a state of mind in trance and detached from the affairs of the world.

Vandana symbolically represents each phase of Meera’s love towards Krishna by composing one song for each phase from her collection and treating them with an appropriate element from Indian classical music, to evoke respective emotions. Thus, Raag Des adorns the romantic rain song “Badara Re,” Raag Darbari emotes the declaration of love in the King’s courtroom in “Rana Ji,” and serene notes of Bhairav Thaat amplify detachment and longing in “Chala Wahi Des.” Each song tells a piece of the story from Meera Bai’s life, and the components of each song are important parts of the telling. For example, in Hindi artwork, Lord Krishna is often depicted as a cow herder, playing a flute which not only calls to the animals, but also to his thousands of gopis (milkmaids) who follow the sound of his flute from far away. Vandana uses the sound of the flute to represent the presence of Krishna. It further represents the longing for something which is simply out of reach, which Meera and other devotees can hear, but never see.

Like a Bollywood soundtrack, this recording follows the story of Meera Bai’s devotion and love for Lord Krishna, a tale ripe with blockbuster themes of resilience in struggle, and the power of love to triumph. Vandana draws on her own personal experiences and lifelong studies of vocal technique to illustrate Meera’s story with meticulously painted aural landscapes.

Indigenous Cactus Flutes, Afro-Colombian Drums, and Brass Bands: Totó La Momposina Puts Colombia’s Soul on the World Stage

2009-10-13T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

Dancing in dusty backyards to quill-tipped gaita flutes and resonant drums, the people of Colombia’s Caribbean coast villages cultivate songs and sounds that sprung from the traditions of indigenous peoples, the Spanish conquistadores who came to their lands five centuries ago, and the African slaves they soon brought with them. On the island of Mompos where the Magdelena River meets the sea, Latinized European brass and guitar flow seamlessly into Indian gaita melodies and bold vocals, all to a powerful African pulse—in an amalgam that varies from village to village.

This is the legendary Totó La Momposina’s home turf, the land and people who inspired her to carry the musical torch of five generations of ancestors, and develop their traditions, pursuing her passionate love for Colombia’s long neglected and disdained Afro-indigenous music with dogged determination in her native land, in Europe, and now worldwide. Totó’s travels will bring her to Queens, NY, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, CA and Miami this August to celebrate her latest album, La Bodega (Astar Artes; digital release August 3, 2009).

Totó has become a cosmopolitan sensation, but she first fell in love with her art thanks to musical parents and an amazing group of mentors, from village wise women singers to Afro-Colombian drum makers. Her parents, musicians from a long line of musical forbearers, left their home on the island of Mompos in search of economic opportunity in the city, but found they had profound prejudice to contend with—so they founded a music and dance ensemble. Colombia’s turbulent politics and brutal civil war eventually took the family to Bogotá.

But Totó’s musical soul was forged in the backyards and village squares of Mompos, where she learned songs from cantadoras like Ramona Ruiz, her mother’s elderly cousin in the family’s native village of Talaigua. “This is really where I got started,” Totó reflects, “at the cantadoras’ parties.” Ruiz and her fellow villagers drew in part on the legacy of coastal Indians, who make gaita flutes from cactus wood and duck quills (“Margarita”) and keep many ceremonies and traditions alive, despite intermingling with other populations and ideas that arrived on the coast.

The village cantadora does everything from healing with herbs and giving marital advice to running celebrations and leading songs. “Imagine the backyard of a thatched poor homestead. Chickens have been moved out of the way,” explains John Hollis, Totó’s manager and son-in-law. “There’s lots of dust and it’s really hot, and in the middle is a group of drummers. And around them are the cantadoras, leading the songs, and around them people stand clapping and singing the chorus.”

Another close friend and mentor was the drummer and instrument maker Batata, who was working in construction when Totó first met him. Batata and his relatives make up “the royal family of African drummers, as Totó puts it,” and he introduced Totó to the unique rhythms and the bass thumb piano-like marímbula kept alive in the northern Colombian region around Palenque de San Basilio, a town founded by escaped slaves who spoke their own language, home to songs like “Dueño de los Jardines.” From a more Indian-inspired village herself, Totó reveled in the full palette of Colombia’s African sounds Batata showed her while traveling through the region, absorbing the beats and drums (“Tembandumba”).

These two streams of tradition along the Magdelena River—the indigenous and the African—meet in what has become an imminently familiar pop sound across Latin America, the cumbia “when Indians and Africans dance together,” Totó smiles.

In urban Colombia, where the cumbia was once looked down upon, the mid-century denigration of coastal music and culture in general gradually shifted thanks in part to big dance bands that took up cumbia and other party-friendly rhythms and to singers like Totó. From there, the cumbia spread into the heart of Mexico and deep into South America. “Manita Uribe,” dedicated to Totó’s sister, is a rollicking, brass-inflected classic cumbia rich with coastal flavor.

Backyard choruses and village rhythms pushed Totó to turn away from a more well-trodden path for a coastal musician and take a gamble. She headed to Paris in hopes of launching an international career. Life in Colombia was a struggle, and Totó hoped to find a more receptive audience and new approaches in Europe, where she studied the history of dance for a year at the Sorbonne and made her first recording.

Several years passed, with Totó returning to Colombia, but eventually her big break came: a groundbreaking tour with WOMAD festivals across three continents and a popular major label album, thanks to her energetic grace, musical inventiveness, and deep commitment to her beloved traditions. Much as Susana Baca did for Afro-Peruvian music, Totó has put Afro-Colombian music on the map for global audiences and increasingly, for her compatriots back home. Young Colombians from urban backgrounds have taken a new interest in Afro-Colombian and coastal sounds, researching and playing once frowned-upon traditional songs from Bogotá to New York.

This is exactly what Totó had hoped for during the long years walking the streets of Paris or keeping the party going in Talaigua. “I make music to show to the world the expression of my soul, my heritage,” Totó muses, “the expression of what I feel without thinking in duality, without class conflict and politics. Without selfishness. True love—that is what I want to express.”

A Fierce Fight for Understanding: New Tinariwen Album Captures the Power and Grit of a Beloved, Desolate Sahara

2009-10-06T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

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.

Like the underground water table that feeds the green oasis of Tessalit, the group’s spiritual home in the relentless rock of the Southern Sahara, Tinariwen draw deep draughts from the well of Tuareg culture and their own personal experience on Imidiwan: Companions (World Village; release: October 13, 2009), recorded in the gardens of Tessalit and in the stony, beloved desolation of the surrounding desert.

After years of recording and mixing in distant Malian and European studios, Tinariwen longed to come home again for their latest album, to return sonically to the calm immediacy and signature intensity of the sound that sparked a global music phenomenon. So they tapped French engineer Jean-Paul Romann, who worked with them during their first recording sessions at a radio station in nearby Kidal.

Yet this wasn’t the same Tinariwen that had walked into the sterile confines of the sound booth nearly a decade ago. They didn’t want to go with the flow. They were older, wiser, with an increasingly refined vision of how to convey what they heard in their own music, essences of the desert’s air, sky, rocks, and silence. They knew how to engage with Romann and get just the right sound. Even if that meant jamming in the Sahara.

So Romann set up a studio in Tessalit. In the small house in the middle of the desert, anything could happen. It was a place of hospitality and a hub of spontaneous creativity at all hours: Late one dark night, guitarist and songwriter Abdallah brought by several striking female singers to record. Despite the late hour, a drowsy Romann obligingly cued up the backing tracks, and the women produced some of the delicate and powerful chorus parts that feature prominently on the album.

Tinariwen also insisted they strike out into the wilderness surrounding Tessalit to record in some of the rocky valleys and windswept plateaus dear to Tinariwen’s hearts. Following the lead of Ibrahim, Romann captured the band’s sound in places Ibrahim and other members had discovered over the course of many years playing in the desert, capturing a vibe that Romann feels is “just in the air” of this corner of the Sahara.

The air around Tessalit is rife with something akin to the blues, what Tuaregs call “assuf,” a word so complex it’s next to impossible to translate. Yet ask Tinariwen what they play, and they’ll likely reply that they play assuf. It’s more than a style of music; it’s deep personal longing, loneliness, and nostalgia that haunts the once mighty Tuareg, who have been increasingly marginalized over the past two centuries. Assuf reflects everything outside the companionship of the campfire, the eerie world of the spirits, the forlorn darkness of the desert at night.

Yet it’s the lonesome desert blues and the defiant pride of the Tuaregs that unite the diverse creative personalities of the band. Tinariwen, now with two generations of members, is a band of songwriters, each with their own take on Tuareg music, be it the rapid-fire, rap-like incantations of traditional male poetry that open the bluesy “Tenhert” or the traditionally female drum circles of the tindé that pulse behind the anthemic “Kel Tamashek.” Though longtime companions, Tinariwen’s members reveal different facets of the desert’s fertile possibilities.

Take Ibrahim, the band’s founder, creative leader, prolific songwriter, and guitar master. Though he had only seen guitars in Western movies shown at bush cinemas, he built his own as a child from wire and watercans (echoed on the album cover, a chance photo of children taken near the latest recording session). This ingenuity served him well as a refugee in a Libyan camp, where he first rallied with his companions to fight for Tuareg freedom across Mali and Niger, experiences chronicled in songs like “Imidiwan Afrik Temdam” and “Tenalle Chegret.” Now, still sleeping on occasion in a traditional tent at the center of his Tessalit compound, he pleads the case of the Tuareg youth (“Chabiba”) and puts his royalties where his mouth is, supporting a local café and other youth-oriented projects.

Or take the troubled yet wildly inspired Mohammed Ag Itlale, who goes by the nickname Japonais due to his almost Asian looks. Known as the greatest Tamashek poet of his generation, his tempestuous life has sparked deeply personal meditations like “Tamodjerazt Assis,” where he sings bitterly that regret is like a termite, eating the heart from the inside, a harsh yet elegant simile reflecting the poetic depths of traditional Tamashek verse.

Or Abdallah Ag Lamida, dubbed “Intidao,” one of the younger generation, who spends his time travelling from village to village visiting friends and family when not playing with the band. His passionate concern for social causes echoes Tinariwen’s long commitment to change and improvement in their community, and his condemnation of the widespread unemployment and apathy plaguing his people resounds on “Imazeghen N Adagh.”

Or Alhassane Ag Touhami (“Hassan”), whose fierce spirit as a guerilla fighter earned him the youthful moniker of “Lion of the Desert”—though he now scoffs modestly at this nom de guerre—and whose songs, like “Ere Tasfata Adounia,” have taken on a serious philosophical bent, contemplating the value of life and loss.

“At the end of the rebellion, we saw that violence only hurt people and spread death. But we knew we needed to make people aware of our culture. Our music was born out of suffering and that made it political,” Hassan recalls. The guerillas became guitarists, at first playing music so politically charged that simply owning a Tinariwen cassette could get fans arrested.

“Now,” Hassan continues, “we want to show the world what is here in the desert and show the Tuareg people more of the world, so that we can change and grow.” And they continue to bring the sounds of the world—from Bob Dylan to Bob Marley—to the desert, recently turning to filesharing via cell phones, Bluetooth, and battered computer speakers where they once traded worn cassettes.

For Ibrahim, companionship (a rough translation of the album title, Imidiwan) is about more than the gang of youngsters he grew up with or the close bonds he shares with Tinariwen’s musicians, with other Tuaregs who endured exile, or with the Tessalit community. “I am not just talking about the Tamashek,” Ibrahim explains. “I’m talking about Malians, people from Niger, about my friends from all over Africa. And all the friends we’ve made around the world who have helped us.”

These companions have heard the group’s message of pride, loss, and longing. On a more global scale, Tinariwen see themselves as desert-criers, messengers transmitting the true image—both good and bad—of their beloved home to those who will listen.

“You hear so many lies about the desert. People need to come and see what things are really like. And the more who come, the better,” Ibrahim smiles. Listening to the sounds of the oasis and rocky barrens that echo on Imidiwan may be the next best thing.

Aotearoa Dub: The Black Seeds Plant New Zealand’s Roots Sounds on U.S. Soil

2009-09-29T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

The Lord of the Rings put New Zealand’s beauty and creative spirit on the pop culture map. Flight of the Conchords revealed New Zealand’s unique wit. Now reggae/funk sensations The Black Seeds—Conchord friends and former band mates—are ready to take listeners one step deeper into the Other Down Under, with infectious grooves, slamming brass, and booty shaking beats on the group’s first North American release, Solid Ground (Easy Star Records; Released exclusively on iTunes September 15; everywhere else September 29, 2009), and on their debut U.S. tour with John Brown’s Body this September.

Down-and-dirty dancehall and the deep throb of dub may sound like a Kiwi novelty but New Zealand’s sparkling beaches and green, rolling hills proved the perfect place for transplanting Jamaican sounds. Reggae has been a passion for New Zealanders since the 1970s, marked by a pivotal Bob Marley concert in 1979 and the growing support and struggle for Maori cultural and political recognition in their native land of Aotearoa, the Maori name for New Zealand.

The Maoris’ battle for their rights and their land was mirrored in classic reggae’s socially conscious lyrics, and Rastafarianism resonated with young Maoris and European-heritage New Zealanders alike—New Zealand even boasts a Rastafarian MP, the Green Party’s Nandor Tanczos. The music and lifestyle flourished in the laidback island vibe of Wellington, the country’s small coastal metropolis with its village feel, vibrant arts scene, and penchant for jazz, dub, and hip hop.

“It’s all about the island sound,” laughs The Black Seeds’ guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Barnaby Weir. “Speed ukulele, church choirs, the rhythm of the Samoan log drum. After all, if you live on the island, are you going to put on AC/DC?”

Departing from the keyboard-heavy underground scene of the 1980s, today’s New Zealand reggae, thanks in part to bands like The Black Seeds, has dug into 1970’s-flavored funk and soul, and spawned popular reggae festivals, #1 hits, and multi-platinum album sales. “New Zealand reggae is not strictly reggae. We have our own sounds. It’s been a small but influential scene for a long time, and as a teen, I remember going to hear big sound systems,” Weir recalls. “We’ve been playing parties for something like fifteen years. But the scene now has hit a popular phase. It’s almost a trend in a way. Being from an underground band, I’ve watched it really come into its own over the last five years.”

Coming into its own has also meant hitting the world stage, as audiences and critics across Australasia and Europe have embraced The Black Seeds’ brand of Aotearoa dub. Along with going double-platinum in New Zealand for previous releases and earning strong reviews worldwide for Solid Ground, The Black Seeds regularly sell out shows in Europe and perform at major festivals such as Denmark’s Roskilde, London’s Lovebox, Holland’s Lowlands Festival, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as playing on popular television music shows like France’s Canal Plus. Now, North America, home to its own burgeoning home-grown reggae scene, will finally get a taste of New Zealand’s increasingly popular reggae vibes.

The Black Seeds have ridden this rising reggae tide, working out of a studio dubbed The Surgery that the band converted from a once condemned Wellington karate dojo. A maze of halls, rooms, and nooks, it’s practice space, recording studio, and funky spiritual home all in one. “The Surgery is a fairly humble but well-used studio. It’s our headquarters. It’s not flash. But it’s f*ckin’ good!” Weir exclaims.

The Surgery has incubated a shifting sound over the years that the band, tight from months of touring when they recorded Solid Ground, wryly calls “future-retro.” Strictly roots, molten bass and punchy brass collide with edgy funk beats (as on “Rotten Apple”) and what Weir calls the “spacey textures” of tracks like “Slingshot,” all with a gently optimistic Kiwi twang.

The new reggae rage in New Zealand rose from the grassroots, much like its counterpart scene in the U.S., as groups like The Black Seeds and John Brown’s Body spend years pounding the road with hardcore touring. Now with support of renegade label Easy Star—the devious masterminds behind Dub Side of the Moon, Radiodread, and Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band—unconventional reggae groups like The Black Seeds and JBB are creating a new generation of devoted fans hungry for the music and the spirit reflected in the Seeds’ name: the legendary panacea of Black Seed Oil and the roots that remind humanity of our common origin.

“We are all from the cradle of civilization in the Congo, and it all developed from there and migrated all the way to the islands of the South Pacific,” muses Weir. “We made it down here. There are African rhythms in every music, and we believe you can find the journey of the rhythm all the way down to New Zealand.”

“… soulful 70’s styled reggae … single ‘Make A Move’ is one of the snakiest reggae pop tunes on planet earth, and the subtle message of one love is woven into Barnaby Weir’s lyrics on tracks such as ‘Love Is A Radiation’ and ‘Rotten Apple.’”
--Mojo Magazine (UK)

“This New Zealand octet possesses, in spades, the funky rhythms of all good dub. It’s hard to sit still throughout Solid Ground… It boasts the rhythmic, melodic stabs of Studio One’s ska-reggae keyboard master Jackie Mittoo and the bass-driven dance-soul of funk pioneers The Meters. With an eight-member strong band, The Black Seeds can’t help but project a wall of sound …. Those who aren’t exactly smitten with the sounds of Jamaica will be hard-pressed to stop this album from growing on them.’’
--The Advocate (Australia)

“Following up the critically acclaimed Into the Dojo, which spent five weeks at number one, was never going to be easy for The Black Seeds, but the boys from Wellington have well and truly done it with Solid Ground, pure rhythm and energy blasts from the word go.’’
--The New Zealand Herald

Stone Ancestors, Forest Spirits, and Pink Floyd Across Fifteen Time Zones: Huun Huur Tu and Carmen Rizzo Distill a New Sound for Tuva’s Soul on Eternal

2009-09-22T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

The songs that echo in boreal forests and bounce off primordial peaks have a blind date in the Hollywood hills. There, carefully crafted electronica meets the horse-hair spike fiddle and stone images of the ancestors are praised to the sound of lush strings. This is no remix—this is a sonic meeting of minds between musicians on two continents, united instantly via internet (that is, if you don’t count the time it takes on rutted Russian roads to find a high-speed connection).

This is the new sound of the world’s best loved re-inventors of Tuva’s musical treasures, Huun Huur Tu, and their latest album, Eternal. Hungry for a fresh approach, the group recruited electronic musician/producer Carmen Rizzo (Niyaz, Seal, Paul Oakenfold) and composer/arranger Mark Governor, who has scored dozens of major films, for a collaboration that went deeper than a bit of beats, sampling, or mixing. Eternal digs into universals—the spiritual connection to home and the past—from two radically different points on the globe: a remote corner of the Russian Federation ringed by towering mountains where nomadism, Tibetan-style Buddhism, and shamanism still define everyday life; and the sleek high-tech recording studios of California.

Huun Huur Tu began their virtual journey by going to Berkeley’s legendary Fantasy Studio at the urging of manager Vladimir Oboronko to work with engineer John Cuniberti and make an audiophile-quality recording of their signature songs and instrumental pieces—hymns to sacred mountains, to the forest, to hunters’ prey and herds’ predators, and to the ancestors symbolized by stone monuments scattered around Tuva’s steppes. They worked hard to capture the full sonic spectrum of the horse-hair fiddle, the igil; the shoor, a vertical flute; the bowed byzanche, an erhu-like fiddle with two sets of strings.

Yet despite the spectacular sound, the group felt they could push the music further, and Oboronko began searching for a good engineer to tackle post-production and mixing. Through his friendship with Governor, he was referred to Rizzo, who had a nagging suspicion that this could be way more than a simple mixing project.

“As I listened more in depth and studied the tracks, I knew I could mix it, but it lent itself to a lot more,” Rizzo recalls. “I told them, ‘If you are open to that, I can show you.’ As I began to mix I inched myself into doing more and more and taking different liberties. And as it went on they liked more of what I did. And I kept going deeper and deeper. It evolved into a natural collaboration between Huun Huur Tu and me,” one spread over fifteen time zones deep into the Siberian taiga.

Rizzo, without any extensive expertise into Tuvan tradition but “with a lot of respect for Huun Huur Tu,” crafted soundscapes around and out of the group’s pieces, sometimes carving a new performance—“Dogee Mountain,” dedicated to Tuva’s sacred Buddhist site—was gently extracted from an old classic like “Orphaned Child,” a heartbreaking traditional lament of a motherless child. The grit and the breath captured in Huun Huur Tu’s recording expanded under Rizzo’s hands, into the sound of the country’s broad resonant valleys, dark forests, and open plains.

These slopes and plains have nurtured nomads for millennia, and the comings and goings through what is now Tuva have left an indelible mark on the diverse faces and songs of the region, which extends culturally into today’s Mongolia to the south. Tuvans recognize this link with peoples past by ritually feeding milk or fat to the ancient stone figures scattered about the remote grasslands and carved by waves of Huns and Turks moving west more than a millennium ago.

Musicians like Huun Huur Tu acknowledge this legacy, through songs like “Ancestors’ Call” which thanks Tuvans’ forbearers for passing down beautiful music. Huun Huur Tu’s long-standing member Kaigal-ool learned this music while riding in front of his herding grandfather on horseback during the summer. While they trotted along looking after the animals, Kaigal-ool’s grandfather would throatsing as his grandson felt the vibration in his body. As he began to practice for himself, his elders would pass along tips. “There was never any formal musical schooling,” Oboronko observes.

Tuvan songs often express sacred gratitude to woodland animals—imitated in songs like “Mother Taiga”—and to the steppe predators that may be merciful to a herder’s flocks. “When you are a hunter and herder, in Tuvan tradition you are always in communication with the spirits of the animal world,” Oboronko explains. “You are always required to do your part in maintaining the balance between human and animal world. If you are a hunter entering the forest, you sing to appease the spirits.”

This intense spiritual heritage was not lost on Rizzo and Governor. But what sounded perfect for an ensemble of temperamental traditional instruments playing in freer tempos and tunings presented a unique challenge to the conscientious collaborators. “When we got the tracks, one thing really concerned me. When they recorded, they recorded almost live,” Governor reflects. “There was no absolute, A440 tuning. There was no set tempo. Many other producers would have heard that and said no way. But Carmen worked within those limitations. It was amazing what he could do—and technically quite a task.”

Not content to merely slice and sample, Rizzo painstakingly lined up the rough and ready Tuvan rhythms with a click track and tuned synthesizers to work with the horsehair and wooden pegs, “something not very common these days,” Rizzo muses. In a third layer, he worked with Governor to arrange strings, and added his signature trumpet and other, Middle Eastern-inspired instrumental touches. “Carmen basically made three records,” Governor laughs. “He mixed it, reworked it, and then added live instruments.”

Yet after all this hard work, another unexpected hurdle awaited, one rarely encountered even by producers like Rizzo who work frequently with world music artists and long-distance co-creators. Would the seemingly hardcore traditional Tuvan musicians like what Rizzo was up to? And, more importantly, how would they get a chance to even hear it?

While tossing MP3 files around the globe is completely commonplace for many musicians, Huun Huur Tu had to travel four hours over barely improved roads from the Tuvan hinterlands to get to an internet café and listen to a file. It wasn’t until they met up with Oboronko in Taiwan for a performance that they got a chance to hear Rizzo’s work. “They gave it a thumbs up,” Oboronko smiles.

This warm reception of an electronica-infused re-interpretation of their beloved songs may come as a surprise to fans who imagine the group as Tuvan cowboys fresh off the steppe. But Huun Huur Tu has always played with tradition, instilling a contemporary sense of emotion and drama into Tuva’s music. Though far from the Web, the musicians grew up listening to rock bands like Pink Floyd, whose music migrated deep into Soviet Russia in the 1980s and whose sound resonates ever so gently on “Sargylarlar.” The group’s newest and youngest member, Radik Tyulyush, has further funkified its galloping fiddles and sinuous melodies, making his own traditional-style shoor flute out of salvaged PVC pipe.

What began as a blind date will end with a real-life meeting this fall: Rizzo, Governor, and Huun Huur Tu will play together live, kicking things off with a show in Perm, an industrial city in Western Siberia and site of frequent exile under the Soviets. Rizzo feels this live set-up will cement Eternal’s example as a third way for well-known world music acts, an approach that liberates musicians from pure tradition, while eschewing cheesy pop aesthetics. “This isn’t your average throatsinging record,” Rizzo notes, ”but it’s also not your typical coffee table or hip bar record. It’s a third option.”

The New Face of Cuban Soul Rock from the North: Alex Cuba’s Agua del Pozo Breaks the Language Barrier

2009-09-15T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

“He’s like Marvin Gaye, singing soul to a new generation…” – Boston Globe

"You'll fall in love with Cuba's untamed voice. Even if you don't understand a lick of what he's saying, you'll feel him." – New York Post

Mangoes sprouting in the tundra. The new face of Latin soul thriving in a hamlet a day’s drive north of Vancouver, British Columbia. This is the story of guitarist, singer, and songwriter Alex Cuba, who came into his musical own in the Canadian north and whose Cuban soul rock power trio flies in the face of conventional notions of what Latin music can be: gentle, hip, wry, and uplifting, with a twist of funk where Marvin Gaye meets Jaco Pastorius.

This new Cuban cocktail, whether served up on Agua del Pozo, Cuba’s second album now finally available on CD with two new bonus tracks, or on his upcoming North American tour, has gone to the heads of fans from Ottawa—where a listener thanked Cuba for preventing her from taking her life—to Osaka, where Cuba was blown away by the audience response on his recent first Japanese tour.

It’s won him the admiration of artists like Nelly Furtado, whose Spanish-language debut out in mid-September features a title track duet written by and performed with Cuba, as well as a distribution deal with EMI, critical acclaim, and top spots on iTunes and other charts.

But for the jovial artist with the awesome Afro, it’s all about the music and what it can accomplish. “I am a very spiritual dude,” Cuba smiles, “when it comes to music and things to say about life. On songs like the new track on the album ‘En Armonia,’ I am talking about how to find harmony in life.”

Cuba’s songs break the language barrier on a regular basis, wooing fans who might otherwise have limited interest in Latin or Cuban music and who don’t speak Spanish. “It always blows me away to see that,” Cuba notes. “More and more it’s happening that I am going to places like Memphis, where I played two months ago, and I see people in the crowd singing the words. People are really dealing with the lyrical content of my music” even if only through translations.

Cuba’s music itself and his less-is-more approach are a big part of the chemistry, and the reason a Cuban immigrant in the Canadian backwoods is the new and unconventional face of Latin music. “I get people telling me that my music really helped them get up in the morning. When somebody looks into your eyes and says your music saved their life because they were really depressed or something, that gets me totally excited and amazed.” Cuba was deeply moved recently when a woman approached him after a show in Ottawa and let him know that the vibe in his songs had helped her reconsider committing suicide one bitter day, even though she didn’t understand the words.

This chemistry got the attention of pop diva Nelly Furtado, who was contemplating a Spanish album and looking for just the right lyrical and musical feel. Her guitarist introduced her to Cuba’s music and unmistakable style, and they hit it off instantly. “I can write with her any day any time. She feels the same,” explains Cuba, whose sweet voice is different than what is typically expected in most Cuban music where vocals must compete with a 16-piece band. “Nelly told me one night, ‘I like your vibe! You know, your writing is different and that’s what I like in music.’ She could work with anyone in the world. But that’s what Canada has done to me, where it’s unique and good to be different. It’s starting to manifest itself as my music evolves.”

Cuba’s Canadian evolution transformed him, a kid from a small town near Havana, into a fearless independent musician stringing his beloved Gibson guitars with the heaviest, bassiest steel strings (which he plays without a pick). “When I went to Canada, I found this place very open, a new country, in many ways,” Cuba reflects. “Canadians will embrace any form of art, as long as it’s natural or honest. So I found a lot of space here to be myself.”

Being himself meant finding new ways to play with the musical icons of his new-found home, as well as finding his own Cuban-inflected voice. So Cuba experimented with something thoroughly unexpected for a hip Latin artist: a Spanish cover of a Canadian classic by country rock band Blue Rodeo. “I first heard it when I came to Canada in 1996 and my first son Daniel was just about to be born. I loved it from the first listen, even though I didn’t understand what I was hearing. Then I learned that the band is an iconic band in Canada that speaks to all Canadians. So I did it in Spanish. It’s a bit like taking the Canadian citizenship test,” Cuba laughs, “and now I am more Canadian than I was before.” The song, “Arrepentido” (“Bad Timing”) was released exclusively through iTunes and can be heard on the upcoming tour.

Leaping over boundaries has become second nature for Cuba, who revels in critical comparisons to soul stars like Marvin Gaye, indie darlings like John Mayer, and Latin cross-cultural masters like Carlos Santana. This hit home several years ago during one particularly challenging concert in New York, when he was faced with a crowd angry that he spoke in English, not Spanish between songs. Cuba quit the stage in disgust, had a falling out with his first label, and gained a sudden stroke of insight: He had to do his own thing, no matter what.

“It was a very important moment,” Cuba recalls. “It told me what I should do with my music. I need to go to the trouble of finding the people who get my point.” Though he released Agua del Pozo digitally last year to coincide with critically acclaimed tours, and he toyed with offers from major labels, for the physical release, he waited until the stars aligned to match his independent spirit.

“Harmony is all of us together,” concludes Cuba. “That’s what I want my music to do no matter what. If I have to go on my own to reach that; I do it on my own. I team up with people who really get it. I sing to people who feel what I am doing.”

Milestones in the Musical Life of Alex Cuba:

    * #1 Album on iTunes US Tropical (Agua del Pozo), #1 Album on iTunes US Alternativo (Live   From Soho), #3 iTunes US Alternativo Song Download ("Si Pero No");
    * Two Juno Awards (Canada’s Grammy) for Best World Music Album in 2006 and 2008
    * Duet with Nelly Furtado, “Mi Plan,” out on iTunes August 11, to be followed by co-written singles from Furtado’s upcoming Spanish debut (September 15);
    * Toured Japan, Europe, and other new corners of the globe to rave response;
    * Sold out shows from New York to Cali before Agua del Pozo dropped;
    * Well-received showcases at SXSW, CMW, WOMEX, and the Latin Alternative Music Conference;
    * Strong, international online fan community;
    * Full length recordings: Humo De Tabaco (2005), Live From Soho (Solo - iTunes 2008), Agua Del Pozo (Current)

From Iraqi Maqam to Robert Johnson: Middle Eastern Band Salaam Creates a New American Sound

2009-09-08T00:01:00-04:00

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

Suave Saudis in small-town America and belly-dancing Hoosier housewives. Trumpets and pianos that take on quarter tones. Iraqi tunes that channel the ghosts of American bluesmen. A good old family band, but with a serious series of twists.

Welcome to the world of Salaam, the brainchild of a Chicago-born Iraqi-American on a tireless quest for her roots, a dedicated spouse who dove merrily into the odd meters of the Middle East, and an eccentric cast of musicians passing through the funky college town of Bloomington, Indiana. After years of committed research and practice of strictly traditional forms like Iraq’s endangered maqam, violinist and spike fiddle player Dena El Saffar, percussionist Tim Moore, trumpeter and santoor-player (hammered dulcimer) Amir ElSaffar, and Turkish pianist and qanun-player Hakan Toker play fast and free with the musical past of the Arabic and Turkish world on Salaam.

“When we rehearse traditional Iraqi music, it takes so much concentration and fine tuning of minute details. It’s really serious,” explains Dena El Saffar, who along with brother Amir, became active performers of maqam. This rich and storied body of music suffered a blow when Egyptian cinema emerged, British occupation took its toll, and Jews—the leading instrumentalists in Iraq—were deported to Israel. “The great thing about Salaam, after you learn that serious classical stuff, is that you can relax and have fun. And see what happens. We can be playful, more willing to introduce novel ideas” to everything from Iraqi popular songs (“Hadha Mu Insaaf Minnek” & “Gulli Ya Hilw”) to 17th-century Ottoman court music (“Arazbar Peşrevi”) to originals inspired by the lush heyday of Egyptian orchestras (“Layla,” written by Dena).

These novel ideas spring from days of improvising together, and from unexpected moments in unexpected places. A wild gig at a smoky hard-drinking bar in Terre Haute, Indiana spurred the unique arrangement of the Iraqi folk song “Gulli Ya Hilw,” as the crowd—which included a dapper Saudi engineering student who bore an eerie resemblance to Prince and scions of the town’s long-established Lebanese family—went nuts for the driving rock drum set backing the traditional, lovelorn vocals and started a sing-along.

An unusual instrument—unusual for Middle Eastern music, that is—inspired Salaam’s version of another romantic song Iraqis know and love, “Hadha Mu Insaaf Minnek.” “We wanted to make it sound like we were sitting around a campfire on a beach,” laughs Moore, who is married to Dena. “Amir began experimenting with a guitar he had borrowed, and I was playing the dumbek, but trying to channel the bongos.” As ElSaffar strummed, he summoned up an old love affair with Robert Johnson recordings and wound up creating “a Bluesy guitar intro with an Iraqi beat.”

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.

Amir and Dena’s Iraqi father raised them on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, Gershwin, and the Blues Brothers, but was reluctant at times to share his heritage. Dena’s search for a deeper connection with her ancestral roots led her as a young woman to Middle Eastern music, an obsession soon shared by Amir. Both were trained in Western classical music, and both were soon egging the other on, traveling overseas to find teachers who could further open up the new landscape they sensed on scratchy archival recordings or mysterious cassettes by Egyptians who could effortlessly squeeze gorgeous quarter tone scales out of battered trumpets.

“My first interest in Arabic music came when I was 19 when Dena played me a recording, a two-minute free rhythm improv, and I couldn’t tell what instrument it was,” recalls Amir, who is a critically-acclaimed jazz trumpeter in New York City. “I asked her, ‘What is that?’ She said, ‘That’s a trumpet.’ I was blown away by it. Miles Davis was an epiphany moment. Egypt’s Sami El Bably was another one.”

Epiphany led to epiphany, and eventually to Iraq. Soon Dena, Amir, and Moore became filled with a purpose beyond just playing Middle Eastern music and passionately began to set out to master the rapidly disappearing Iraqi maqam in all its complex, multi-faith, and regionally diverse glory. “Maqam was the music of any major occasion, even religious ones in Iraq’s mosques, synagogues, and churches. The background for all music in Iraq is maqam, whether it’s religious or popular,” explains Amir.

Salaam does not strictly pursue the spirit of pure maqam—that’s the goal of the trio’s other group, Safaafir, which performed this spring in an international maqam festival in Baku, Azerbaijan. Salaam manages to honor tradition by both finding the play between notes and keeping the core of the music all in the family, albeit with a twist. Getting the microtones at the heart of most Middle Eastern scales with Western instruments like the trumpet may seem like a lost cause. But Amir, thanks to a few tricks with the tuning slide, can make an ordinary trumpet move effortlessly between bluesy solos and perfect Middle Eastern melody.

And Toker, who resides in Istanbul and dug into scientific music theory treatises back home, turns the least likely candidate for quarter tone success, the piano, into a striking part of Salaam’s sound on pieces like “Yugrug.” “Hakan is a mad genius of sorts and has devised this amazing strategy for supporting microtones while playing the piano, some principle based on the Pythagorean Theorem and the stacking of fourths,” Dena jokes. “He chooses the most interesting things to play way down in the lower register that don’t clash.”

“When I met Salaam, I had to face a paradoxical fact,” says Toker. “Here I was, a born-and-raised Middle Easterner who had devoted his life to Western music; and here they were, born-and-raised Americans who had devoted their lives to Middle Eastern Music. I couldn't handle the fact that these people had a handle on my culture’s music, more than I did! They were playing traditional instruments, capable of microtones, whereas my instrument wasn't, so I picked-up the qanun, and my life changed... along with it, my view of the East and the West!”

The family aspect once common to many Iraqi and other Middle Eastern ensembles is equally transformed by Salaam. Women did not play instruments like the joza (spike fiddle) traditionally—at least not in public performances—making a brother-sister or husband-wife team a new take on old roots. “We have a psychic connection,” Dena smiles, “and can intuit what the other is about to do.”

Beyond the family circle, Salaam has found a way to draw on the unexpectedly cosmopolitan and musically talented resources of their local community in Bloomington, Indiana. People like Toker, who first came to town to attend the local conservatory for classical piano, but soon immersed himself in local performance art and learning the Turkish qanun (zither), or the scholar visiting the local university from Tunisia who left behind the love song “Retik.”

But there is also a pool of enthusiastic local rock and folk musicians eager to enter the world of Middle Eastern music. While these musicians may not have the dedicated focus of the ElSaffars or Moore, they often uncover new approaches, as rock bassist John Orie Stith did in his funky line for “Chobi Party,” a jam based on an infectious and hard-driving Iraqi dance beat. “It is fun to bring these skilled musicians into the fold while creating enough space to highlight their strengths,” reflects Dena, who was recruited for Youssou N’Dour’s string section on a recent tour of his “Egypt” project.

Though it has taken 15 years, Dena’s persistence and dedication has paid off—from creating a Middle Eastern ensemble in a small Indiana town when there were no Arabic musicians to draw on, from persevering through a rotating door of college-town transient sidemen, to memorizing and transcribing recordings of Om Kalthoum and Sabah Fakhri, to traveling the world in search of maestros and paid gigs. With the convergence of a dedicated percussionist husband, a “mad genius” from Turkey, and a brother who traveled as far as Iraq to unearth maqam techniques, Salaam has come into its own sound.

“We’re not trying to be a band that just recites this music,” Moore muses. “We want to add our own fingerprint, our own identity into it. If we feel like we can do something new or interesting to a song, then we are more likely to embrace that.”