World Music News Wire

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

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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.

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“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

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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”

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“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

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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.”

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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

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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.”

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“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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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.

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“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.

Heartstrings: Medieval Lutes, Twilit Clubs, and Deep Romance Ring True on Cuban Troubadour David Álvarez’s Clandestino

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

David Álvarez sings like a bard of courtly love, locked in a bittersweet court and spark with the tempestuous Lady Love on the streets of Manzanillo. One of Cuba’s young lights, he can evoke the sunny sweetness and lush longing, the Spanish and African past, that runs deep in Cuba’s songs, yet add a rush and pulse that speak of a young, vibrant musical mind.

On Clandestino, Alvarez weaves a tale of love lost, questioned, and savored from the strong Mediterranean threads that run through his native city of Manzanillo’s song traditions, to the gentle thrum of the laúd, the Cuban country answer to the ancient lute of Iberia.

With legendary Cuban players (Irakere’s sax man Alfred Thompson; tres master Pancho Amat; Buena Vista Social Club’s Roldán Carballoso Gomez) rounding out his ensemble of top performers, with a rising cry or a delicate whispering tremolo, with soft-spoken percussion and dramatic musicianship, Álvarez urges love to find a way though doubt and distress.

“For me, composing songs is the way to rescue those beautiful moments, when life is lived without prejudices and big questions are asked with the innocent belief that everything is possible,” smiles Álvarez. “This album is a return to those places and times that, in my short life, I turn to regularly, places that give me hopeful energy and endless inspiration.”

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Some of the places that inspired Álvarez as he began imagining his long-standing dream for the album lie in Manzanillo, the home of Cuba’s influential trova song style. He would linger around jukeboxes in old clubs, while his dad played him chestnuts from his youth. He would go to dance parties and bars that hadn’t changed a lick from the 1940s. He would hang out all night and busk in the city’s well-loved parks.

“Trova was a very vibrant scene, both the old and new styles, when I was young in Manzanillo,” Álvarez recalls fondly. “I memorized a lot of the repertoire I heard then.”

Yet like many young Cuban musicians, Álvarez wanted to find new angles and means of expression within the time-honored traditions of his home. Enter the revered icon of trova innovation, Pedro Luis Ferrer, who mentored Álvarez as a member of his group. From the indomitable, outspoken Ferrer, Álvarez notes, “I learned not to make concessions when it came to making good art and the importance of consistency in my thinking. I learned to remember that music is the vehicle to bring my thoughts and feelings to light and that music should be a beautiful gift for those who listen.”

Álvarez began to find his own voice, working with fellow musicians and friends from Ferrer’s circle and creating their own, soon very hot group, Juego de Manos. Now in the original compositions on Clandestino, Álvarez pairs his youthful energy with an uncanny ability to channel the twilit spirit of his favorite haunts and Cuba’s rural campesino traditions.

To bring the right feel to this diverse sweep of romantic songs, Álvarez invited new collaborators from the ranks of legendary Cuban bands to join his core group. He knew he needed to add (among other instruments) the laúd, an instrument traditionally associated with country styles and with ancient ties to the Canary Islands and Spain. An instrument that sings in the hands of Buena Vista Social Club’s Roldán Carballoso Gomez.

“To me, there is not a more transparent and sweeter instrument than the laúd,” Álvarez explains. “It is one of the central timbres in Cuban country music, though it doesn’t get used in the usual way in these songs. Instead of the typical 3/4 or 6/8 rhythms, its voice brings to the album the spirit of the tonada guajira, a Cuban music style from the countryside closer to Spanish music than African. It imparts a Mediterranean flavor and the feelings of Medieval and Baroque music, where its past lies.” This history finds fresh form as the laúd and guitar join forces on “La Tarde,” a wistful ode to the evening, when the muse often comes closest.

Yet Álvarez combines the gentle sweetness of strings with a bold pan-Latin flair, be it in the dramatic, almost cinematic opening of ”El Alma” or the fire-and-ice of piano and brass on “Distancia.” He hints at the pulse of Andean charango, and calls to Cuba’s African spiritual heritage in “Musa del Río,” beckoning the muse-like orisha of rivers to enrich his creative efforts.

Inspired by Latin artists from Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa to Chile’s Victor Jara, Álvarez notes, “When their music meet the varied roots that my little island feeds me with, it sparks songs and also deeply informs the person I am,” a joyful troubadour, turning nostalgic street corner sounds into artful Latin hymns to love’s complexities.

Crazy With Joy: Henry Cole & the Afro-Beat Collective Find An Age-Old Mestizo Heart and Fresh Jazz Flash in Afrobeat on Roots Before Branches

http://www.worldmusicwire.com

Quicksilver Puerto Rican drummer Henry Cole knows how Wayne Shorter might have jammed with Fela Kuti. Or what Miles would have done if only he’d gone Afro-Caribbean with his rock-jazz hybrids. He hears how jazz can grab the rootsy sounds of bomba, plena, and Cuban rumba, and sparkle with electro sheen and rock energy.

He hears it, because these sonic roots have been intertwining in Puerto Rico for hundreds of years. “If I had been a Puerto Rican musician playing a few centuries ago, I would have had the same kinds of influences: African, indigenous, European,” Cole explains. “They’ve come together to create mestizo sounds forever, and I’m just carrying that forward.”

Cole & the Afro-Beat Collective on Roots Before Branches, a gently autobiographical yet firmly funky vision that channels the joie-de-vivre of Cole’s home scene in Puerto Rico and the bright sophistication of New York’s jazz heights. Equally able to jam with a hip hop crew or jazz masters, Cole harnesses his well-honed rhythmic power and his love of catchy, evocative melodies to create a deep, wide-ranging vision of unity, balance, and Afro-Caribbean creativity.

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One night, the bold beat that shook up Lagos came home to Puerto Rico.

Cole had reveled in the diverse musical sounds of his fellow Puerto Rican musicians playing in the small clubs and bars of San Juan’s historic heart. He had played with the scene’s many vibrant and varied figures, often dashing from an early evening jazz gig to a rock show right across the street. Some of his artist friends did spoken word. Some rapped. Some played rock en Español. Some were hot international jazz performers—MacArthur Fellow saxophonist Miguel Zenón, Grammy award winning sax player David Sánchez—and some were old-school Latin roots musicians and salsa masters.

How could Cole find something that would let them all get down?

The solution: Afrobeat and the masterful grooves of Fela Kuti. “Miguel and I started doing jam sessions in San Juan at Christmas with a trio. It was great, but I missed all these other elements, like that salsa energy,” Cole recalls. “But when I heard Fela, I was like ‘Wow, this is it!’ He had tradition, he had the rock vibe, he had solos, and a really intense energy. The songs were relatively simple and you didn’t need a big rehearsal. I got to Puerto Rico with a chart, called my friends, and played. It was the perfect musical vehicle, but we adapted it to the island, with local percussionists and a poet instead of a singer.”

This cross-pollination grooves hard on tracks like “Trabájala,” where rap poet Hérmes Ayala rocks the mic with a pointed call to action, alongside Zenón’s wailing beauty of a sax solo. Or the organ-powered “Solo dos veces,” that puts the Cole’s spitfire drums play off of Afro-funky horn lines. He keeps all the elements in balance, thanks to a keen organic sense of timing and melody. For Cole, one pulse beats through it all: There’s a high voice, a low voice—and a language that moves everyone.

“In many traditions, the drum that speaks, that improvises, usually has a high and a low sound. You have two sounds in Puerto Rican plena, playing the language of the drum. The traditional players don’t think about it in terms of technique; they think about language,” Cole explains. “I wanted to learn the language from the main traditional sources and then orchestrate it from there.”

Like a language, the album evolved over years, as Cole dug into indie rock (“Una para Isabel”), electronic music (“Comienzo,” “Uncovered Fears”), and jazz classics—he imagined a post-bop horn player fronting Fela’s band, or an Afro-Caribbean version of Bitches Brew—or simply in a springing pulse that sparked a whole melody in his inner ear.

Inspiration found Cole as he reflected on his childhood in Mayaguëz, the heartland of Puerto Rican plena, where at age nine he first fell in love with the drums and lost his mother (“Aurea V.” is a dreamy, bittersweet tribute to her). He questioned his path as a pro musician breaking into the New York scene (“To believe without seeing”) and his relationships (“No eres tu, soy yo”). He reveled in love and wrestled with his own mortality. The emotional turmoil led to stirring music, melodies Cole devised simply to satisfy and engage—to move beyond the sometimes heady intellectual world of jazz.

“I put a lot of energy into coming up with something that would express how I was feeling,” Cole reflects. “I imagine a group on the stage and the audience. And I think, ‘What can I offer to you, that will make me happy and you happy? What will bring us together and speak to all of us?’”

Cole brought highly versatile kindred spirits together in the studio in Puerto Rico and in New York: Zenón and Sánchez, the New Orleans-inspired post-bop tenor sax of John Ellis, Tito Puente trumpet man Piro Rodríguez, salsa master Cheito Quiñone (Arturo Sandoval, Julio Eglesias), and nimble, raw-edged guitarist Adam Rogers (Cassandra Wilson, John Zorn, Paul Simon).

Yet the tracks came together in a spirit of play, like the upbeat jam sessions in San Juan, capturing the sheer delight of making music that grooves. “In Puerto Rico, there’s a spirit of humility toward playing music, a real pleasure in the music,” Cole notes. “You can go crazy with joy and scream and play for fun. It’s a platform to be relaxed and happy. You play what you want, and you go back to the roots of playing, without attachments.”