World Music News Wire

Aphrodesia’s Precious Commodity Upsets the Afrobeat Orthodoxy: East Coast-West Coast Transfusion of the New Afrobeat Generation

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Aphrodesia isn’t afraid to turn everything on its head and send it through the distortion pedals of their own sensibility. A slang term for Shanghai hookers becomes a tribute to women’s value; wall-shaking amps create the perfect distortion for an age-old lamellophone; a cross-continent move spells inspiration not band demise; and a new-found freedom turns dedicated Afrobeat orthodoxy into free-wheeling fusion.

 Precious Commodity maps how far the high-energy eleven-piece Bay Area band has traveled from Afrobeat worshipers to innovative and mature collective, and points to a radical new direction for North America’s burgeoning Afrobeat scene. Where once careful attention to the tradition sparked by Nigeria’s Fela Kuti reigned supreme, now musicians are madly pursuing their own visions for the music—and creating traditions of their own.

Groups from Aphrodesia to Nomo to Antibalas side project Ocote Soul Sound are reclaiming Afrobeat’s outspoken political platform and transforming it into intimate personal statements and more subtle critiques and explorations of American life. “We learned the term ‘Special Girl’ from a friend who had just returned from Shanghai on business,” explains singer and songwriter Lara Maykovich. “He was offered, a special girl, a prostitute. The song is the story of this trans-continental sex trade, a kind of mockery of this old game where man thinks he is winning.  Power and money are evidently not the final quench. The thirst is satisfied by a more precious commodity. Sex, our most powerful possession and that which connects us to the unstoppable nature that man will never control. We began to think about the West's misconceptions on what is of value. The fear-driven mass of consumption, our denial of death that obstructs us from seeing what is truly precious.”

The personal approach also translates into new musical dimensions. “Sonically, our music has become much more varied than in the past. And this album broadens and strengthens what we have been building on,” recounts Aphrodesia bassist and songwriter Ezra Gale. “It was a conscious decision, really getting more creative and going for different sounds, discovering a much more diverse palette of instruments and sonic surprises.”

The group’s palette has expanded to include studio high jinks and the once verboten guitar solo. Inspired by Konono No. 1’s unwittingly revolutionary rethinking of the thumb piano, Gale took a musical idea that came to him while strolling through the overjoyed Mission District on Obama’s election, had singer Lara Maykovich play an mbira she had picked up in Zimbabwe, and then ran it through a huge bass cabinet and three guitar amps cranked so loud the studio’s walls shook (“November 5 I & II”).

“For a long time we have had two guitar players, but a rule of no guitar solos,” Gale notes. “There’s just no room for them in Afrobeat’s interlocking guitar parts, and we wanted to respect the tradition.” The longing to respect the music they loved took the band a few years ago on a wild bus tour across Togo, Benin, and Nigeria in a dizzying series of car chases, cassette bribes, and finally, an unforgettably warm reception at Afrobeat heir apparent Femi Kuti’s Lagos club. The experience solidified Aphrodesia’s sound, built on members’ past sojourns in Ghana and Cuba, that melded Afrobeat and Yoruba chants to the orisha spirits (“Ayala” and “Caminando”).

“As lyricists we carefully consider our invocations and intentionally apply them to our current political world struggles and our own fractured American reality,” explains Maykovich. “Since the voice of suffering is universal and passion is interchangeable, we don’t consider this a borrowed tradition. It’s one of the many traditions of mystery spiritual being have originated from.”

With their African mecca behind them, the band was ready to take the next step, which included lifting the long-standing guitar solo ban. “It was really funny: We played this one gig a redneck bar in woods near Santa Cruz, and the sound guy, as he was packing up, said ‘I ain’t never seen a band with two guitarists and no guitar solos.’ On this album we have three, and they are all awesome,” Gale smiles. “To us, it was just another symptom of us opening up and looking for different things.” Things like a noise guitar solo jolting through the pop smoothness of “Think/Suffer” where guitarist Mike Abraham strives to “avoid any and all notes,” Gale laughs.

Aphrodesia has expanded geographically as well as musically, with several members relocating from the Bay Area to New York. The move had an unexpected effect: Instead of undermining the band’s work, they found that it opened up their music to new post-production approaches and a new Big Apple vibe. “We had something we haven’t had before, a diversity of feedback and viewpoints in the studio, because in New York, all these talented people will just stop by the studio and listen,” people like Gale’s friends from the Blue Man Group who gave Gale input on several tracks. “It’s a product of working somewhere where you have to drive like California versus New York, where you walk down the block and bump into people,” Gale muses. The change of scene and long-distance music making—an amazingly seamless process thanks to MP3s—has brought Aphrodesia’s creativity into sharp focus.

This creativity still embraces the grooves that moved Aphrodesia from day one. Straight-up Afrobeat goodness overflows on “Merit Badge,” a tribute to the band’s humorous praise of members who receive imaginary merit badges for figuring out how to fix the tour bus or managing to give a stellar performance in the throes of severe illness. “Friday Night,” a palm wine song of frustrated love, came to the band from Obuobi Ashuog, the guitarist for Ghanaian friends Kusun, who takes a solo on the track.

Yet old orthodoxy and new spins merge on Precious Commodity. The funk and r&b call to wake up to the world around you, “Make Up Your Mind,” mixes Yoruba and Afro-Cuban chants with English lyrics and a guitar solo run through a whirling Leslie speaker salvaged from a Hammond organ. “By the Iron” winks at prog rock by adding lush strings to a Malian song and English incantation interwoven by Maykovich.

Aphrodesia’s new twist on a beloved approach shines brightest on the intro and outro tracks—“November 5”—that frame the album and feature the distorted mbira. The reworking of the track and its transformation in the New York studio where Gale put the finishing touches on the album represent a meaningful departure for the group. “I’m fascinated by the prospect that a song is not necessarily finished when it’s played and recorded. Aphrodesia has been more of a straight-ahead band, but this track is a different way to use the studio, a different way to think about recorded music that’s all around us now,” Gale reflects.

“I think because we are a younger white band, we felt like we needed to prove ourselves. We really wanted to do things right and give the music respect, and going to Africa was part of that,” explains Gale. “We feel like we have done that, though of course we’re always learning. But there is a feeling that we have gone down that path of trying to do everything authentically, now it’s time to embrace our own sound.”

The Divine on the Dancefloor, the Breath in the Beat: Sufi-Inspired Turkish Master Omar Faruk Tekbilek Remixed for Rare Elements

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The divine is everywhere, in the breath of a reed flute, the clank and hum of machines, or the slammin’ beats of an electronic track. This is Turkish virtuoso Omar Faruk Tekbilek’s message, and he hears it everywhere.

When Tekbilek came to the USA to build upon his successful music career back home, he was faced with the task of supporting his family in a country where he did not know the customs or language. For 17 years, he operated a loud and hot steam press in a clothing factory. At first depressed by this fact, one day Tekbilek had a revelation: if he had to put his dreams to the side and work this difficult job, he would make the best of it. The next day he heard a symphony in the factory machines. Suddenly the steam press sounded like a saxophone. “The hum was so loud around me, there was music around me. I had never heard it before because my mind had been away, not there where I was, where I had been for months. When I accepted the situation, I cried for joy,” Tekbilek recalls.

Tekbilek found a new delight in the factory, a revelatory remix of everyday sounds. Now new sides of Tekbilek’s Sufi-inspired songs and compositions jump out on Rare Elements: Omar Faruk Tekbilek (5 Points Records; June 9, 2009), the second installment in the Rare Elements series of musical meetings between global master musicians and the world’s most creative remixers: Junior Sanchez, Tommie Sunshine, Flosstradamus, Amon Tobin, Albert Castillo, Nickodemus and Zeb, Kodomo, Joe Claussell, Cheb i Sabbah, and Jordan Lieb.

For Tekbilek, music has four corners: the mystical, inspired by his deep Sufi faith; the folkloric; the romantic and personal; and the contemporary that unites all the other elements with modern instruments and current sounds to form a new palette. These elements reflect facets of love—love of the creator, adoration of a lover, or the rootsy joie de vivre of a traditional Turkish tune—in songs like “Sufi,” about the name of God sounding in every breath, or “Selemet,” an Arabic tune transformed into a loving ode to Tekbilek’s wife.

A prodigy, Tekbilek’s talent lay beyond his innate skill as a musician. It flowed from his spirit. One hot summer day in his native town of Adana, “my mother opened the door and jumped when she saw me inside playing my flute. She felt sorry for me, as I was inside, and told me to go out and play,” Tekbilek smiles. “I told her not to worry, that I was having fun. I was deep in trance. I was also going to school to become a cleric, an imam. I realized then that, when I was playing, I was in the same state of mind as when I was praying.”

Tekbilek soon mastered the nay, the traditional end-blown bamboo flute whose seven holes mirror the head’s seven orifices, the baglama lute, and a bevy of percussion instruments. “The great joy of my life is to play all instruments on a song,” Tekbilek laughs. As a young man, he moved to Istanbul, explored Western styles, became a popular studio musician, and picked up knowledge and wisdom from the head nay player of the Mevlevi Sufi order, before eventually landing in upstate New York, where he worked in a clothing factory as he rebuilt his musical career from scratch.

Now an established performer regularly touring the world, the once skeptical Tekbilek began to embrace the remix project as a way of reaching out “to a different dimension, a different mentality,” and offering new listeners “a taste of the timbre, a taste of the melody” that would leave them longing for more. It might seem an uneasy union: A Turkish musician who plumbed the sacred nature sound, entranced by a homemade flute at the tender age of 12, and a posse of producers with laptops who hail from New York to Algeria to Brazil.

But behind Tekbelik’s nimble nay, Sufi chants, or Turkish folk melodies is a pulse that unites his work with the best of dancefloor grooves. “Whatever instrument you are playing, you are percussionist in a sense,” Tekbilek explains. “Because in all spiritualities, it is the same. If there is no stroke, there is no sound. The breath hits bamboo, the bow hits the violin, and the pick hits the bouzouki.” Or the needle hits the record, the beat kicks in, and people begin to move.

Corners of the club scene have always reveled in the close connection between dance and trance, between rhythm and transcendence, something which Sufi poet Rumi discovered in a marketplace as he spun to the sound of a goldsmith’s hammer, and the whirling dervishes have explored ever since. “When you spin, suddenly you are everywhere,” Tekbilek reflects. “Your body-mind connection becomes very apparent. It goes out of control and your awareness of mind becomes more dominant. You become more aware of the breath. It’s an act of meditation.”

DJs are always hungry for new and exotic sounds, eager to toss them into the mix, but Tekbilek insisted that the melodies and timbres of his music be more than just world music window dressing. Instead, he dialogued with remixers to keep the spirit of his work alive. When he first heard the remix for “Whirling,” a medley of traditional Sufi songs, he was surprised that the DJs had decided to leave out the nay part and asked that they reincorporate it into the track. “Without the nay, there is no soul,” Tekbilek explains. The producers kindly obliged.

Despite the occasional bumps in the remix road, Tekbilek is bemused, appreciating the chance to get his message out in dancefloor-friendly form. “This is an opportunity to offer the younger generation phrases, words, rather than whole thing all at once. This is still good. It’s a connection with music lovers,” Tekbilek exclaims. “I am after taste, soul, and feeling. One note, but with feeling.”

The Mountains Next Door: Lily Storm’s Soaring Tryst with the Village Sound

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Twilight falls. Mist gathers in the hollows, as a bird flies to warn a girl of her lover's death. A woman croons to her baby, wrapping it in protective leaves. In the dark, a dreamscape emerges. These shadowed fates and tales possess Lily Storm’s debut album If I Had a Key to the Dawn, an intimate flight through the lost loves, hidden meanings, and twining melodies passed down for generations in the lands east of the Danube.

Lily Storm can’t get away from the haunting soul of these songs from the East. “If it weren’t for these traditional songs, I wouldn’t be a musician,” reflects Storm, a member of an emerging generation of musicians who learned to navigate this sonic world by soaking up recordings from far off lands in the privacy of their rooms, undaunted by walls and cultural boundaries.

Drawing from diverse traditions that cover a broad area from Russia and Ukraine south to Greece, from Central Europe to the steppe-lands of Asia, Storm's distinctive voice and passionate delivery impart a sweeping, dreamlike vision, cohesive and personal.

When Storm began recording, she was aiming for “something light and nostalgic, a sort of summer café feel,” she smiles -- a musical doorway for friends and family. But as Storm worked in the studio, the songs would not relinquish their eerie origins. What started as a side project ended up engrossing Storm for three full years, as she sought to convey the essence of the ancient music.

“The very act of singing is like releasing a bird that has to make its way in the world,” Storm explains. “I imagine the voice journeying through various dark, surreal landscapes. With time I realized how personal an expression it had become. It led to a deeper, more sorrowful place.”

Almost in spite of itself, a new vision emerged. A Ukrainian lullaby, “Sleep, Child,” begins the journey. “Often you think of a lullaby as an ending, but I knew I wanted this song as the first track.” says Storm. “I realized I was thinking about the album as a sequence of dreams: the lullaby puts you to sleep at the beginning, and the last song wakes you up again.” Instead of basking in the noontime sun, Storm’s songs drift slowly from a soothing yet eerie nightfall to a fragile and contemplative dawn, captured in the final track “The Swallow is Flying,” whose Czech lyrics inspired the album title.

Storm fell into singing just as gradually and unexpectedly as she stumbled across the heart of her album. “I never intended to be a singer. I wanted to go into math and physics,” Storm muses. “My path to this music was largely as a teenager browsing through the entire CD collection at the local public library in Tacoma, Washington. I just drifted over and checked things out, without really understanding why.”

The recordings had a deep and powerful effect on her. She carried favorite tunes (“Love, Love” and “Green Leaf of a Pear Tree”) with her for more than a decade before attempting to sing them. At first listening was a private pastime, but soon Storm found others similarly moved and enchanted, and joined the San Francisco-based vocal group Kitka, performing around the US and Eastern Europe. In Bulgaria, she received instruction and encouragement from the director and soloists of the national Bulgarian radio choir, Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares. “I had done my best to sing in a way that felt natural, and working with them validated many of my instincts. But it also allowed me to fine-tune, and to correct some errors. It was a wonderful experience.”

Like many young record-raiders and wild-eyed musical alchemists bent on reforging tradition—from Balkan Beat Box to Slavic Soul Party to Beirut—Storm felt a new energy bursting from the ancient songs, one relevant to her personal experience. This new blood radically alters the Balkan and Eastern European music scene. “For a long time, Eastern European music was associated with the Iron Curtain. There were political overtones.” Storm notes. “I have nothing against that but it's not where I'm coming from. You also get another message in popular culture, with characters like Borat. I'm really sensitive to that: ‘Oh those quaint villagers.’ I think the younger generation of musicians, whether consciously or not, see it as part of humanity’s heritage in a wider way. People lived in villages for an awfully long time all over the world and developed really rich, beautiful music. There is something gripping about that village sound.”

Gathering songs is also a deeply personal endeavor. A haunting melody must be coupled with meaningful words: The striking scale sweeping through aching lyrics in the bittersweet Hungarian love ballad, “The Peony,” the blurred boundary between lament and love song, between blessing and curse. Other songs have been the unexpected gifts of devoted listeners. Storm discovered “Sleep, child” when a Ukrainian audience member insisted on driving two hours to bring a cassette of the song as performed by Nina Matvienko. A Czech audience member mailed Storm a copy of her favorite cassette, which is how she found “The Swallow is Flying.” Storm chases after lesser-used scales (“The Lemon Tree”), unexpected inflections (“Oh, Stand Aside”), and deep lyrical meaning (“My Nightingale”).

As a solo performer, Storm has the space to experiment with some of tradition's most intriguing aspects: the complex and idiosyncratic ornamentation often found in folk songs, and the deep and direct engagement solo lines demand. She follows her intuition, grasping sparkling timbres, microtones, and poetry. Drawing on the rich musical community of the Bay Area, she assembled a loose group of musicians, each with his or her own connection to the music, and they add guitar, violin, and accordion, as well as the more exotic sounds of duduk and kaval. Spurred by the songs themselves and the instrumentalists’ talents, Storm’s arrangements were transformed in the studio. “I think being willing to throw things out the window continuously, to let go, made for a more genuine and compelling result,” Storm notes.

Part of what went out the window was the stereotypical full-tilt singing style most associated with the Balkans. To Storm’s surprise, it often defied the studio environment. “I think the village sound is very appealing, and use it for live performances. But it's a very bright sound, and I found it can tend toward the harsh when recorded,” Storm explains. “Singing in a village way in the recording studio often just didn’t work.”

Storm needed a more measured, delicate approach to convey her deep, vital connection and with help from recording engineer Jim Helman, built a spare yet atmospheric sonic environment where the songs could unfold in Storm’s natural voice. Helman worked to get a spacious, almost cosmic sound, a sound that was a revelation. “I try for as open and direct a tone quality as I can get, letting all of the voice come forward, not holding anything back,” Storm says. By allowing the full range of her voice’s inherent overtones to emerge, she captured her own personal, raw voice, her own “village sound.”

“I have gone through periods of self doubt, wondering, ‘What am I doing?’” Storm recounts, contemplating her position as an American singing Eastern European music. “I am drawn to do this without thinking. So when I do think about it, it occurs to me it might seem a bit odd. But somewhere down the line, I realized how natural it is. In the long history of humanity, people have always learned from each other's music. There is something inherent in music that we want to be evocative and elusive. This is partly what it means to be human. We’re fascinated by the mountains next door.”

The Catalysts of Coconut Rock: Ocote Soul Sounds’ Creative Mutations and Funky Beats

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Just a sliver of the ocote wood starts a blaze. A few pieces of this pine was all Martín Perna needed to get his cooking fires started in a small fishing village in Michoacán, Mexico. It was there that Perna—known for founding Antibalas, the NYC collective that sparked an Afrobeat revival—found a new direction. 

“For several years, I’d spend time in this little fishing village,” Perna recounts, “living, writing, and doing a lot of green building. People would hear I was a musician and ask me to play some music. It was kind of difficult. What do I say: I play baritone sax, which I left in NYC, with this fifteen-piece band. If I play you some of my music, it’s not going to make sense,” Perna recalls. “I started thinking about what it means to be a musician and having a wide enough repertoire that I didn’t need fifteen people to play. So I learned how to write for the guitar.”

 Yet it wasn’t until a mishap on a biodiesel cross-country trek that Perna found the perfect vehicle for this new sound, and the perfect musical partner in Adrian Quesada, of the Austin-based super-group Grupo Fantasma. The result was Ocote Soul Sounds. The grit and funk of the gridlocked NYC streets intersect seamlessly with the voices and rhythms of dusty Latin American lanes on their latest album Coconut Rock.

Perna and Quesada had lived in eerily similar parallel universes. Though Quesada grew up in the Texas border-town of Laredo, and Perna came up in Philadelphia (later New York), both musicians straddled borders literally and artistically. Both had grown up on hip hop and the jazz and funk it was built on; both taught themselves to play multiple instruments; both had founded game-changing, booty-shaking big bands; and both were deeply moved by a powerful spirit of social and political activism, the spirit of ocote.

Ocote, the Nauhatl word for pine, is key to starting fires, the fires used for cooking and heating across Mexico and beyond. A tiny handful, and even damp pieces of wood ignite, Perna says. “And I like that metaphor. I have always seen my role in whatever I do as a catalyst. We’re not the big log burning that everybody sees. We are the one that gets it started,” whether it’s the current Afrobeat craze fueled by Antibalas, Quesada’s initiative in Austin to help improve the lives of the city’s musicians, or Perna’s founding of NYC’s first biodiesel factory.

Years ago, Perna converted his station wagon to run on restaurant grease and journeyed from Brooklyn to Mexico, making a brief stop in Austin to meet Quesada, a friend of a friend. The two began playing around with some song ideas, and things really clicked. But after a few tracks, Perna had to hit the road. 

The return trip gave an unexpected boost to the collaboration. “Martín’s car broke down and started having all sorts of problems. He had to drive from the Mexican border at 20 miles per hour, and then got a tow all the way from San Antonio. So he got stuck here and stayed with me until he could fix the car, which took a while because no mechanic would touch it back then. And we finished the first album,” Quesada smiles.

The musical partnership continued, because, as Quesada explains, “It fit like a glove: I’m the rhythm section, and Martín’s the horn section.” Both have dozens of song ideas and sketches floating around—from melancholy cumbias to funkified Latin descargas—just waiting for the right rhythmic tweak or melodic twist. “That's how a lot of our songs work: We'll have these parts that are good but unfinished, and then the other person adds the elements to make the song whole,” Perna notes.

Perna had been working on one song on Coconut Rock, “Vampires,” for years, recording demos with friends TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but feeling like the song could go further. So Perna and Quesada tackled the song, a critique of capitalism inspired in part by the shocking greed and gentrification that overtook Perna’s Brooklyn neighborhood in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. On that day Perna left the World Trade Center right before disaster struck and discovered his mother was suffering from cancer. “After we finished that song, I feel like I don’t have to make another musical critique of capitalism ever again,” laughs Perna, who is spending 2009 on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.

Since that biodiesel breakdown evolved into the first album, Ocote Soul Sounds has expanded to a seven-piece live outfit, bringing in close friends as well as long-distance collaborators. The result is what Perna calls “a community feel.”

One such collaborator, Brazilian vocalist Tita Lima, is featured on the psychedelic Latin jam, “Vendendo Saude E Fé” (“Selling Wealth and Faith,” a Brazilian folk expression of hope and optimism). “Tita and Adrian have been in touch for a while. She recorded one of his songs a while back with her own group, even performing it on Brazilian television. For ”Vendendo…” he sent her the instrumental, and waited, and waited, worried that we wouldn't make the deadline. Finally, when she sent some demos back, it was butter!”

Ocote Soul Sounds is a great change of pace for two leaders of big, sprawling, democratic bands: “Ocote is more experimental. It’s a bit more psychedelic,” Perna explains. “Both Adrian and I are on same page creatively, and it’s nice to work really fluidly like that,” compared to the slower creative process of getting the twelve musicians of Antibalas to agree, something akin to “Congress trying to pass a budget,” as Perna playfully puts it. Quesada draws on his experience working with Prince, with whom Grupo Fantasma has performed with from L.A. to London over the past two years. “Working with Prince was one of the biggest turning points for me as an arranger,” recalls Quesada. “We were able to watch Prince’s attention to detail in his craft. He would listen to the whole thing together and then break it down section by section, separating the parts, only to build it back together again, but much stronger.”

Ocote Soul Sounds’ fantastic realism draws on everything from the writings of Chicano right activist and psychedelic cowboy author Oscar Zeta Acosta (“Revolt of the Cockroach People”) to Cuban children’s rhymes about the boogeyman (“El Diablo y el Ñau Ñau”), featuring lyrics by Chico Mann (a.k.a. Marcos García of Antibalas). “Prince of Peace” is all about “a messiah coming back to town looking like Sun Ra, with this giant raucous marching band strutting down the streets.”

A strong political message flows through the wild images: The boogeyman might be about to snatch you off to a secret Homeland Security prison, and the Second Coming is all about justice. “Pan, Chamba y Techo” calls for the basic necessities—bread, work, a roof, and water—that we all have a right to, “the basic human rights all governments should provide,” Quesada notes.

“Ocote Soul Sounds in many ways is an expression of cultural identity, the stress and beauty of remaining authentically connected to all of the strands of culture which make us who we are,” Perna explains, and this is about something far deeper than cultural diversity; it’s about tapping into crucial creativity. “To paraphrase Einstein, we can't solve problems using the same mentality that created them. It will be the creative innovations and mutations that provide solutions and survival strategies for the times ahead. At the same time, all this must be done to a funky beat.”

Human Jukebox of the Revolution: Mariachi Real de San Diego Get the Party Started With Long-Lost Mexican Gems

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Gunslingers and gadflies. Campfollowers (not cockroaches!) and cowboys. Birth, love, and death. All in a human jukebox that makes the women sigh, the men holler, the children squeal, and the dogs bark. This is old-school mariachi, the troubadours of Mexico’s revolution and one of North America’s most beloved party traditions. This spirit burns true in Mariachi Real de San Diego, who restore mariachi music’s forgotten chestnuts to their rightful place at the fiesta on Mariachi Classics in a lush acoustic set that will capture the hearts of even the most ardent mariachi cynics.

“When the mariachi starts, everyone starts making noise,” Pedro Gonzalez—group founder and vihuela player—chuckles. “You’ll even see guys riding a bucking bull at a rodeo who start shouting and singing straight from the heart when they hear the mariachi play.”

Mariachi Real are on a mission: To find and play the good old songs many groups have forgotten. Mauricio Gonzalez, the group’s guitarron player and Pedro’s son, has riffled though record bins in Tijuana and traded choice finds with a small but dedicated group of hard-core collectors in California and Texas in search of these gems. “Traditional mariachi is a window into the past. For me, music has always been so powerful because of the energy and emotion it transmits,” Mauricio reflects. “And mariachi has such strong emotions in it. You play it when a kid is born, and throughout his whole life. The mariachi is always there.”

At first, Pedro advised his son to protect the music he had uncovered, the product of so much hard work. But Mauricio had to share and soon had the group’s veteran mariachis scratching their heads. The older members, including one musician who once starred in a rodeo show, wracked their brains to recall songs like “Jugueteando,” a classic from the founding fathers of modern mariachi, Mariachi Vargas, or “San Diego,” a norteño tune once popular among the older generation of mariachis but rarely recorded, and certainly not recorded recently. “They told me, ‘We haven’t played that stuff in twenty years!’” Mauricio laughs.

Digging deep into mariachi’s neglected repertoire, Mauricio, Pedro, and the four other musicians of Mariachi Real have found a multitude of tunes that once defined their art, the bygone classics old folks still ask for at house parties. “The best parties keep us on our toes. We have to dig into the well of repertoire,” Mauricio smiles. “My dad knows the older people there will ask for something that makes him think back to his youth to remember the lyrics. Many times people have pulled us aside and said, ‘I have asked mariachis to play this for years and you guys are the only ones to play it.’”

Mariachi music may kindle images of straw sombreros, margaritas, and Cinco de Mayo parties for many Americans, but its roots lie in revolution and the wild and heady days following the populist uprising in the early 20th century. “The mariachi tradition goes back over a hundred years,” notes Mauricio. “It came from the people, it came from the hills, from the ranches. It was a different lifestyle then.”

Songs like “La Periodista,” which chronicles the transformation of a village busybody into a revolutionary town crier, and even everyone’s favorite “La Cucaracha,” which tells the tale of a nimble female camp follower and not a bug, hearken back to the country’s rough and tumble history. “Many polkas and songs came from the revolution. Musicians wrote and dedicated them to some of the revolutionary concepts. Some have dates. Some are named after female colonels. Every time something would happen, they would compose something for that moment.”

Though they wrote the soundtrack for a new era in Mexico, mariachis and other musicians’ lives were truly tough. Though now mariachi schools have sprung up around the U.S. with formal instruction and sheet music, the musicians in Mariachi Real picked up mariachi from listening, playing along, and getting stern correction from their elders. “You learned on the fly,” Pedro recalls. “When I was learning, if I hit a sour note, the older musicians would reach over and strike my hand with a bow.” Pedro learned his first chords and songs from his grandfather, who immigrated as a teenager to Los Angeles, and eventually passed on his love and knowledge to Mauricio.

Walking or hopping cattle trains to get to their next gig, early mariachi groups often got way more than they bargained for from patrons. “Sometimes, groups would go to parties and the man in charge, a politician or whoever, would make them play after the party ended. They had to keep playing for hours,” Pedro explains. “So here’s what they would do: They had a seven or eight piece group. One by one they would sneak away and run like hell, while the rest of the band kept playing; until finally all of them got away. Sometimes there were gunfights. One of my trumpet players saw his uncles get shot to death. He tells the story of taking out his trumpet and blowing it into his uncle’s ear to see if he was really dead.”

When not forced to serenade local bigwigs or dodge bullets, mariachis were doing what groups like Mariachi Real still love to do—to get the party started at major rites of passage, celebrating birthdays with songs like “Las Mañanitas”, marriages, and even deaths with songs like “Las Golondrinas.” These two songs frame Mariachi Classics reflect the central role of mariachi in people’s lives. “I don’t care how poor people might be. They will always have mariachis at birthdays and wedding parties, and even at funerals,” Pedro explains. “We’ll play in church, do a Mariachi Mass, play at the gravesite, the songs the person used to like. Then we’ll go to the wake. We’re celebrating life.”

Like their stalwart predecessors, the broad smiles, perfect harmonies, and spotless charro suits of Mariachi Real belie this working band’s disciplined commitment, which flies in the face of the stereotype of the hard-living, hard-drinking mariachi.

“You’ve got to have mariachi music in your blood,” Pedro exclaims. Mauricio likes to recall how his mother noticed he always jumped around in utero every time mariachi music started to play. Though skeptical of his father’s music at first, Mauricio rediscovered his passion for mariachi in college and soon he was hooked.

You also need to be a veritable live jukebox, able to whip out a requested song at a moment’s notice. “We know about 3,000 songs,” Pedro estimates. “We could play eight hours straight without repeating anything.”

With a strenuous gig schedule that has made Pedro’s wife “a mariachi widow” as she humorously puts it, there is no room for sloppiness or moodiness, an approach Pedro credits to his service in the Marine Corps and his early mariachi mentors. “Sometimes, I would have problems at home or stress at work. And I’d show up to play, and one of the older musicians would always pull me aside and tell me that no one cared about my problems,” Pedro remembers. “We were there to be professional. He made me smile and taught me that we’re mariachis and we deliver what we’re hired to do.” Pedro singlehandedly changed the mariachi scene in San Diego County applying this strong discipline, emphasizing punctuality, honor, and a strict dress code. Other mariachis in the region have now followed suit.

Moving everyone from nostalgic grandmothers to Chuck Norris and Betty Ford, Mariachi Real‘s music gets them through the challenges of a working band while inspiring a deeper understanding of Mexican culture. “You have to have a lot of patience and trust,” Mauricio muses. “It can be tough to deal with the crazy wedding coordinator or the drunk uncle who wants to come up and sing. Or with someone who doesn’t have an understanding of music, who mocks you a bit and requests ‘Frito Bandido’ or something. But you’re working. It’s fun. You’re getting paid to play music, play something you love.”

Mariachi is a living music, always changing and picking up new ideas and songs. But one thing doesn’t change: The mariachis’ unswerving presence at life’s milestones. “There might be a gap between the old mariachis and new kids here in the U.S., but when these kids grow older and have families, they will want mariachi for their functions,” Pedro reflects. “They know the music and the culture and they like it. Mariachi will be at every party and event. I don’t think we will lose our culture, ever.”

The Moxie of Electric Guitar Rock Meets the Grit of West African Spike Fiddle: Real World Records Releases Justin Adams’ and Juldeh Camara’s Tell No Lies

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“Ah, the spirits are near,” Gambian griot Juldeh Camara told British rock guitarist Justin Adams as they finished a spontaneous song one night in Adams’ small garage studio.  “It came from nowhere, went on an entire journey. I looked at him, astonished,” Adams recalls.

Adams is no newcomer to what some Westerners call “luck” or “coincidence” and some Africans call spirits, having alternated time in the Sahara with Tuareg bluesmen with time onstage as British rocker Robert Plant’s guitarist. The past decade has seen a convergence of the unnameable forces that guide the soul of rock and roll and the essence of Western African music forms. Camara’s evocative playing on the riti—a Gambian, one-string spike fiddle that evokes a diversity of sonorities—is unexpectedly compatible with Adam’s signature Clash-meets-desert trance guitar sound.

The fluidity, spontaneity, and otherworldliness that define both spheres—rock and African—are palpable on Tell No Lies. Adams’ and Camara’s collaboration is filtered through the confidently bluesy grit and urban sensibilities of rock, desert grooves, and old-school R&B. “I wanted to take the music beyond the usual ‘nice’ sound of a lot of African records,” says Adams. To this end, Adams made a mix on his iPod for Camara—who also plays a Ghanaian banjo called the kologo—and for Mim Suleiman, a metallurgist-turned-singer from Zanzibar.

“I made up a mixtape before we started working on the album, and it had things like Johnny Otis, Willie and the Hand Jive, and an old Rolling Stones track from Exile on Main Street, which is very spooky and percussion heavy, along with some various old 1970s Nigerian tunes and Senegalese tunes, with lots of distortion and analog delay,” Adams explains. “And we had a bit of Led Zeppelin and The Clash and of course Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, the musical well between the New World and old West African funk. Those were the reference points.”

And for Camara, who grew up learning the riti from his blind griot father, this all makes perfect sonic sense. “People ask me a lot which kind of music is my favorite. I don’t have any. Music is family,” Camara muses. “If I listen to songs from different people, I hear African rhythm. That’s how I feel the music.”

The feel for the music Adams and Camara share runs deep. The duo rarely bothers with plotting out set arrangements or managing strict rehearsals, but explores melodies and vocal lines intuitively, exchanging gestures and musical signals to craft and refine their songs. “I’ll play a riff, and Juldeh will say, ‘Keep that, keep that!’, record it on his mobile phone, and start singing,” Adams recounts. “I’ve never worked with a musician where we’ve talked so little, and played so much.”

The connection was sparked by a phone call out of the blue from an excited Camara. “A friend gave me a copy of Justin’s CD and I took it with me in Gambia. When I got there I was playing the riti and trying to follow what he was playing. I was feeling it in my body. When I got to the UK, I got his number and called him. I said, ‘I heard your stuff. This style you play is very, very connected with my spirit.” Then over the phone Camara whipped out a few licks on his riti and the kologo, which he had picked up from Ghanaian musician Atongo Zimba, and Adams “went crazy” on the other end of the line. They were soon jamming and recording together.

Even before strange circumstance united them, Adams' and Camara’s lives unfurled along similar lines. The son of a diplomat, Adams spent his youth living and traveling in the Middle East and North Africa. Camara’s Gambian childhood was also spent on the road, riding with his griot father from place to place, performing songs and earning a living. When Camara’s father had a certain destination in mind, “He just talked to the horse. He would tell the horse, ‘I am going to this man. Take me there.’ And the horse would take us. I would ride in front, and my father in back.”

Camara has inherited his father’s profession, especially since his father became a marabou, or healer. As a griot, Camara used his riti to perform at everything from family ceremonies to political rallies to beach hotels, regularly learning new songs from his father. And once a griot, always a griot: Camara sees the constant business opportunities—a plane full of people, say—and the responsibilities of his calling even in his new British home.

“If somebody gives Juldeh something or honors him, he will get his riti out and sing their praises straight away. It is amazing, how he plays for an audience. He’ll sing to particular people in the audience, in Fulani,” Adams smiles. “That’s why we don’t have to rehearse or arrange. There is a whole system of call and response. He and I can call each other when we want to change the rhythm or end the song with musical cues.”

A griot’s charge is to speak the truth, even if couched in humor or poetics. Camara does just that on songs like ‘Kele Kele' (No Passport, No Visa). “I’m singing about why I’m sad. In Africa, the people are going the back way to Europe and they die. They go to Morocco, take a small boat, and try to come to Europe. I am telling my youth, my people in Africa to be careful, and to think properly before they move. We have everything in Africa. But I see both sides.”

Camara’s insistent calls for young Africans to remember their heritage and to those in power to avoid the temptations of their positions may spring from his ancient profession, but the music resonates with the Afro-Anglo grooves heard on today’s airwaves. “There are moments in ‘Achu,’ for example, when we are referencing some modern R&B music but at the same time keeping the structures so Juldeh can feel absolutely comfortable playing pure Fulani rhythms and melodies. Something in the drive and the way it’s put together made me think about Timbaland and the Foo Fighters. That pleases me,” Adams laughs. “I don’t like things to be too coffee table.”

“Juldeh is really prepared to take on challenges and learn other kinds of music, yet is a deeply roots musician. An amazing combination. Me, I can’t help but be a pretty post-modern kind of player because of my generation. Yet, I have had twenty years of listening to Gnawa music and a lifetime of travel. We have both gone quite a long way in each other’s direction. And sometimes Juldeh winds up more R&B than I am,” Adam smiles.

The spirit of rock and hip hop flows effortlessly into the power Camara senses in instruments like the kologo, with a sound that Camara loves because it reminds him of his people’s huduru (a similar instrument), whose sound lends warriors strength. For Adams and Camara, it’s about harnessing that power to defy stereotypes and shelf-worn clichés of African music collaborations.

Santero Fights Fire(bombs) with Water on El Hijo de Obatala

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In a few beats, Santero can evoke the flatbed truck sonidero DJs of his native Guatemalan mountain village, his father’s cumbia band, and the memories of multiple family deportations. His rhymes are informed by running away from home at thirteen, rough times on the Bronx streets, and the neo-Nazi firebombing in New Orleans that nearly cost him his life (and did take his vinyl collection).

Yet on El Hijo de Obatala (Siete Potencias Trading Co., distributed by City Hall Records), the DJ, MC, and Lukumí (Santería) spirit walker summons the Orishas, or spirits, and deepens hardcore hip-hop and reggaeton street cred, into the world of violin-loving river spirits, the great mother who protects and yet rules death, and the light-filled divine father of humanity.

Meeting the spirits wasn’t easy. Santero was rooted in family traditions, including mesa blanca, a hybrid form of spiritualism passed down through his mother’s line that blends Catholicism, indigenous, and African elements. He had learned from Rastafarians in New York, from sitting in on classes with friends who were both punks and divinity students, from living in a book-filled church basement thanks to a kindly Maryland deacon. He took cues from Buddhist and Hindu teachings.

But it wasn’t until he joined a class led by a dancer from the Ballet Folklórico Nacional de Cuba that Santero began to have close encounters of the Orisha kind. “During class, I started manifesting spirits. I would get the shakes and regain consciousness three or four hours later. During that time an array of spirits would have come through my body. They speak and heal. It started getting really out of hand,” Santero recalls. “I’d be sitting at dinner somewhere and someone’s grandparents would manifest. When something like that starts happening to you, it makes you question your whole reality, your sanity. I started looking for answers.”

The answers—or “at least the right questions”—came in Havana, Cuba, where Santero initially went for more dance training. There, he began to meet spiritual elders who gave him insight into his troubling experiences and a new vocabulary for grasping what from Haiti to Brazil to Cuba is a completely normal occurrence: someone being taken by spirits or ancestors. He was initiated as a Lukumí priest and has never looked back.

This new vision, as well as the songs and rhythms of Lukumí, was transformed by Santero’s hard-hitting love of rap, funk, cumbia, and Brazilian batucada to become El Hijo de Obatala. “All the tracks are transposed traditional batá drumming,” Santero explains. “The way we speak with our ancestors, the way we call them down, is dance and song, but mostly through rhythm and batá drums. We turned it into kick drums and snares and high hats.” Santero called on Grammy-nominated producer Greg Landau (Patato Valdes, Susana Baca, Maldita Vecindad, Quetzal) and legendary One Drop Scott (E-40, Scarface, Mac Dre, Luniz) to mix rhythmic tradition with urban beats, using the code of the ancestors on the youth of today.

Long before Santero got into the groove of the spirits, he learned the power of the big beat. As a kid in small-town Guatemala, he had his first brush with sonidero DJs, homemade mobile sound systems mounted on flatbed trucks that were the heart of every village festival, along with hand-cranked carousels and hard partying. "They changed my life. They saved my life,” Santero recalls. “They showed me there was something other than military service or going to the U.S. to clean people’s toilets. Me, just a street kid, I could aspire to something without an education, without resources. When you are a six or seven year old kid and you hear James Brown or Bob Marley pumping out of speakers, you have no idea what they are saying, but they change you forever.”

Like the sonideros, Santero’s childhood was spent traveling around Central America, sometimes with his father’s touring cumbia or salsa bands, sometimes fleeing the violence and natural disasters that wracked the region. From Guatemala to El Salvador and back, and finally to the U.S., Santero’s family faced several harrowing border crossings as they made their way north from Mexico, as well as multiple miserable deportations.

Once in the U.S., life remained difficult. The family rarely stayed put for long, and struggled to make a living in rough neighborhoods from the Bronx to New Orleans. But music continued to bring both pride and hope to an otherwise grim situation. “I remember when we got a TV for the first time and my dad was playing salsa on a Univision show showcasing new artists,” Santero recounts. “I was sitting with my brother and cousins, this huge family, sitting in front of this tiny TV in this tiny apartment. That changed everything. I was so proud of his accomplishment. He came from a dirt-poor family in Central America, and through his music he was able to fulfill one of his dreams. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘I can do this, too.’”

An incredibly independent teenager, Santero spent more time DJing late at night for local radio and playing gigs with impromptu punk, funk, and reggae groups than in school. During his years in racially fraught New Orleans, he helped put out a paper called The Red Army and basically “refused to keep my mouth shut,” even when his views condemning segregation and David Duke-style politics got him on the KKK’s black list. When one of many neo-Nazi attacks destroyed his home, a VW minibus, and his record collection, he hopped a Greyhound, and eventually made a new start in Oakland, with a new vision for his music.

“My ideal goal is to expose people to the Lukumí tradition in a non-judgmental way. Especially young Latinos. The traditional isn’t as strong and I just want to make sure there is a whole new generation exposed to it. I was exposed through traditional dance. But there’s never really been something that speaks to my generation with the kind of music they love, the big urban beats,” Santero says.

El Hijo de Obatala opens like all ceremonies or major undertakings with “Abre Camino,” a dance floor-friendly prayer to Eshu who opens the path and watches the crossroads, and moves on to hard-hitting praise of the Orishas from the great father of all, Obatala (“Baba Ade”) and the thunderous creating and destroying mother (“Madre de 9”), to Ogun (“Machete”) and Ochosi, the iron spirit of warfare and industry and the warrior spirit of justice.

Santero feels the need for the energy of spirits like Ochosi in the police shootings and tensions that dominate his Oakland community, and for the message spoken by the darker aspect of the female ocean spirit Yemaya, the sea devastated by pollution and neglect. “In ‘Agua del Mar’ I ask, at what point do we drop so much filth into the ocean that she cannot deal with us,” Santero reflects. “I ask what happens to the fountain that we turn to, to cleanse ourselves, when we find it is so dirty it can’t cleanse anymore.”

Tracks like “Agua del Rio” capture the lush beauty and unexpected hybrids found in Santería traditions. When addressing the sensual patron spirit of Cuba, Ochun, you’re as likely to hear violins as drums. “Sometimes during ceremonies with homage to Ochun, the drumming will stop, and some cats will pull out their classical strings,” Santero smiles. “Whatever it takes to get the spirit to respond and be present, to manifest.”

“Everybody in the community has a role. Some prepare food. Some are diviners who use shells to read your energy and destiny. Some play drums. My role has always been channeling Orisha energy. Either making music for them or manifesting them through me. I’m a spirit walker. That’s my role.”

The Chairman’s Diplomatic Tour of a New America: Nigerian Legend King Sunny Ade brings the Forty Minute Jam to U.S./Canadian Stages and Festivals

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The shift from recorded to live music as the main driver of music commerce happened ten years earlier in Africa than in America. Nigerian juju icon King Sunny Ade knows this first-hand.

Stars of juju—the Nigerian music that came out of palmwine parlors and which is characterized by interlocking guitars punctuated by talking drums on top of a pre-electronica bed of sound created by the Hawaiian lap-steel guitar—would put out up to four albums per year in the good old days: an Easter album, a Ramadan album, a summer record, and then one more for Christmas. Starting with the shift to cassettes and then to CDs, musicians and labels could not outsell the street, where bootleggers would turn around their own production within a week of release. But when juju’s last man standing, King Sunny Ade, who still maintains a huge following in Nigeria, plays North American stages, none of that will matter. Because The Chairman—as his fans lovingly refer to him—is best known as the leader of the original jam band.

Bootlegs notwithstanding, on these shores it may be just as likely that your distribution channel will crumble. Ade’s last album release here, Seven Degrees North, has been off the market since 2000, when label Blue Moon/Mesa’s distributor V2 collapsed. Blue Moon/Mesa will re-release the album.

Audiences at festivals across the continent—from Bonnaroo to Playboy Jazz, from Ravinia to Celebrate Brooklyn—will witness contagious 40-minute grooves that have been steeped in a modern-day tradition where playing for and reacting to the audience is paramount. The truth is that King Sunny Ade is so well-loved back home, among dignitaries and business leaders, that it is quite a feat to carve out the time for a two-month tour here. But the Chairman likes a change of scenery as much as the next guy, even if he does have to miss out on people “spraying” him with money, as is the tradition back home.

Nigerian music—like in many places in Africa—has a built-in patronage model, from which some North American musicians are taking a page. Whereas some North American artists are starting to offer individual patrons a “producer” spot in their liner notes, attendance at a recording session, or even a mention in the lyrics of a song, African “praise-singers” have always interwoven family history, regional folklore, and direct tributes to benefactors in a live concert setting. The more poetic, knowledgeable, and flattering the praise the singer offers up in live improvised song form, the more dollar bills the honoree literally throws at the performer. And the more money laid on the singer, the longer the musician extols the audience member. This direct fan-to-musician model has developed over many decades and makes top African performers masters of audience engagement. King Sunny Ade—with his huge line-up of musicians and groove-laden jams—is one of the continent’s most-loved performers.

Ironically, “spraying”—the process of tossing or pasting money on a performer—was recently banned in Nigeria. The politicians behind this move argue that the parties have become too opulent. The flipside of the argument is that there is no legal system for musicians to make money. Copyright societies have been in court for almost a decade with arrears in the billions of nairas (Nigerian dollars). Artists’ only hope for making a living is in a live setting.

Though most African countries staged fierce independent movements from European colonizers, most of them succumbed to American, Western European, and Congolese forms of pop music. Until the last couple of years, Nigeria was one of the few holdouts. King Sunny Ade’s standing as the last nationally-known icon of juju takes on more importance in this chapter of Nigerian musical evolution.  Whereas Nigerian’s other internationally-recognized music-form, afrobeat, has seen renewed interest thanks, in part, to dozens of non-African bands that have taken up the style, juju is not as easy to replicate. While afrobeat is known for its broken English and social rants laid over funky beats, the older style of juju is wrapped up in proverbs and the conversation between complex interlocking guitar lines and talking drum rhythms. Furthermore, in this age of laptop music production, few bands can afford to tour with up to 30 performers on stage playing tens of thousands of dollars of instruments.

Live music has withstood the test of time in Africa. Music fans who catch King Sunny Ade will see the master at work, mesmerizing attendees with a groove that Trey Anastasio long ago said inspired the approach of Phish. The perfect juju to get your recessive posterior onto the dancefloor.

The Taste of a First Kiss: The Smoky Tango and Sultry Boleros of Buenos Aires’ Federico Aubele’s Creative Songwriting

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“It’s such a vast and huge theme, love. You can approach it in different ways,” reflects Buenos Aires-born songwriter and guitarist Federico Aubele, whose new album Amatoria has been released by ESL Music. “Love is such an important thing for every human being, whether we notice it or not. We all experience it at least once in life. It’s one of the few things, along with dying, that is guaranteed to happen to you.”

Way back in 1 BC, the original Latin lover wrote the Western world’s first guide to picking up women Roman-style, Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love. Fast forward two millennia, when Aubele is swiping pages from Ovid’s playbook, by way of smoky tango bars and the sultry heyday of Mexican boleros in the 1940s, and falling hard into the acoustic yet lush Amatoria. In fine Pan-American style, the final impetus for the album came thanks to an all-love-song compilation of classic Johnny Cash. 

One day, while talking with his wife and sitting at a wildly out-of-tune piano, Aubele accidentally bumped four keys with the cup of tea that was in his hand. “A nice melody came out, but since the piano was so out of tune, each key was not the right note,” Aubele smiles. “I saw that the tea bag had a message on it, which said ‘Let Good Things Come to You.’ I said, ‘That’s it!’ I went up and played the riff on my guitar and started developing the melody.” The result became “Luna y Sol,” a song that chronicles the union of male and female, the joining of two separate lives.

Aubele heard love in boldly eclectic yet elegantly spare arrangements. His new compositions hinted at reggae. They had a touch of old-school, down-and-dirty tango. They flowed from the melodic essence of the Beatles, who took Buenos Aires by storm, leaving their imprint, though with a distinctly Argentinean creative flavor.

But the spirit of bolero, especially the rough-and-ready, heartfelt ballads of the 1940s, formed the backbone of Amatoria, harkening back to Aubele’s childhood in Buenos Aires. Aubele’s mother was constantly playing records of tango, boleros, and bossa nova, including classic groups like Los Tres Ases. A musician at heart, she played guitar and would wake Aubele up for school with a traditional Spanish song.

As Aubele’s own music developed through rock to dub, Aubele’s confidence and songwriting maturity led him back to the songs he heard growing up. He started tracking down old gems and savoring them, and soon came to love the style, as well as the Spanish language’s ability to express romance. He began creating songs with roots deep in the Latin sounds of his childhood but in the rhythmic aesthetic and sonic inflection of his own generation.

“Hermosa” is a straight-forward Mexican-style bolero, but with an Argentinean accent. “The lyrics are a very straightforward love poem about a very intimate moment,” Aubele explains, “imagine two people hugging in the night, with the moonlight coming through the window.” “Este Amor,” sung with Natalia, Federico’s wife, is dedicated to her and is a tribute to the great bolero trios of the past. “Your inspiration always comes from your internal world and your feelings. But you expose that through your art in a way that other people can connect with. That’s where it starts becoming universal.”

Though a darling among wry hipsters, Aubele is an unabashed romantic, open to the inspiration that comes from staring at the moon on a Spanish night (the Gypsy inflected “Suena mi gitarra”) or at the face of a peacefully sleeping lover. Even as a teenager, when not jamming to the Ramones and the Stones, he loved the jazz ballads of the big band era and thought it was the perfect soundtrack for a romantic moment. “I would make mix tapes with all those songs,” Aubele recalls. “But I didn’t have anyone to share it with, because all the girls my age were not into jazz at all. I would listen at home in my room alone, and think, ‘This kind of sucks.’” Now with his own confidence built from experience, musical and personal, Amatoria reveals Aubele’s voice as relaxed and in the mood, with no reservations.

While a handful of tracks focus on love’s suckier sides—the breakups, breakdowns, and bittersweet moments in the slow burning tango of “Otra Vez”—Amatoria is overwhelmingly sensual, drawing on the tradition of Spanish erotic poetry and evoking the taste of a first powerful kiss (on “El Sabor”), and very intimate.

This intimacy shines through the grounded and delicate production, which focuses on Aubele’s guitar and voice, as well as that of guest vocalists like Sabina Sciubba (Brazilian Girls) and Miho Hatori (Cibo Mato). Aubele stayed away from keyboards, generating all the ambient sounds with his guitar and effects, and from electronic beats. “I wanted to keep things simple and balanced, with the exact amount of elements. I took out whatever was not completely necessary. Over time, I could feel what was really needed and what did not need to be there.”

“I never start when I am recording a song, by recording a beat,” Aubele explains. “I start by writing a song you can play on guitar and sing. On top of that, you can build whatever you like, leave it acoustic or bring a whole orch. Because the song is solid. If it’s solid, it’s going to stand by itself.”

The Reverse Bernie Madoffs of Latin Jewish Hip Hop

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Bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘put your money where your mouth is,’ Latino-Jewish urban collective Hip Hop Hoodíos offers the music industry’s very first digital money back guarantee with the release of their career retrospective Carne Masada: Quite Possibly the Very Best of Hip Hop Hoodíos.

“We like to think of ourselves as the reverse Bernie Madoffs of the Latin music community,” says Hoodíos frontman Josh Norek, also known as Josúe Noriega. “How many times have you been ripped off and bought an album that sucked? There are tens of thousands of album releases each year, so we decided to cut through the clutter and do what no other artist seems to have the courage to do – refund people who don’t like the music.”

“Carne Masada: Quite Possibly the Very Best of Hip Hop Hoodíos” is the first-ever ‘Best of’ collection -- including 5 new tracks -- from the critically-acclaimed Latino-Jewish urban collective. Hip Hop Hoodíos’ latest release features guest participation from members of such major Latin & Jewish acts as Ozomatli, The Klezmatics, The Pinker Tones, Delinquent Habits, Los Mocosos, and Los Abandoned. The album’s first single is the old-school-flavored homage to pre-gentrified Manhattan, “Times Square (1989).” The album spans the group’s entire career and also includes liner notes written by the esteemed Rolling Stone/L.A. Times music critic Ernesto Lechner.

The Jewish answer to Los Fabulosos Cadillacs? The Latino respuesta to the Beastie Boys?  From Latin funk to klezmer to cumbia to straight-up rap, Hip Hop Hoodíos are a cross-cultural phenomenon. The band is almost certainly the only act in the history of recorded music to have co-headlined both the Salute to Israel Parade and the Barrio Museum in Spanish Harlem.