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Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
The blues-rock provacateur on his historico-musico revue. A protegé of Eggleston, Falco also photographed and filmed ‘60s and ‘70s Memphis blues. WEB EXTRA: Listen to a song by Tav Falco’s Panther Burns!
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Antunes, vocalist for the landmark rock band Titãs, on lyrical audacity, his sound and visual poems, and everything from Bossa Nova to Tropicália. WEB EXTRA: Listen to exclusive sound poems by Arnaldo Antunes!
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Quirky DIY popster R. Stevie Moore has recorded over 400 albums—most of them by himself, at home—since the ’60s. Shrigley Field, the album he recorded in response to David Shrigley’s book Worried Noodles, is available now.
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With performers ranging in age from 72 to 88, Young @ Heart bridges the gap between modern and genuinely old school.
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The postmodern composer’s gleeful, spatialized works orchestrate invented instruments inside, outside, and all around the theater. A brilliant manipulation of form and perception.
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Best known in America for his controversial album with Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music, pianist, composer, and Zeitkratzer leader Reinhold Friedl speaks with collaborator Elliott Sharp.
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Los Tigres del Norte: the ultimate corrido-belting norteño band, and Grammy winners to boot.
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Amina Claudine Myers, virtuoso pianist and organist, sits down with trombonist, composer, and educator George Lewis to discuss the articulations between sound, history, and place that are central to her work.
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Experimental composer and pianist Anthony Coleman speaks with painter Michael Goldberg on the eve of Coleman’s CD Shmutsige Magnaten (Tzadik).
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PERFORMA05 founder RoseLee Goldberg talks with Danish artist Jesper Just about his first-ever opera, True Love Is Yet to Come, which premiered this past spring in New York.
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Novelist Erasmo Guerra caught up with Monterrey alterna-rock band Plastilina Mosh—the duo of Alejandro Rosso and Jonas—at a makeshift beer and sangria stand after their performance in Brooklyn this summer.
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Andy Palacio was known as the king of Punta Rock, the Belizian dance music that grew out of that region’s strong Garifuna culture. Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier talked with Palacio about the Garifuna’s struggle for survival in the Caribbean.
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Musician, electronic composition innovator and MacArthur fellow Lewis has been documented in more than 120 recordings as well as numerous installations and written texts. He talks with Parker about where improvisation and politics intersect.
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Artist William Wegman has been an early music aficionado since he was a graduate student in the mid-’60s. when he met George Steel, the Miller Theatre’s impresario who started the encyclopedic Composer Portrait Series, they had plenty to discuss.
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Over the past four decades, Tony Conrad’s legendary work in minimalist music, experimental film, and video, has been seminal in the development of those art forms. Conrad continues to make radical, humorous, provocative pieces today.
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Legendary composer-improviser and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell is best known for his work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago over the past several decades, where he continues to make breakthrough innovations and influence musicians around the world.
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Damas “Fanfan” Louis is both master drummer and houngan asogwe, high priest of Vodou. The painter Michael Zwack, caught up with him in New York to discuss Haitian rhythms and Fanfan’s involvement in a cultural center for dance, drums and Vodou.
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When British sound artist Kaffe Matthews thinks about sound, she thinks about space, time, travel and radios strapped to bicycles. Her approach to making music is based on sampling her surroundings and capturing their sonic personality.
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Born in Buenos Aires in 1931, Mauricio Kagel is one of the most distinctive and prolific composers in contemporary music. Keyboardist Anthony Coleman took a seminar from Kagel in 1981 that was a turning point in his career.
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Cofounder of the influential reggae group Third World, Ibo Cooper produced some of the most dynamic and sophisticated reggae tunes ever recorded. As songwriter, keyboardist and vocalist for the group, he spent 25 years taking reggae around the world.
>>>A member of Bob Marley’s powerful backup singing trio, the I-Threes, Judy Mowatt was also the first Jamaican woman to record a solo reggae album when Black Woman was released by Tuff Gong in 1979. She went on to have a remarkable solo career.
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New York composer, producer and improviser Elliott Sharp has famously fast fingers that are constantly giving shape to and executing numerous solo and collaborative projects. Sharp trades lively emails with writer and old friend Mike McGonigal.
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Since her groundbreaking debut album Bitter, bass player and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello has been cultivating a unique blend of jazz, funk, hip-hop and R&B. Her latest, Cookie, an Anthropological Mixtape, earned her a seventh Grammy nomination.
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Haitian classical guitarist Frantz Casseus came to New York with the ambition to compose a distinct music, fusing the European classical tradition with Haitian folk elements.
>>>Maraca’s technical proficiency as a flutist is complemented by his lightning-fast ear. Renowned in his native Cuba, Maraca earned his chops playing Cuban jazz with Chucho Valdés’s supergroup, Irakere, and composer Emiliano Salvador before he turned 23.
>>>Eddie Bobè is a master percussionist, vocalist, composer and arranger. His expertise extends across a full spectrum of Afro-Caribbean music and traditions. Fellow drummer Frank Marino speaks with Bobè about the force that Afro-Caribbean music is today.
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The epic Three Tales, a digital-documentary-video opera by renowned composer Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot, uses three seminal technological and dramatic events from the 20th century.
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Every guitarist—Marc Ribot notwithstanding—who has ever hard the legendary Bill Frisell play, has wondered how he manages to produce notes that swell in volumes as they sustain, instead of steadily fading as they do on everyone else’s guitar.
>>>Cuban pianist, composer and arranger Bebo Valdés was at one time the orchestra leader of Havana’s Tropicana nightclub, accompanying visiting stars such as Nat King Cole and house legend Beny Moré.
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Julia Wolfe has all the credentials a young composer could want: a degree from Yale, a Fulbright, and commissions and awards from the Kronos Quartet and Library of Congress. But she’s best known as one of the three founders of Bang on a Can.
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Frontman for Guided by Voices, this 42-year-old ex-schoolteacher and Ohio-based object of international hero worship just happens to be a regular guy who obsesses over experimental and psychedelic pop music.
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A 15-piece orchestra of all-star Cuban musicians, ¡Cubanismo! celebrates the legacy of Cuban dance music—from traditional rumba and cha-cha to son and danzón. Band leader Jesús Alemañy once played trumpet for Cuba’s most famous son group, Sierra Maestra.
>>>One of the most popular singers in Brazil, Marisa Monte’s priority has always been on vocal performance for her audience. Musician Arto Lindsay, responsible for bringing her artistry here, speaks with the pop star.
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Since her first recording in 1952, South Africa’s legendary singer, filmmaker, activist and long-exiled leader of the anti-apartheid movement, Miriam Makeba has proven time and again that she deserves the laurels Mama Africa and Empress of African Song.
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Arto Lindsay’s 80s band, DNA, compounded New York’s No Wave sound into the ultimate punk howl. His work with the dean of Brazilian song, Caetano Veloso, and other Brazilian musicians opened North American ears to samba.
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Chanteuse Susana Baca dedicated the past two years to researching the contributions of black musicians to Peruvian music. Poet and novelist Jaime Manrique talks with the singer about coming face to face with the past.
>>>Los Van Van have been making music you can dance to for over 30 years. If you think this means they’re easy, don’t. Colombian writer Silvana Paternostro, talks with the band’s leader Juan Formell.
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Cassandra Wilson’s sophisticated jazz riffs cover everyone from Hank Williams to Miles Davis to the Monkees. Poet and music wiz Glenn O’Brien steals a téte â téte with the chanteuse not long after a night club appearance at New York’s Blue Note.
>>>Downtown, no-wave, rock, free-prov guitarist Marc Ribot ventures intrepid into “prosthetic” Cubanismo on his album Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos. David Krasnow asks: “What’s this Jewish guy from Jersey doing playing the son montuno?”
>>>Cuban musician Jesús “Chucho” Valdés grew up listening to the legends: his father Ramon “Bebo” Valdés played with Nat King Cole and Erroll Garner at the famed Tropicana; the pioneers of Afro-Cuban jazz assembled and jammed in their home.
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