Issue Articles
Moonage Daydream: La Santa Cecilia
Miguel “Oso” Ramirez and Alex Bendana, the percussionist and bassist of the Los Angeles band La Santa Cecilia, respectively, are discussing some of the pathways taken as the group has become one of the leading forces in Mexican-American music. Naturally, names of a few well-known trailblazers come up: Santana, Los Lobos, Lila Downs, Patricio Hidalgo, all of whom they have also collaborated with at times.
Seun Kuti: King of the hard-hitting jazz-funk
Seun Kuti is pacing around a London flat as he chats on a video call, taking his laptop with him as he looks for a lighter for something he rolled to smoke. He’s just arrived for a few days of recording, but he’s a bit animated and, perhaps, agitated after a frustrating experience with immigration
Bill Frisell: Guitar Hero
To some, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell is known for tastefulness and restraint.
Youssou N’Dour: The Voice of Senegal
About 20 years ago singer Youssou N’Dour, who stands at the top of modern Senegalese music, visited the island of Gorée near his home in Dakar. It was the start of a mission to trace the paths of the many Africans transported from there to the Americas and Europe as slaves, and to trace the paths of the music that emerged from the depths of those horrors — specifically jazz and gospel. The directive was for him, accompanied by Swiss pianist Moncef Genoud, to bring that music back for performance on Gorée, now used as a monument to those who suffered beyond comprehension in that dark history. The result was a documentary, “Retour a Gorée (Return to Gorée).”
Lila Downs Talks Back
Lila Downs, one of Mexico’s most vibrant musical stars for a few decades now and a global ambassador of the nation’s culture, sits in a house in the capital Mexico City, about 250 miles northwest from her home in Oaxaca. She’s not there as an artist, but as a mother.
Jon Batiste: Beethoven Blues (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1) (Verve)
It doesn’t take long for Batiste to yank Ludwig Van from the Romantic-era parlors of Vienna to the red-light dens of Storyville. Just six seconds, to be exact, into this album centering on Batiste’s solo piano interpretations/interpolations of Beethoven pieces. That’s when he slides from the familiar lilt of Für Elise into a frisky, blue-notes-laced run with such elegance and grace that even the maestro himself would be delighted.
Nine Lives is Back: First full concert staging at the Civic in nine years
“Nine Lives,” the acclaimed book by the late journalist Dan Baum that tells the stories of nine New Orleansians and their families and communities in the years from 1964’s Hurricane Betsy through 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, may have even more than nine lives.
Another Heart and Another Ann Savoy
Ann Savoy doesn’t have an exact count of how many performances she’s done at Jazz Fest over the course of the 45 years since she first played there. But it’s a lot: 80? 90? Maybe as many as 100?
Finding Something Epic: Béla Fleck’s Bluegrass Heart
Trying something he’s never tried before is a passion for Béla Fleck. Trying something no one has tried before—on the banjo at least—is a calling. “Yeah, that’s my happy place,” he says, truly beaming on a video chat from his Nashville home. “To try to find something epic, or at least that I perceive as epic. Whether it’s epic or not, it’s enough to get me to feel like it’s worth going to work every day—if you call this work.”
The Songbird of Wassoulou: Oumou Sangaré is always moving
Quint Davis and his team basically built the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival from the ground up decades ago. But they didn’t build it from the ground up the way Malian singer and cultural activist Oumou Sangaré built the Festival International du Wassulu for its inaugural edition in 2017.
