World Music Wire:

Along the borderlands between the U.S. and Canada, a lone songbird sings with a voice clear, rich, and distinctly French. Her name is Michèle Choinière, and nestled in the northwestern Vermont woods, she continues a once thriving Franco-American oral tradition that recalls the bright cheer of kitchen parties, the wry pleasures of courtship, and the sway of a waltz.

Known for her originals and her distinctive interpretations of traditional songs, she has returned to her family and cultural roots on La Violette, a tribute to the ties that bind and their musical vitality. Drawing on francophone songs unique to northwestern Vermont, as well as French folk classics and popular gems, Choinière puts a contemporary polish on songs as old as the hills, with a festive tenderness.

Choinière was raised with French as her first language, at a time when many of her peers were no longer learning their parents’ mother tongue. Many Francophones on the American side of the border wanted their children to assimilate. These immigrant families, who came to the U.S. for work during the hard times of the 1920s and 1930s, maintained a quiet presence, farming and working in an area where they were not particularly welcome. But their children, now adults, are frustrated that they were not privy to this Franco-American inheritance.

Choinière’s family was the exception to this rule. Not only did her parents speak French at home, her parents both taught her songs: her mother through the everyday songs sung in the kitchen while preparing meals, and her father through his harmonica playing. But the main venue for the passing of these traditions was the soirée–the kitchen party–where families and friends would gather, push the table to the corner, pull out the harmonica, fiddle, and the accordion, stomp on the table for percussion, dance, drink, and of course, sing.

With this unique background, Choinière often laughs when she is told that she is the only Franco-American singer in the whole state of Vermont, a lone voice recalling a rich and beautiful tradition. Her songs come from a variety of sources beyond her vibrantly musical family.

She’s mined treasured recordings of elderly local singers and turned to dusty cassettes of funky French-Canadian broadcasts from the 1950s and 60s. In a world of chords, sheet music, and fake books, Choinière works almost exclusively off the page, diving into oral traditions and transforming as she goes. It is an organic process of showing the skeleton of a piece to musicians and having them add their own flavors to the song.

For a woman who never set out to be a professional singer, Choinière has slid gracefully into the role, unfolding as a musician as an adult. Singing with her father, she found herself featured on a Smithsonian Folkways recording of Franco-American music from New England, Mademoiselle, Voulez-Vous Danser? (1999)

And soon she began writing her own songs, originals that came together on Coeur Fragile (2003). “My piano became my therapy,” she smiles, “and as for my voice, I never wanted voice lessons. I wanted to sing in my own way.” Her voice embraces a distinctively French sound, yet remains sweet, velvety, and whispery, twisting and twirling the nuanced strands of the language. But Choinière’s voice can pack a potent—and potently upbeat—punch. La Violette is at its heart a dance album.

From the starting notes and percussion of the opening track, “Fue a de Lou,” her voice lilts through waltzes and dance tunes opening into unique musical spaces and images: from the antiquated upright piano emanating a tinkling tone from the corner of the family living room, to the lively musical moments of a soirée.

“Fue a de Lou,” Choinière feels, “has a driving force to it, like you’re on the ocean, in a boat, moving forward.” Its playful movement, and nonsense chorus, add to the festive feel of the song, which is unique to Franco-American Vermont. This is followed by another lively party tune, “La Violette,” and is a shining example of how Choinière creates her own version of traditional tunes.

While some Franco-Americans may insist she adhere strictly to the tradition, Choinière believes strongly in ‘modernizing’ the songs she has learned from her family and her community. Through her own arrangements, she gives fresh voice to the music. “La Bergere Encore,” a jazz arrangement of a traditional children’s song, is a surprising shift in tone and style, yet reveals how flexible and powerful Franco-American music can be.

For Choinière, this album is a living memoir of her family. Several songs, including “Quand le soleil dit bonjour” and “Par un Samedi matin,” were sung by family members frequently throughout her youth, including at her parents’ wedding.

And many illustrate the importance of place in the collective memories of the immigrant experience. “Vive la Rose” draws on the experiences of the Acadians in the Maritime provinces, while “Brind’amour” is a 1920s French café song once popular among Franco-Americans. “Rame, Rame, Rame, Donc” recalls the St. Lawrence seaway in Québec, evoking the repetitive motion of rowing on a river, while the words imagine rowing away from hardship towards a more peaceful place.

The true inspiration for this colorful, poignant collage of distinctively French music, however, lies not with past generations, but with the family’s newest member, Choinière’s daughter Isabella. Each song serves as a momentum of what Choinière hopes to pass on to her little girl, a menagerie of ideas, values, histories, and poetic images of what it means to be Franco- American in 2010. And it’s an album little Isabella can dance her heart out to.

La Violette connects generations to their history in New England, in Quebec, and in France to their history as Franco-Americans. It tells a story of a people connected through musical, linguistic, and cultural traditions, historical snapshots evoking time and place for the nearly lost roots of New England’s Francophones. With sprightly songs, Choinière beckons to audiences to listen to her cultural call, and increasingly, they do.

World Music Wire

Dressed to the nines in a retro-chic suit,Slovenia's Magnifico (Robert Peut) gyrates with Euro irony and sultry smoothness,backed by a burst of Balkan brass and a chorus of go-go dancers. The bad boy cum hit maker glories in the pleasures of pan-European English, pop culture, and the sillier side of porn, all with a distinctly Slavic wink.

But the inveterate showman and former folk dancer's wry exploration of sex and post-socialist society carries echoes of the dissolution of his erstwhile homeland, Yugoslavia. An "emotional emigrant" who fled the chaos of war and moral collapse by retreating into his own creativity, Magnifico sought asylum in music, a love he discovered decades ago as a young man, when his father bought him his first guitar.

His songs, while raising the roof, raise eyebrows and spark debate about everything from xenophobia to homophobia, dominating charts in the former Yugoslavia and Italy. He has crafted songs that unabashedly chant "Magnifico is queer" and parody Slovenes' insults for Southern Slavs, tracks meant to shock, critique, and amuse.

Several generations of fans frequent the singer and actor's flamboyant shows, where they sing along to the provocative lyrics and savor the furious Balkan beats, part of a new culture tempered by conflict and buzzing with vitality. Slovene teens scream at a Magnifico sighting, while local intellectuals chew on his post-modern shape-shifting significance. This is all part of the tongue-in-cheek fun for the actor and songwriter, whose surprisingly grounded life offstage includes a beloved wife and family, and a down-to-earth perspective on his party-hearty repertoire.

Now Magnifico is being unleashed on the world at large with Magnification, in a blast of Balkan- and Roma-scented funk, r&b, and soul... and even a flirtation with cowboys and Mexican-style horns. Tracks hail from Magnifico's latest limited edition Slovenian release, along with several freshly minted songs from the songwriter's ever fertile mind.

World Music Wire:

Jailbait princesses and phonograph pornographers. Anarchists, atheists, and amputees. Humble farmhands who dig their own graves, and holy womanizers out to save the unlovable. Welcome to the wild world of Georges Brassens, as translated on the new album Bad Reputation and channeled by Pierre de Gaillande.

The Paris-born, California-raised singer, musician, composer, and translator found a kindred spirit in the pioneering pop star, ubiquitous in France but sadly neglected in America. Keenly in tune with Brassens’ timeless eloquence and timely grit, de Gaillande embarked on an epic two-year mission to translate Brassens’ work and evoke the legendary singer-songwriter for Anglophone audiences. The hard part: to keep Brassens’ melodies intact, de Gaillande had to keep the same syllable count, rhyme scheme, and other poetic parts in English.

De Gaillande spent his teenage years in California immersed in rock, laying out wacky punk anthems on his four-track and using guitar licks to woo girls at Sunday school. He later took these skills to New York, where he rocked with indie and folk-rock bands like the Morning Glories.

But he had a dark secret: He was French. His father, a teacher, made sure he never forgot it. “He likes to impart his wisdom,” de Gaillande muses. “My dad would make my sister and me sit down with a George Brassens song, asking us if we understood what it was about. He would bore us to death. We couldn’t enjoy the music because it was like school.”

The obsession that became Bad Reputation started when the senior de Gaillande sent his son the lyrics to “Le Mecreant,” a Brassens song calling for morality without the crutch of religious authority, a graceful statement of atheist philosophy. It struck de Gaillande and sparked a conversation with his dad that turned into a serious translating habit. “Over the years I had tried to translate the poetry of writers like Baudelaire, so I thought it would be interesting to try my hand at this song, which I loved,” recalls de Gaillande with a smile. “Then I went back to all these other cool ones with great melodies, and boom, it totally avalanched from there.”

Yet this nonchalance belies the task de Gaillande had set for himself: to adapt one of the biggest figures in French music and poetry without completely and utterly betraying Brassens in all his complexity: the iconic iconoclast. A dreamer who dominated the pop scene for decades. A highly individualistic man of powerful convictions—yet no patience with politics or intellectual fads. A proto-punk who worshiped 17th-century poetry, whose banned songs became national treasures, and whose moustache sparked a fashion craze.

It’s nearly impossible to explain Brassens’ significance in French culture—and nearly impossible to underplay it. He’s a teller of tales like Bob Dylan, if Dylan had come from a centuries-long line of satirical tunesmiths and bards. He sounds like Django Reinhardt swinging with an apolitical Woodie Guthrie. A voice like Leonard Cohen’s dominates sparse arrangements that managed to blast French pop apart the way the Beatles did Anglophone rock.

Yet de Gaillande has succeeded in invoking Brassens’ essence by painstakingly, playfully rendering his exquisite, unusual lyrics into English. Lyrics borrowing from the golden age of French poetry, the 17th century, chock full of colorful profanity and medieval references.

Brassens, in his meditation on the vagaries of celebrity “Trumpets of Fortune and Fame,” asks wryly, “I wonder, holy cow, who do I have to f*ck / To make the goddess of a hundred mouths speak up?” Yet he’s just as likely to reference the Old Testament (“Bad Reputation” speaks of the prophet Jeremiah) or 16th-century religious violence (the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Hugenots comes up in “Don Juan”) as to drop an “F” bomb.

De Gaillande relished the challenge. “I found that I was really well suited to it; I’ve been a songwriter preoccupied with lyrics, poetry, and melody for a long time,” de Gaillande reflects. “It was amazing to have this music that’s been in my head for so long come to life.”

A self-taught songwriter, the poetry-mad Brassens made music to fit the words. “He would write lyrics with rhyme and rhythm, and then cobbled the music together to fit,” de Gaillande explains. ”The music feels unpremeditated, fluid, and personal. Sometimes it makes no sense rhythmically, because it’s in service to the lyrics.” To do justice to the music, de Gaillande kept all the rhythms intact, finding the right number of English syllables, and maintaining the original rhyme schemes.

He also found, as he began working with New York-based musicians unfamiliar with Brassens’ songs, that these rhythmic subtleties had eluded most people who played songs like “Bad Reputation.” That is, until bassist Christian Bongers noticed something: Everyone was getting it wrong.

“That was the first Brassens song I ever learned, and I used to play it on guitar. Christian realized that I was playing it wrong, that there is this wild rhythm that’s hard to pin down,” de Gaillande notes. “It has a 5/4 moment that’s bizarre. It took someone with fresh ears to really get it.”

This peculiar sense of rhythm entwines with a quiet interplay between melodies, with little licks and flourishes in the originals provided by a second guitar. De Gaillande, while wanting to respect Brassens’ sonic sensibilities, used a broader, richer musical palette to bring out the many melodies: vibes, clarinet, dobro, another voice thanks to singer Keren Ann (“To Die for Your Ideas”).

But one thing was off the table: drums. “I’ve made a conscious decision to not have a lot of drums, even though I come from a folk rock or punk background,” de Gaillande says. “I didn’t want too many drums or any other instrument with rock connotations because Brassens ignored rock altogether.” Even though hints of rock sometimes shine through on songs like “Penelope,” Brassens seemed to have had little interest in the music taking Europe’s youth by storm.

That was typical for Brassens, a man who lived in a cold-water, no-frills Paris flat even at the height of his illustrious career, a place that had harbored him after he ran away from a German work camp and that he said taught him to appreciate discomfort. Living in his run-down apartment and his own dream world, the only rules he acknowledged were those of poetry. He ignored contemporary culture, politics, and even the bans on his songs, and instead mocked the scandal surrounding his off-color language with songs like “The Pornographer.”

“He uses all this dirty imagery, and then says, ‘See what you made me do?’” de Gaillande laughs. “I went full on with the obscenity.” He turned to the last remaining bastion of obscenity, the last dirty word standing: “Don’t ask me to compose a poem/ If it would upset you to know / That I sit and watch every day / The c*nts on parade / I’m the pornographer of the phonograph, sir / The perverted son of the sing-along.”

Brassens had no interest in being fashionable or cool, and yet defined coolness in a way that resonates for de Gaillande in our day and age. For de Gaillande, it boils down to language: “Using proper grammar, good spelling, and eloquent language is subversive and even sexy in this era of Tea-Party talk,” de Gaillande smiles. “That’s part of the mission of this project: to bring back that kind of sexy.”

“This project has been a real departure for me; it’s very adult and almost square,” de Gaillande laughs. “But I think it’s the hippest thing I’ve ever done. I draw inspiration from Brassens’ attitude: He didn’t care what people thought. He just got the poetry out there.”

World Music Wire:

The descendant of warrior princes, the son of two black African parents, Afro-pop pioneer Salif Keita was born “white.” Inheriting albinism, a lack of skin pigmentation, Keita instantly stood out among other Africans and stood out as a spokesperson for tolerance in all forms.

La Différence, the legendary singer addresses this deeply personal issue–albinism in Africa—and gives it an urgent global resonance that takes his songs from Bamako to Beirut. As Keita’s famed “golden voice” cathartically croons in the title track, "I'm a black man, my skin is white and I like it, it's my difference/I'm a white man, my blood is black, I love that, it's the difference that's beautiful."

The distinction is often interpreted as an ill omen in his native Mali, and invited a life of ridicule, making Keita an outcast in his own community. Society, including public schools in Mali, perpetuates harmful beliefs about albinos, and they are often shunned, ridiculed, and even killed for superstitious purposes.

Although he and others have come to terms with albinism, Keita has struggled long and desperately with the stigma attached to his skin color. Though born into a noted caste of musicians with direct links to Sounjata Keita–the heroic 13th-century warrior-prince who edified the ancient Malian Empire–Keita was forbidden to play music growing up. He was also disowned by his father, kicked out of school, and rejected by the local aristocracy.

Filled with unrealized musical ambitions, Keita had no choice but to leave Mali as a young man. Armed with the strength of his convictions, he travelled to neighboring Ivory Coast, then Paris, London, and New York, where his skin color could not keep him from expressing his artistic vision. His perseverance paid off throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as he became an internationally recognized icon thanks to his gravely voice, innovative musical arrangements, and profoundly poetic lyrics.

In 1997, Keita’s fame helped him to overcome the stigma attached to albinism that persisted in West Africa, allowing him to make a triumphant return to Mali. Cautiously re-entering a community that once shunned him, he discovered a newfound acceptance, which allowed him to re-establish roots there, including building a studio in the capital of Bamako.

La Différence is the latest in a trilogy of acclaimed acoustic oriented recordings (Moffou 2002, M’Bemba 2006) that were primarily recorded at Keita’s Bamako studio. The intimate acoustic environment of La Différence allows Keita’s vocal timbres to shimmer and soar, highlighting their poetic nuances and the poignant themes of his lyrics. While the album is dedicated to the plight of albinos in Africa, leading with its title track that aims to increase the global awareness of this cause, the remainder of the album delves into a wide range of social and political issues.

Over a thick sanguine female vocal chorus and rhythmic guitar riffs, “Ekolo d’Amour” seeks to inform listeners about the ecological devastation that has befallen Africa. Fusing the powerful traditional tones of the 21-stringed kora with a contemporary guitar-rich, down-tempo, polyrhythmic groove, “San Ka Na” cites a specific example of ecological destruction, alerting audiences of the need to protect Africa’s Niger River, upon whose banks Keita played as a child. With a rough and urgent voice, Keita scorns local politicians for their neglect and complacency regarding such problems.

These compositions also point to the global nature of this album, which was recorded across three continents, including sessions in Los Angeles, Paris, and Bamako, among others. String arrangements written by noted producer Patrice Renson (M., Vanessa Paradis, Ben Ricour, Amadou and Mariam) and recorded in Beirut with Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf give the album a subtle orchestral depth. On several songs, the plucked strings of a Middle-Eastern oud mingle with the West African ngoni (lute), creating a swirling melodic texture of Arab-infused African tones.

La Différence also finds the singer re-imagining a few previous recordings with a new palette of sounds. Harnessing the deeply echoing, bluesy textures of guest guitarists Bill Frisell and Seb Martel, an intimate rendition of 1995’s “Folon” offers a stripped-down, horn-absent version that allows Keita’s haunting voice to pierce the mellow cosmopolitan soundscape. With producer John Henry, Keita reaches back to the 1970s, recalling his days with the Ambassadeurs du Motel band in Bamako, with a new incarnation of “Seydou.”

Departing from the original track (“Seydou Bathily”), this softer version bathes Keita’s voice in a rich sonic world of resonant vocal refrains, Arabic-tinged string arrangements, interlocking guitar tones, and a multilayered percussion ensemble that merges sounds from Africa and the Middle East. Given that these songs have been refined by Keita and his band over the course of many years, some for decades, it is no wonder why his delivery comes across with a relaxed, sophisticated confidence.

Further linking La Différence with Keita’s long musical career, the melody of “Djélé” is decorated by the intricate balafon work of Keletigui Diabaté, a monumental figure in Malian music and one of Keita’s most faithful musical partners, helping him to develop as a guitarist over the course of almost four decades. Drawing on his international sojourns, “Djélé” reinforces Keita’s cosmopolitan approach to this album as the breathy tones of an accordion dance with a concert piano over top a bed of deep electric bass, legato orchestral strings, plucked African lutes, and a global array of polyrhythmic percussive timbres.

While listeners may lose themselves in the sophisticated blend of sounds found on La Différence, Keita has not lost site of the ultimate inspiration for this project–the men and women who still suffer with the stigma and health risks of albinism in Africa. As Keita remarked in a recent Mondomix interview, “It’s very, very important for me to help albino people, because they need help, and it is my duty, because I am albino, too.”

To combat the prejudices that regularly threaten albino Africans, the singer has pledged that all the proceeds from this work will be funnelled into his foundation, Salif Keita pour les Albinos.

Since 2001, this charity has tirelessly worked to erase the stigma attached to albinos in Africa, and provide care and assistance to albinos in need of refuge and medical attention, including protection from the sun. Keita knows its dangers first hand, losing his sister to skin cancer in the 1990s. Over the past four years, Keita has donated proceeds from record sales and tours to purchase sunscreen for Africans in need, and build a school and health clinic in Bamako.

La Différence is an intimate journey into Keita’s personal struggles. Singing a hymn of universal tolerance Keita poetically claims, "some of us are black, some are white/all that difference has a purpose…for us to complete each other/let everyone receive love and dignity/the world will be a more beautiful place.”

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Take one part diverse players with intense focus and killer chops, and one part neglected mid-century multi-ethnic hybrid music with origins on America’s harmonious island paradise. Add a dash of Technicolor tropical dreamscape, a twist of wild birdcalls, and stir soulfully.

WAITIKI 7 serves up this polychrome cocktail, taking a new serious spin on exotica, the musical genre that leaped from Hawai‛i’s fashionable bars and clubs to mainstream living rooms in post-War America. Keeping true to exotica’s deep roots and intense demands on musicians with New Sounds of Exotica, the group brings heady passion, acoustic musicianship, and a love of old-school mixology to an art form just begging to be revisited and savored.

The luscious mix that is exotica—the blend of tropical soundscapes, Latin percussion, and popular jazz perfected by Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, and their ensembles—has been profoundly misunderstood. Far from the kitsch of its waning days, the best exotica flows from two very positive and progressive places: the multi-cultural openness of Hawai‛i’s music scene in the first half of the 20th century, and the mid-century impulses that fueled a craze for transcontinental travel and curiosity about Asian-Pacific cultures.

“It was a huge thing at that time to fly from the West Coast to Hawai‛i,” explains Randy Wong, the Hawai‛i-born, classically trained founder of WAITIKI 7. “It became the stepping stone to the East. People became genuinely fascinated by these cultures. The war was over, and there was a spirit of real optimism and excitement.”

These new travelers came to Hawai‛i and discovered what had been brewing in the relatively open climate of cross-cultural exploration for several decades: a vibrant music scene with everything from mixed Hawaiian and English folk ballads, to second-generation Japanese club bands made of traditional Asian instruments, to Puerto Rican percussionists who had recently come to work in the sugar industry. “The musicians who played exotica came from this scene,” Wong notes. “It was really one of the first popular world-music hybrids in America.”

Enterprising bandleaders brought all these sounds together, creating groups that Wong describes as “one huge rhythm section,” so huge that Martin Denny, the king of classic exotica, needed three trailers to take all the percussion instruments—from gamelan parts to octave after octave of tuned gongs to huge bamboo xylophones—along on tour. WAITIKI 7 lets the full percussive force of exotica shine on tracks like Denny’s Chinese-inflected rumbler “Firecracker.”

Exotica musicians were highly skilled, fastidious arrangers, often drawing on Hollywood experience to craft the perfectly evocative sound of the fantastic tropics. Wong, who has had a chance to study Denny’s scores, was blown away by the level of detail. These were serious musicians “with serious chops,” Wong smiles, and a serious approach to even the campiest moments in the music.

WAITIKI 7 embraces the pulse and ambiance of exotica, while adding their own stamp thanks to the diverse jazz, classical, and folk backgrounds the seven members bring to the group, including the jazz drums of multi-instrumentalist Abe Lagrimas, Jr; the thoughtful and vigorous Latin and jazz piano of Zaccai Curtis; the ever cool vibes of classically trained Jim Benoit.Improvisation and more expansive, expressive solos, something rarely heard in carefully scored classic exotica, play a major role in shaping the band’s sound, as do unexpected instruments from violin (classical virtuoso Helen Liu) to woodwinds of all shapes and sizes (Berklee instructor and Latin jazz master Tim Mayer).

Adding a new dimension to the rhythm sections of the past, lush melodies come to the fore on WAITIKI 7’s tour of exotica standards like the beautiful “Bali Ha‛i” of South Pacific fame. Or on the mysterious yet once wildly popular “Similau,” penned by one of dozens of exotica ghostwriters hired to copy Denny and Lyman’s signature sound—without the prohibitive licensing costs.

“The song does things with Latin rhythms and percussion that never happen. The güiro (notched gourd), for instance, is played backwards, something you just don’t do,” explains Wong. “But it works and makes for one mean song.”

The group comes by its love of exotica honestly. WAITIKI 7 percussionist Lopaka Colon picked up not only his beats, but his amazing bird and animal calls from his father, veteran musician Augie Colon, who played for years with Denny. The senior Colon tracked game in the valleys of Hawai‛i Island and O‛ahu, teaching himself calls to attract birds and animals. When he joined Denny’s group, Augie Colon started tossing in calls to enhance the overall atmosphere, and soon band members were responding, teasingly, in kind.

“It’s exciting, and you can’t help but get into it. When Lopaka whoops and howls, he sounds like some marvelous bird, and he’s playing intense percussion parts at the same time,” Wong enthuses. “The birdcalls are a virtuosic element, and they require an acoustic approach to work well. Samples or keyboards can sound so canned. And it really gives the original exotica musicians like Augie their due.”

Wong himself was exposed to the magic of these calls as a child. He grew up tagging along with his grandfather to hear Arthur Lyman, one of the exotica greats who also used birdcalls for dramatic effect. “We’d be sitting ten feet from the guy and he’d be playing solo vibes and doing birdcalls,” Wong recalls. “It was really otherworldly. I got the sound in my ear, even though I didn’t know it was part of a larger musical thing.”

WAITIKI 7’s originals keep true to the spirit of this larger musical movement, renewing exotica’s ties to Hawaiian culture and moving audience members deeply. Wong’s “Sweet Pīkake Serenade,” inspired by traditional Hawaiian ballads, keeps it so real, it literally makes exotica fans weep. “When we performed for the 500th show of Kansas Public Radio’s Retro Cocktail Hour,” Wong remembers, “there were serious tiki fans who had driven from Chicago, L.A., South Carolina to Lawrence and they had us play for four hours. When we played ‘Sweet Pīkake Serenade,’ the audience started crying tears of joy. We still get fan mail from that gig.”

Tiki culture and its exotica soundtrack have another serious side: the heady cocktails once served alongside the music’s sonic dreamscapes. And just like real exotica demands virtuosic musicianship, real tiki cocktails require premium ingredients artfully balanced: freshly creamed coconuts, just squeezed juices, homemade allspice liqueurs, the clove-lime-almond notes of falernum syrup.

“We’re taking this wholly authentic approach to the music,” Wong explains. “To stay in line with that, we take our cocktails very seriously, in the same vein as us performing acoustically.” Wong and WAITIKI 7 have created several custom cocktails for the album, and recipes are included in the liner notes. “There’s a big tiki revival going on, in places like Boston and New York,” notes Wong, “and exotica is a big part of that.”

Serious tiki fans, as WAITIKI 7 has discovered, turn up in the most unexpected places. Though the band was founded in play at lū‛aus in the Boston area, where many members live, they have played some of the quirkiest gigs imaginable: A bar mitzvah at the New England Aquarium, an Indian wedding held in a New Jersey Greek Orthodox church, an art-deco train chugging through Vermont at the height of mud season.

And last but not least, “We of course do tiki festivals,” Wong chuckles. “Nothing like a field full of New Englanders wearing fezzes and sipping rum barrels to get in the mood. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

Sephardic salsa and Southeast Asian-Jewish standup. New music rituals and ancient inscriptions. Parades and jam sessions, world premieres and kid’s music. This is a no-holds-barred party that does what America’s premier Jewish music festival has done for 25 years: break down the walls between past and future, between multifaceted possibilities of Jewish culture and audiences at large.

The Bay Area’s Jewish Music Festival marks its two and a half decades with a day of free outdoor festivities for all ages and background at the Yerba Buena Gardens on July 11, 2010, including instrument building workshops, instant choruses, klezmer jams, and performances running from kid-friendly to hip. “We want these outdoor events to celebrate the local Bay Area scene, where the klezmer revival started and where global music and Jewish music blend in our musically diverse community,” explains Festival Director Ellie Shapiro.

In addition to the fun free-for-all, the Festival is presenting several groundbreaking multi-media, multi-platform performances, the edgy interpretation of Jewish roots that has become part and parcel of its mission. July will see the world premier of a commissioned music and dance piece by composer Dan Plonsey (Dan Plonsey’s Bar Mitzvah); a strikingly sensual installation hinting at the secret lives of Babylonian women (The Bowls Project); and the rave-worthy, trans-Mediterranean electro-dance of Watcha Clan, direct from Marseilles, France.

New music composer Dan Plonsey has worked with everyone from avant-jazz legend Anthony Braxton to highly imaginative author Harvey Pekar, and has garnered extensive awards and fellowships for his innovative yet wryly grounded musical projects. Plonsey, who was raised in a secular Jewish family, had never undergone the ritual himself. Instead, he has composed Dan Plonsey’s Bar Mitzvah, an exploration with choreographer Eric Kupers and the Dandelion Dancetheater of the meaning of ceremony and the transition to adulthood, commissioned by the Festival and premiering in association with the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Avant garde dance veteran Anna Halprin will also be on hand July 8, 7 pm at the CJM for a special preview performance.

The Bowls Project takes ancient inscriptions from clay incantation bowls, buried to magical ends underneath Babylonian houses and incised with wishes and hopes from the mundane to the erotic. Jewlia Eisenberg, the vocal and conceptual dynamo behind the punk/funk/Balkan/Jewish group Charming Hostess, transforms these ancient inscriptions into a visual and sonic experience that interweaves the past—Babylon was a major center of Jewish culture at the time—with the present, today’s Iraq; the spiritual with the personal. To invoke the bowls, the project unfolds in a dome structure, with the inscriptions projected on its interior thanks to video artist Shezad Dawood. Eisenberg will lead a workshop digging into the project earlier in the day, and then festival goers will be able to interact with the space independently.

The Silver Anniversary Festival season culminates on July 18, in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and with the global electronica phenomenon Watcha Clan performing as part of their summer New Frequencies program. Their sound brings hard-hitting beats to North African, Sephardic, French, and just about every other Mediterranean groove imaginable. The band’s high-energy performances are led by vocalist Sistah K, who celebrates and mutates her Jewish background into addictive and irrepressible calls to dance. Watcha Clan’s multicultural take on roots parallels the Festival’s own mission.

“The Festival’s mission has always been to present music that both celebrates Jewish experience in innovative ways and engages the broader community,” Shapiro reflects. “The outdoor events really explore what it means to be Jewish in the multicultural world and embrace what the Bay Area is about, as a hub of multicultural life.” This hub is home to a rich mix of local artists who will be performing in the park and are shifting the boundaries of what it means to participate in Jewish culture.

Artists like Middle Eastern percussion master Dror Sinai or artists like singer Kat Parra, who was mentored by Patti Cathcart of Tuck and Patti but who dove into the salsa scene, opening for major acts like singer Celia Cruz. At the same time, Parra began uncovering her family’s Sephardic roots, which she discovered worked beautifully with the Afro-Latin rhythms she had come to love. “It feels to me like a natural next step as the Sephardic music can be so vibrant and infectious in its melodies,” Parra explains. “The melodies actually easily fit within an Afro-diasporic rhythmic context, as does the timelessness of the lyrics.”

With another unexpected perspective on Jewish culture, comedian Joe Nguyen draws on his experience as a person of both Vietnamese and Jewish background, finding the funny side of his heritage in his funky hometown of San Francisco. Eprhyme and Joshua Walters add hip-hop to the mix.

The day in the park will also honor the Bay Area’s unmatched contribution to Jewish culture—the 1970s revival of klezmer that jump-started two generations of innovative musicians. The old-school mastery of groups like the Red Hot Chachkas, recently lauded for their holiday performance with the San Francisco Symphony, which will pair perfectly with the younger innovators like KugelPlex, who bring in other global elements from Africa to the Balkans as they take on Jewish tradition.

Yet the party is about more than merely savoring Jewish music; it’s about making it. That’s why the July day in the park kicks off with an interactive, second-line parade led by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars founding member, Glenn Hartman, and with family activities like an instrument petting zoo with “zookeepers” from the Mission- based Community Music Center and an instrument making workshop at CJM that turns found objects into sonorous sensations that will feature in the day’s closing parade. Veteran kid’s music performers Ira Levin, Gerry Tenney and Elana Jagoda will keep the younger crowd in the mood.

Older participants will get a chance to burst into song as part of an instant chorus, designed by Jewish a cappella group Vocolot’s Linda Hirschhorn to get even the rustiest of vocal chords harmonizing, or to polish their old-world licks as part of a klezmer jam session hosted by local klezmorim. “We’ve had a hundred people show up in the past for these jams,” Shapiro laughs. “The sound was amazing.” In addition to the klezmer jam / workshop – there will be workshops on Middle Eastern modes (maqamat) and rhthyms.

“The interaction and the innovation is what the festival is really about,” notes Shapiro. “As much as it’s honoring the roots of Jewish culture, it’s also pushing it forward and articulating whole new ways relating to it. While, of course, having a good time in the bargain.”

Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen is an alchemist at heart. Finding inspiration in musicians ranging from Bach to Stevie Wonder, Avishai can transform a tired Israeli school tune back into poetic gold. He can take the Sephardic melodies his grandfather sang in prayer, or his mother hummed while washing dishes, and make them groove. He can take a sinuous and spontaneous jazz bass line turn it into a top forty hit.

Avishai’s joyful powers of transformation are in full force on Aurora, an album turning roots into lyrical, intense songs that showcase not only Avishai’s masterful bass and lifelong musical loves, but his newfound voice.

“It’s a very good practice for any musician, to learn to sing. It’s a beautiful practice in humility, an ongoing craft,” Avishai explains, musing on why he took up singing after decades as a successful jazz bassist. “But you have to take care. You have to like yourself enough to listen to yourself. To accept things that don’t always come out just how you imagined them. It is very exposed.”

Though Avishai’s first performance as a vocalist came at an American summer camp, where a boogie-woogie loving music director got the kids singing songs from Free to Be You and Me, he dropped the idea of combining his chosen instrument and his voice for decades. Years later, at a New York club, Avishai was blown away by Andy Gonzalez “an unsung hero of Latin bass, who effortlessly sang along while brilliantly powering the rhythm section. “I asked him how he managed it,” Avishai recalls. “He just looked at me and said in his characteristically New York tough way, ‘Yeah, it took me a minute or two.’”

Not one to turn away from a challenge, Avishai began singing himself, led by the sound of the bowed upright bass. The bow, producing the sustained notes crucial to perfect bass technique, showed Avishai how to use his voice expressively. “My two main influences as a singer are my mother and the bow,” he smiles.

Avishai’s mother would sing Ladino songs, the Spanish-based language of the Sephardic Jewish tradition, as she went about her day. The sound of her effortless, utterly-sincere voice—along with the influence of his father and grandfather singing in the Sabbath and the classical training he received on piano—stuck with him.

It sparked his exploration of songs like “Noches Noches” and “Morenika,” whose haunting melodies seeped into Avishai’s consciousness from childhood. Harnessing the power of these melodies, Avishai’s arrangements are guided by some unexpected sources: the counterpunctual brilliance of J.S. Bach.

“When I was really young, Bach’s music fascinated me. He sustains two melodies at the same time, and one supports the other: Without one, the other can’t exist,” Avishai notes. “It’s like a fifth dimension that comes into play when I’m listening to and creating music.” Music like his delicate piano-accompanied rethinking of a classic Israeli song learned by most schoolchildren, “El Hatzipor,” about a bird telling a distant listener about the beauty of Israel.

Along with the vibrant Sephardic and Baroque sounds of his childhood, Avishai’s sojourn in New York as a young man made an indelible stamp on his music, where he went from working construction to playing with jazz great Chick Corea and as many Latin ensembles as he could manage. He loves drawing on Latin grooves and tucking them into his arrangements.

“I incorporate the feel of the clave a lot into my compositions. Whoever invented it was a genius,” Avishai exclaims. “It’s a common language that, in two bars of music, unites Africa, Cuba, and New York, where I heard some of the best players perform. That influenced my writing big time; I’m a rhythmic thinker, yet very melodic.”

Much of the musical thinking behind Aurora sprang from simple melodies Avishai improvised on his bass during key moments in his life, personal turning points that resonated emotionally. Songs like “Alon Basela,” an homage to the fortitude of men like his father, whom he compares to the striking alon tree whose strength and resilience is demonstrated by growing straight out of the rock. Or “Shir Preda” which earned Avishai an unheard of hit on Israeli pop radio, “something that never happens to jazz guys,” he laughs. “When I write with the bass, the songs are more grounded.”

This powerful grounding, in both Avishai’s instrument and his voice, transcends language. Though Avishai sings in Hebrew and Ladino, he has few qualms about being misunderstood. Thinking back to his first revelatory experience listening to his sister’s Beatles albums, Avishai recalls the joys of imagining his own stories to match the compelling songs he fell in love with. "I could make up my own images because I didn't understand the lyrics, or only half understood,” Avishai reflects. “The honesty of that music was stronger than any language, and that’s what I long to transmit with my own music."

Shifting between languages and genres, as oud vibrates alongside piano chords, Avishai speaks with a voice that is both global and extremely local, universally resonant and yet deeply personal. All thanks to an unexpected turn to song: “The voice is always fresh because it’s such a human, ever-evolving instrument,” Avishai reflects. “You can never know what to expect and you can never master it, even if you try to gain as much control as you can. It’s a healthy but paradoxical thing, like the heart.”

There’s a sound you hear in the desert, a hum that can only be felt in the deepest silence. It is the high tone of vibrating nerves, the rush of blood in the veins. It’s the ultimate beat, the dance of the body itself.

This sound lies behind filmmaker, producer, and former VJ Kathi von Koerber’s three-part exploration of the life, worldview, and creativity of the nomadic Tuareg peoples of the Sahara. Envisioned from the start as a feature-length documentary film and soundtrack, Footsteps in Africa (KiahKeya Productions; 2009) reveals the vibrant cultural life of the world’s most forbidding climate and is coming to select festivals across North America and the world in 2010.

The sounds Von Koerber uncovered deep in the desert find new resonances on re-imagined tracks of Footsteps in Africa Soundtrack: Nomadic Remix. Brought together by producer and conscious compiler Joshua Jacobs of Ambient Groove, DJs from across the planetary dance floor—from the ambient healing of Rara Avis to the worldly downtempo of the Kaya Project, from rising stars like DimmSummer to global remix icons like Cheb i Sabbah—explore the nature of the desert and its unexpectedly global nomadic denizens, with part of the profits going directly back to Tuareg communities.

“In the desert, there are no birds, no trees, just this denseness. You feel an amazing hertz frequency,” von Koerber explains. So she and soundtrack composer Jamshied Sharifi decided they needed to do something innovative. They invited throat singer Benno Klandt to vocalize over the entire film, a subtle sound only audible on a good sound system yet quietly uniting the soundtrack.

This sound, the hidden hum of the desert, was instantly picked up on by dubstepper Solar Lion. He added a sitar and brought the desert buzz front and center on his remix of the film’s “End Titles.” “You listen to this track and all of a sudden, you can hear it,” Von Koerber smiles; “the tone of the desert.”

DJs had unusually rich material to play with as they created their remixes. Von Koerber, in the process of filming and recording, went to festivals throughout the Tuareg region, events where nomads from Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Niger met and made music together. There, tent jams go on for days on end and put events like Burning Man to shame.

“Westerners gather in mad chaos, but at festivals like the one in Goosi, where some of the tracks were recorded, it’s all about the community, singing together for hours,” von Koerber explains. ”The people who come out live in desert all the time. They hold family and tribal conferences. The music and the gatherings have the intention of promoting exchange and peace at meetings that can’t take place anywhere else.”

In addition to striking on-the-spot recordings, von Koerber enlisted some of the best popular performers from North Africa, such as Moroccan trance legend Hassan Hakmoun. Sharifi, a Persian-American composer with a strong jazz and classical background and an unfailing global ear, brought this varied vibrant soundscape together to support Von Koerber’s vivid images.

The eclectic international approach echoes the Tuaregs’ own distant roots, which stretch back through North African to Spain and Yemen to India, in a centuries-long journey resembling that of the Roma. “If you speak with Tuareg leaders and elders,” Von Koerber notes, “they’ll tell you they came from the east originally.”

Cheb i Sabbah embraces the entire geographic scope of their travels with his artful analog meets digital touch on “Hyena,” while New York global beat masters Nickodemus and EarthRise SoundSystem weave in elements from Asia to Africa. On “Open,” Bombay Dub Orchestra took Hakmoun’s gritty and compelling voice and emphasized its power by bringing in unexpected acoustic instruments like the djembe. “The DJs really felt what needed to happen and what was right for the desert,” von Koerber enthuses. “They took it to a whole new level.”

Von Koerber and her collaborators’ engagement with the stunning sights and sounds of the Sahara stretches into new territory, as well. She, along with groups like Reality Engine (“Tuareg Goosi Jam Audio-Visual Remix”), hope to transform Tuareg tracks into multi-platform creations people can experience live. “I’ve spent a decade creating installations and multi-media presentations,” explains von Koerber. “I’d like to bring that to dancers and listeners, the images and animation that emphasize the message of the music and the film.”

Water and music often intertwine in Tuareg proverbs and songs. As von Koerber puts it, “Water gives life to the body, as music gives life to the soul.” To honor this understanding, fifteen percent of all profits from the remix album will be returned to the community, to support clean water projects. “I wanted to bring the film back to them,” Von Koerber reflects. “It’s their voice, words and thoughts translated. The music and film are representations of them, and I wanted to give back.”

Instead of simply writing a check to charity, von Koerber is using her close ties to Tuareg community leaders to improve wells and purchase covers and new pumping systems as part of the Nomadic Villagers Clean Water Awareness Fund. This collaborative charitable initiative between KiahKeya Productions, the Indigenous Cultural Educational Center, and local Tuareg leaders featured in the film will make simple yet vital changes to improve daily life, yet not alter it radically from its traditional nomad roots.

Along with helping the bold and hardy people who captured her imagination years ago as she backpacked through her native Africa, von Koerber, herself a global trans-cultural nomad, feels the Tuareg have something valuable to give the world. “The Tuareg are nomads, and freedom is their music,” muses von Koerber. “The album awakens you to the nomad in every one of us. It brings you to that joy you feel in the desert, by getting you out on the dance floor. That joy is like water: we all need it.”

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