World Music Wire:

Smooth Electronica artist and Latin percussionist Carlos “Go Go” Gomez is three things: master musician, priest, and martial artist. Now after decades as a sought-after rock, pop, and Latin player and as a spiritual seeker, he has found a groove-heavy way to merge these three paths on New Paradigm Global Music, a richly layered, multi-faceted sonic journey designed to engage, inspire, and elevate.

“One of the reasons for creating this music was to integrate the various parts of my life into one,” Gomez explains. “I wanted to break down those barriers that exist between being a priest here and a musician there and a martial artist over there.”

Eloquent drones and elegant beats—punctuated by Gomez’s evocative and passionate percussion—reveal this newfound place of unity and an omnivorous musician at his best. Gomez has dug deep into his Afro-Latin heritage and played with Eartha Kitt, Tito Puente, Maxwell, Sade, and Mariah Carey, to name just a few. Yet this album reflects a new understanding, a new sense of unity and resonance after an amazing career and very full life.

Gomez, raised in the Bronx, grew up playing drums from the moment he could walk. Fascinated by both the Santeria saints/orishas of his Cuban mother and the revelatory Latin rock of Carlos Santana, Gomez became a professional musician and yogi in his teens, founding the groundbreaking group Seguida with several close friends. The band took Latin rock one step further—into soul, funk, and disco territory—and Gomez became an extremely versatile hard-gigging player.

And a powerful percussionist—so powerful it affected his health and nearly cost him his life. After doctors gave up on him, he turned to an Akan (West African) priest in Queens, who through herbs and prayer returned Gomez to both health and music. Gomez was so moved by the experience, he eventually traveled to Nigeria and became an Ifa priest himself. He continues to pursue both physical disciplines such as jeet kune do, tae kwon do, and yoga, and spiritual ones—reading and studying intensively about theosophy, the Kabbalah, and practicing meditation, Taoism, and Inner Alchemy.

This seemingly diverse experience converged one day a year and a half ago during a meditation workshop led by teacher Jim Self (whose voice graces “Law of Attraction”). During one meditation session, Gomez had a “transformative experience,” the kind of concrete, visceral spiritual experience he had craved for years. It changed the way he approached music.

No longer satisfied with simply “being someone else’s hands,” Gomez felt it was time to create music of his own. It was time to give expression to what he had gleaned from a complex and rich life behind the drums, in martial arts studios, and in temples. The resulting album traces an expanding spiral from slow and contained, to energetic and ecstatic, and finally to transcendent. “It’s an invitation to go inside, for listeners to reach the same state I found that day,” Gomez notes.

But this journey is not passive background music; its hypnotic quality is meant to spark movement and meaningful connection to the body. “Aremu Odudua” takes an age-old Santeria melody, as sung by Gomez’s late Afro-Cuban singing teacher Lazaro Ros, that tells of Odudua, the progenitor of the Yoruba. For Gomez, this Abraham-like figure resonates with Mantak Chia’s bone marrow cleansing qi gong—connecting with the bones, one’s very foundation.

The foundation of Gomez’s tracks is drones, and these reflect his many perspectives and influences, as well as his ultimate message. “Metu Neter,” inspired by the divination techniques described by Pan-African spiritual teacher and writer Ra Un Nefer Amen, unfolds in a “non-traditional mantra,” layers of sounds from different philosophies and faiths resonating as one.

“If you listen carefully, there are three levels,” Gomez explains. “The classic OM is divided into five different sounds, as it was taught to me at the Satchidananda Center in New York almost forty years ago. The second layer is a Taoist mantra, and finally the third is an Arabic chant reminiscent of the call to prayer. This was designed to represent the essential unity of all religions, that they are all part of the Universal Truth.”

Though the tracks revolve around drones—the sounds of flowing, splashing water on “Water Dragon” or the bells of “Law of Attraction”—Gomez’s sixth sense for rhythm keeps them hypnotic yet never static. “On ‘Metu Neter,’ for example, I was trying to constantly change my conga playing in a subtle way; it’s a metaphysical part of the song,” Gomez reflects. “Pop music requires absolute precise repetition, and before digital recording, I had to do it physically. That’s how I got on so many records. But I’m breaking that mold, and instead, I’m trying to create constant subtle change so that you barely even notice it, much like life.”

These musical concepts serve a greater goal: Gomez’s message of spiritual unity, love, and connection to the inner self through the body. “I love movement, and that’s why I did yoga and martial arts. But many people think dance and movement is just about seduction and sex,” muses Gomez. “Yet there’s also dancing for your own personal joy and for your spirit. Dancing can lead to internalization, to a transformative state of ecstasy and bliss.”

World Music Wire:

Bursting with old-school big band power, Afrobeat crew Chopteeth know how to turn skeptical foot-tappers into shirt-whirling, wolf-whistling believers. The group regularly fills DC’s dance floors with nostalgic African fans and American-born converts to the style exemplified by the now revered Fela Kuti. They’ve supported diverse acts from Aaron Neville to Gov’t Mule, from Konono No. 1 to Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars.

Chopteeth Live captures that full-on energy, with a heavy-hitting horn section, layers of irresistibly catchy interlocking percussion, and carefully crafted takes on African pop classics.

For Chopteeth, even a seeming straightforward live album became a deep exercise in tracing musical lineages. Over many sweaty gigs, the band honed a late Fela piece of fugue-like complexity (“Question Jam Answer”) and spent months calling Nigeria to find an unsung master of African funk. They dug through record store bins, trolled the internet, and mined the vinyl of die-hard African record buffs to find lo-fi and neglected gems.

These gems harken back to the golden age of African pop, the 1970s. In rough-and-ready studios, musicians laid down heady mixes of James Brown-inspired funk, complex chord changes, and local rhythms. They reacted to soul and rumba, to jazz and rock, to harsh political realities and deep roots. Though some musicians of this generation rose to international prominence, many languished, only recently rediscovered by dedicated African music fans, labels, and collectors.

Chopteeth’s discoveries, presented with passion on stage, point to several major figures, forgotten in the recent Fela craze on and off Broadway, who were instrumental in shaping what came to be known as Afrobeat. One striking example, Nigerian jazz player Peter King, had a show so hot back in the day that it rivaled even Fela’s own. Once celebrated, King receded from the international spotlight after his early 70s heyday.

Chopteeth loved King’s tune “Freedom Dance,” a funky vamp on a compelling jazz chord progression that was a blast to play live. When they captured a live version for the album, though, they knew they had to track King down. What began as a simple exercise in copyright clearance became a multi-continent hunt for the forgotten icon.

After a month’s worth of calls to Nigeria, Chopteeth bassist Robert Fox finally connected with King on the phone. “I told him who we were and that we wanted to do a version of his song, and to arrange permission and payment,” Fox recalls. “He was really cool about it. It was an honor for us, to get his blessing, and give him the due he deserves.”

The album gives many other artists their due, from Guinea (“Festival”) to Senegal (“Jiin Ma Jiin Ma”) to Congo (“Gagne Perdu”), showing the musical and geographic sweep that characterizes Chopteeth’s live shows. Their versatility and energy have won them a wildly devoted local fanbase—and garnered them six Wammies (the DC answer to the Grammies®), including Artist of the Year. Their debut studio CD Chopteeth helped build this following, thanks to trans-African originals that eclectically combined the wealth of African pop with upbeat lyrics in multiple languages.

Two years went by, and it was time to capture the band’s live vibe, the heavy-duty intensity of a good old big band, something increasingly rare in this age of mp3s and streaming files. “The truth is people don’t often hear big bands playing dance music live anymore,” muses Fox. “You hear a song like Fela’s ‘J.J.D.’ in person, and it just feels different. It’s a shocking experience for the audience.”

The audience at the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, for example, barely knew what hit them. The band decided to tackle a little-known Ellington tune, “Didjeridoo,” after they were invited to play at the DC celebration of its iconic native son.

Chopteeth had a unique take on the composition, created after Ellington toured Africa in the 60s as a musical ambassador. They had a feel for the musical roots that inspired the elegant piece. Trombonist Craig Considine whipped out his circular breathing chops to simulate the drone of a didjeridoo, while the group’s baritone sax player Trevor Specht stalked the piece’s elusive final note.

“There’s a low A note that some saxes get and some don’t,” explains Michael Shereikis with a laugh. “If your horn doesn’t go there, you can stuff something in the bell. Mark Gilbert, our tenor sax player, stuffed his big fist into the horn of the baritone sax to get that low note. They practiced in the dressing room and it worked. It made quite the impression on stage.”

And, like all of Chopteeth’s prime live cuts, makes for an equally striking impression on record.

***

“A storming powerhouse of big-band African funk, Chopteeth is smart, tight and relentlessly driving. Their live shows have been known to make even the most motionless of concert-watchers flail their limbs and do something that resembles dancing. Only the most determined stoics will be able to resist the grooves conjured up by Chopteeth.”  —Washington Post

“Afrofunk with lunatic energy”—National Public Radio

“It’s as if Tower of Power resurrected as Afrofunk.” —The Albuquerque Journal

World Music Wire:

When kora-player Ballaké Sissoko approached French cellist Vincent Ségal after a show, Ségal never suspected that he’d find himself several years later on the banks of the Niger, digging into African music’s introspective side with a virtuosic Malian bard. He never imagined that the curious duo would discover striking similarities in their music and lives, creating a free space for cross-cultural creativity based on deep commonalities.

“We’re the same age,” Ségal notes, explaining the wide swath of common ground the two unlikely collaborators share. “We have the same kind of family, a son and daughter. We have the same way of life, playing these quiet instruments passionately. I’ve spent time with many musicians”—from Sting to avant guitarist Marc Ribot—“but it’s not the same as it is with Ballaké.”

Though unexpected, the results of this intuitive closeness feel organic. Their album, Chamber Music, recorded in the subdued atmosphere of Salif Keita’s Mouffou Studio on the Niger River in Bamako, Mali, has a natural flow, yet brims with the subtlety of two masterful artists working in warm concert.

The soft-spoken Sissoko and Ségal share a powerful link with tradition, with guiding teachers, and with similarly rich-voiced instruments. They also share a seemingly insatiable longing to push tradition to the limit and escape their ceremonial functions as musicians with certain roles to play.

Sissoko learned the deep-rooted poetry and music of the djeli (Bambara for “griot”) from his father and grandfather, taking on the traditional role of historian, praise singer, and bard. Yet even before befriending Ségal, Sissoko reveled in innovation. He pursued challenging collaborations with blues greats (Taj Mahal) and Italian minimalist composers (Ludovico Einaudi, with whom he performed at the Festival in the Desert in 2008).

Along the same lines, Ségal was rigorously trained as a classical cellist—he’s a former player with the Opera de Lyon—as a musician destined for a technically demanding role in Europe’s art tradition. Yet an influential early teacher encouraged him to pursue his fascination with African, Latin, and rock sounds, and to dig into other music outside the narrow confine of classical. He’s now frequently seen brandishing a funky electric cello as part of the trip-hop project, Bumcello, or laying down tracks for everyone from Cesaria Evora to Blackalicious.

While both musicians had a long history of working and playing in genre-bending ways, they realized that their work together deserved serious thought and time. “It was important to get to know each other musically. For quite some time we got together at Vincent’s home whenever I was in Paris,” explains Sissoko. “We built our work together, step by step. Today, when we play, we understand each other without saying a word: One look is enough.”

This meeting of the minds had a strong basis on their shared understanding of music, both European and African. Ségal had gotten into Afropop, listening to records with African neighbors and going to shows. But Sissoko, taking the lead, showed him a quieter, more introspective side to West African music the duo feels is too often overlooked.

Their collaboration gave Ségal, used to compromising his sound and technique when playing with hip hop or pop performers, what he calls “an escape:” room to more fully explore his instrument. Sissoko would suggest traditional melodies he loved, and Ségal would vamp and interweave parts around them, slapping and plucking around Sissoko’s virtuosic kora. Or Ségal would bring jazz-infused compositions like “Oscarine,” giving the duo a melodic base from where they could leap merrily into improvisation.

“Ballaké comes from African classical music, in a way,” muses Ségal. “It’s not like a meeting when you try to do a fusion of different styles. I knew more about African pop music, but it wasn’t about finding grooves or the right feeling. We just learned to play together without saying anything.”

They could best capture this tacit, understated link, Sissoko suggested, by traveling to his native land and recording at the studio founded by African icon Salif Keita that caters specifically to acoustic projects. There, working through the night and eschewing overdubs, the duo laid down spare, graceful tracks that make full use of the cello’s percussive and sonorous possibilities, and the kora’s rich sound. They also turned to local musicians to add other musical elements, including stirring vocals: As a tribute to Sissoko’s late singer friend Kader Berry, they worked with the broadly talented Malian-born, Ivorian-based singer Awa Sangho (“Regret”).

Ségal and Sissoko love to draw on other harp-friendly cultures, from Crete where Sissoko heard the tune that inspired “Houdesti,” to the Celto-French sounds of Bretagne (“Historie de Molly”). And while seeming to range far afield, they always return to the intimacy that makes small acoustic performances so moving—an element that runs deep in African music.

“Most people think of African music in terms of fast dance beats and percussion, perhaps because much of that music is so good,” Ségal reflects. “But you have a forest of different instruments, a variety of sounds and feelings. The quiet, pensive side of African music is what Ballaké shared with me, and what we bring to our collaboration.”

World Music Wire:

The whistling of the high-mountain wind creates eerie overtones and postmodern statement. The repeated thrum of a string against wood and hide turns into a meditative, evocative figure straight from the avant garde. The descendents of isolated Siberian herdsmen make serious, strangely universal music out of some of the planet’s quirkiest acoustics.

The Tuvan acoustic quartet Huun Huur Tu prove that Tuvan music can take plenty of intelligent innovation on their latest album, Ancestors Call, a collection of the ensemble’s best-loved songs and pieces rethought thanks to their close interaction with Western music. Using traditional instruments and drawing subtly on 20th-century composers, funky rhythms, and the palette of electronica, Huun Huur Tu transform ancient songs into complex acoustic compositions. North American listeners will get a chance to experience this fresh approach in January and February 2011, as the group tours the U.S.

As they began touring in the West seventeen years ago, Huun Huur Tu almost single-handedly introduced the outside world to the boundless wealth of Tuvan traditions, thanks in great part to their superior musicianship. Hailing from the high pastures of the Altai Mountains in south central Siberia, the musicians have spent decades honing the overtone singing, instrumental approaches, and vibrant songs of their home.

Yet the group also had the musical savvy and the chops to take their traditions far from the slopes and valleys of Central Asia. They made groundbreaking traditional recordings that put their home on the map. They toured the world, gaining fans and inspiring overtone singers. They’ve wowed audiences in both Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, eliciting surprised remarks after one festival show in Kenya that they played with the same ”soul” as local musicians. They sparked a boom in Tuvan and other throatsinging, lute-strumming ensembles from Central Asia that have been the mainstays of global music festivals.

Being the first (and arguably the most skillful) has its advantages. Well-established as “world music” masters, Huun Huur Tu has long been involved in pushing the envelope and digging deep into their roots to find new possibilities. The most recent member to join the group, Radik Tyulyush, a third-generation throatsinger, talented multi-instrumentalist, and conservatory trained composer, added a dose of youthful energy and rhythmic complexity recalling good old American funk.

Recently, Huun Huur Tu has worked together with prominent Russian composer Vladimir Martynov, who drew on the works by the visionary early 20th-century avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov to create Children of the Otter (forthcoming as a DVD on GreenWave), a 70-minute piece for chamber orchestra, choir, and Tuvan ensemble.

Martynov’s background in Russian Orthodox music, other non-Russian music from Central Asia, as well as his embrace of everything from mid-century minimalism to rock operas to Renaissance polyphony, made collaboration easy and inspiring for Huun Huur Tu. While the quiet influence of minimalism can be felt in the group’s newest approach to “Chyraa-Khoor,” a traditional Tuvan song, but with a contemplative Philip Glass-esque undercurrent.

Another, similarly harmonious collaboration with a very different kind of musician came when the group worked with producer Carmen Rizzo (Niyaz, Seal, Paul Oakenfold, Ryuichi Sakamoto). By working closely with Rizzo on Eternal (GreenWave, 2009), the members of Huun Huur Tu got a taste of how to create electronic soundscapes around traditional material. This experience, along with their role as the heart of a new kind of chamber orchestra, guided much of their music on Ancestors Call.

“Gradually, over the years, the sound has shifted,” reflects manager and co-producer of Ancestors Call Vladimir Oboronko. “It’s become more sophisticated, more-dimensional, and much more relevant to current music sensibilities. Huun Huur Tu is innovating indigenous Tuvan music under the subtle influence of the music of 20th and 21st centuries, and the result is both contemporary music that belongs to the whole world and a fresh take on the traditional music of their beloved Tuva”

World Music Wire:

The pickPocket ensemble could be playing in some midnight café, as patrons smile with nostalgia. Or they could be gliding down a shadowy cobblestone street, as passersby kick up their heels. Or you might have caught them at the very beginning, when a refugee from experimental electronic music started to waltz through practice sessions on a mountainside overlooking the San Francisco Bay.

The cinematic, polyglot charm of what pickPocket’s founder Rick Corrigan calls “café music” moves from the pensive, bittersweet Memory, the group’s latest album, to rousing and playful dance numbers swaying in odd meters. With two upcoming shows in Berkeley in November and December, the quintet promises an intimacy and immediacy that borrows gleefully from Balkan boogies, Arabic ornaments, wry French musette, and just about anything else they can get their hands on.

“Café music is almost like the inversion of folk,” exclaims Corrigan. “Folk music is something deep and particular to a region or people. Café music is just opposite: We come from all the places we come from and meet in the middle.”

Free to play with any and all elements that catch their ear—North African blues, whirling Balkan beats, elegant Middle Eastern melodies played on the banjo, old-school waltzes—the pickPocket ensemble aims not to resemble, but to reassemble music into a new acoustic form. The group sounds like the house band at intimate night spot, where a Paris street corner, the outlines of the Atlas Mountains, or a Mediterranean village square magically flash past the windows in quick succession.

This is no gimmick; it’s the way pickPocket hears the world. “You’d go into a record store and in the “world music” section everything used to be Balkanized—excuse the phrase—into countries: Greece, France, Turkey. But most musicians don’t think that way,” Corrigan explains. “They mix with anyone whom they can communicate with, which is why we like to talk about café music. It’s not about nations; it’s about intimacy, about just you and me, interacting face to face.”

This face-to-face feeling and disregard for ethnic and genre boundaries give audience members from across the globe the eerie feeling they’re listening to music from their childhood. “We often have fans tell us that they love a certain song, that it reminds them of music they heard as a child. The funny thing is, it’s never the same song twice and never the same place twice,” muses Corrigan.

pickPocket prides itself on crafting musical narratives from disparate elements. The resultant pieces sound just a breath away from the film soundtracks that inspired many of the members growing up. Yet the guiding principle that brings it all together is simplicity. Corrigan and fellow members often spend rehearsal time, not finessing the sinuous melodies or spitfire 11/8 time signatures but figuring out how to get rid of extraneous notes, until just the perfect polished essence remains.

The result: “I remember a recent show, seeing a family of children, their parents and grandparents all getting into it,” guitarist and banjo player Yates Brown recounts. “And we’re playing this intricate tune in 9, and these kids are dancing to it. It’s deep music, but I think that's a telling example of how it invites people in.”

To manage this feat, the group draws on diverse past experience—from klezmer (violinist Marguerite Ostro) and Balkan music, to Latin (percussionist Michaelle Goerlitz) and jazz (Berklee grad and double bassist Kurt Ribak). Brown cut his teeth on Middle Eastern and North African music playing with a traditional Arabic orchestra he met through the clinic where he works and where many of the patients are of Arabic heritage. “Next thing I know I’m bringing in the banjo to see how an oud [Arabic lute] melody might sound on it,” Brown laughs. “I think that spirit of exploration and integration is very much in keeping with what I do now in pickPocket.”

Corrigan, in his journey from the cerebral realms of electronic music to this vibrant and visceral vision of café music, grasped the importance of inclusive, seductive simplicity early on. “I wanted music that you just pulled out of your pocket, something very simple and direct,” he explains, referring to the band’s curious name. “It felt so liberating after years behind banks of wires and keyboards.”

After walking away from music for an entire year in his frustration with electronic music, Corrigan woke up one day and picked up the accordion. “I used to play under a tree on Mt. Tamalpais, squeezing back and forth until I connected with the instrument,” Corrigan recalls with a smile.

But he knew that to really get good at his newfound interest, he needed a gig. He pitched the idea to the owner of a local Hungarian restaurant and soon found himself playing every Tuesday evening, drawing kitchen staff out to listen and inviting musician friends to join him. This seat-of-the-pants approach transformed into a stable ensemble. The group has slowly honed its sound over ten years, led by Corrigan’s sensibilities and quest for a slower, more intimate music.

“People think of what we do as old-fashioned,” confides Corrigan. “We invoke a world where people gather in close together, and the acoustic quality enhances that. One fan told me our music brought her back to a place of slow conversation that she’d never known and that she missed. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

World Music Wire:

In the dry mountains of New Mexico, an Iraqi oud (lute) master raises homing pigeons. Persecuted for a single potent song, he fled his native land, only to be deprived of his beloved instruments at the border. Yet like the birds he cares for, he has homed in a new nest, where quarter tones can be urged from accordions, rock stars and classical violinists can play Iraqi maqam, and Middle Eastern lullabies echo in Pueblo Indian words.

Meet Rahim AlHaj, oud mastermind and composer behind Little Earth. On the album, a loose but poignant affiliation of musicians from a plethora of places and backgrounds tackle the filigree beauty of Iraqi maqam. Bill Frisell and Peter Buck, Cape Verde’s Maria de Barros and Mali’s Yacouba Sissoko, sitar and Iranian ney virtuosi all explore new territory mapped out by AlHaj’s deep sense of both maqam tradition and the expressive possibilities of global music.

“It was a dream, to compose music for all the world,” AlHaj chuckles. “The challenge of the project was to do more than just get together and jam. It was not just for fun.”

A favorite student of esteemed Iraqi oud player Munir Bashir, AlHaj was trained in both Iraqi maqam and Western classical music. He soon gained a sterling reputation as a performer, eventually leading decades later to Grammy nominations and recordings with the Smithsonian.

He also honed his skills as a composer, skills he has coaxed into full flower on Little Earth, where he transforms musical forms like sama’i (“Sama’i Baghdad”) and Iraqi sea chanteys (“Sailors Three”) into elegant pieces for unexpected instruments.

“Though most sama’i are written for traditional Arabic instruments, I wrote it for a Western string quartet, but they have to play it in the Arabic way, including the special intonation and microtones—we have eight notes between B and B-flat” AlHaj explains. “It was unique, the first time this form was performed by Western musicians on classical strings.”

Though highly successful in his musical career from an early age, AlHaj’s heart cried out against the suffering he saw around him in Iraq, especially with the advent of the brutal Iran-Iraq War that killed millions. “When I started to understand the world, I started to understand justice,” AlHaj reflects. “I felt like I was responsible and obligated to make all my music give voice to the voiceless.”

This desire moved him to set a friend’s poem to music and the resulting song of resistance—titled “Why?”—spread like wildfire from Iraqi to Iraqi. Soon it was being sung everywhere, and AlHaj found himself in one of Saddam’s prisons.

Only two years later did AlHaj end up at the border with Syria, free to go yet deprived of his precious ouds. After several years in exile, he was granted asylum in the United States, where he landed in Albuquerque thanks to a strange cultural misunderstanding: Thinking that, as a Middle Easterner, AlHaj would feel more at home in New Mexico’s arid climate, his sponsoring organization sent the new refugee to the deserts of the Southwest. A world away from the fecund land he had fled.

Yet this mishap put AlHaj in a state rich in diversity with thriving global music connections. And as he settled into his new life, he began to seek out musicians eager to bring their voices to AlHaj’s stunning oud, careful compositions, and heartfelt message.

"The musicians use their own sound and environment—I don’t want them to imitate me—but they need to play the composition right, with the influence from the Middle East and the maqam,” AlHaj notes. “This music is composed music; we’re not just jamming. It’s all written."

Within these compositions, however, collaborators found new means of expression, using a language that they shared with AlHaj. Robert Mirabal, the Taos Pueblo Indian renaissance man and flute player, turned an Iraqi lullaby into a statement in his language of Tewa (“Lullaby”). Guy Klucevsek managed miraculously to get his accordion to hit the right quarter tones (“The Searching”), while Chinese p’ip’a (lute) player Liu Fung found a way to make her pentatonic work with AlHaj’s maqam modes (“River”), all to his great amazement.

The musical encounters often had a strong dose of kismet, as AlHaj’s work with Cape Verdean singer Maria de Barros proves. When recording took AlHaj to California, he met with de Barros and they struck up a conversation. AlHaj mentioned a piece dedicated to the memory of his mother and the warmth that emanated from her, de Barros exclaimed that she had Portuguese lyrics about her mother. The result (“Missing You/Mae Querida”) was more than a Cape Verdean morna being played by an oud; it was the bittersweet swing of de Barros’s home intertwined with the soulfulness of Iraqi maqam.

This soulfulness—the moan of a woman in mourning, the sigh of a palm tree collapsing under gun fire—remains AlHaj’s constant companion. It, and AlHaj’s political commitment to peace, continue to inform his work, and led him to close collaboration with a musical legend from his country’s erstwhile enemy, Housein Omoumi, master of the Iranian ney (traditional flute).

These elements are felt most powerfully in “Qassim,” a piece memorializing his vivacious and optimistic cousin killed during the U.S. occupation. “I needed to tell my cousin’s story in music. Iraqi women cry out in grief from their stomach, very low,” AlHaj reflects. “The piece starts with the sound of the horror at what happened. An Iraqi woman’s cry, thanks to Stephen Kent’s didjeridoo, and the rhythm of the piece are driving, insisting to be heard.”

Beyond the sorrow and insistence on telling the stories of those without voice, AlHaj has found a new contentment and sense of place in the U.S., and more mournful pieces are joined by sprightly expressions of pure joy. Works like “Morning in Hyattville,” inspired by a cheeky mockingbird and augmented by guitarist Bill Frisell, and “Athens to Baghdad” where AlHaj explores what he playfully calls “a place of sweetness” with his friend and sometime collaborator Peter Buck of REM.

It is this union of the bitter and sweet, the harsh and the soothing, which gives AlHaj’s vision its punch. For AlHaj, his work is about far more than curious peregrinations and sonic juxtaposition. It’s about finding a path to peace and ending the suffering of the women and children, the bold minds and kind spirits, he witnessed.

“Of course, musicians from opposite sides in conflict can come together and make music,” AlHaj states. “But we must figure out how to make music together before we become enemies, or we will prove ourselves fools. If we can hold that ideal high, as a principle, we can make it into fact. We will make it real and the earth will indeed become little.”

World Music Wire:

Most public schools facing the current funding crunch mount desperate donation drives or bake sales. But at the arts-based East Village Community School in the heart of one of New York’s historically bohemian and global neighborhoods, parents, students, and school staff opted instead to raise money by singing compelling ballads, making funky beats, and recalling unexpected family stories.

Fresh, savvy, and chock full of infectious songs and history, Songs from the East Village maps the world of childhood, as it spans the globe. Like the school and its neighborhood home, the album unites Iraqis and Tibetans, immigrants by choice and refugees, deep historical roots and edgy innovations.

Grammy Award-winning Irish vocalist Susan McKeown is among the accomplished musician parents at the school, and has led the project from brainstorm to production. The idea first came to McKeown under the tragic circumstances of the death of East Village Community School (EVCS) student Juliet Harper. During the memorial service, one of the school’s parents, flamenco singer and flautist Alfonso Mogaburo Cid, sang a heartbreaking lullaby learned from his mother.

“The song had the power to carry people through an event like that,” McKeown reflects. “It was overwhelming. It brought us all together.” It also sparked the realization that within the school community, there was a wealth of incredible musical talent and an opportunity to engage children in creating music.

The compilation that started as an extracurricular activity has developed into an exciting album, filled with world-renowned neighborhood talent as well as yet-unheard beautiful young voices. Behind each song is a story that is as much East Village as it is American, the tales of immigrants. And it is as much American as it is universal. These melodies of childhood playgrounds and imaginations express shared experiences of play, loss, and longing.

McKeown helped organize a “CD Club,” an optional group for students of different ages, with the end result being a professionally produced album. Wanting to draw on the rich cultural heritage of the families in the school, the club solicited songs from parents and staff, asking for children’s songs from their own childhood that could be included in the project. With each song came incredible stories that illustrate the web of experiences that brought people to the Lower East Side of New York.

The East Village has long been a multicultural bohemian space, rich in sounds, sights, and smells from around the globe. It’s also home to an extraordinary group of talented musicians, actors, writers, and artists—many of whom send their kids to the arts-based East Village Community School, and lend their striking voices and ideas to the album.

Ray Santiago, a Puerto Rican pianist who has been a staple in the East Village Salsa scene for decades, is featured on “Arroz Con Leche,” a Puerto Rican playground song. Bassist and Black rock icon Melvin Gibbs lays down the Afro-funk grooves he’s perfected in “The Tiger.” This track also features the words of actress Sarita Choudhury, who starred in films like A Perfect Murder, Mississippi Masala, and Spike Lee’s She Hate Me. “The Tiger” weaves a sonic forest around Choudhury’s tale of a trip to Rajastan where she comes face-to-face with the fearsome, stunning predator during the making of a documentary.

Two Iraqi girls, forced by war to stay inside their Baghdad home for two years brought in a playground song that dates from the 1920s, “Belly a Belbool.” Belbool was a Jewish Iraqi swimming instructor, who would teach his students rhythmic strokes in the Tigris River, to the beat of the song. It is still sung by girls in Baghdad playgrounds.

“Snow” is a Tibetan song performed a cappella, by a Tibetan fifth grader in his first year at EVCS. The boy and his younger brother, who arrived just a year ago, walked through the snow-covered Himalayas to India, before settling in their East Village home, among other refugee families. The emotion of that experience seers their voices.

More commonly known songs like Irish tune “Molly Malone” and the classic Americana song, “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” are given a fresh take with this interplay of different voices—big and small—and the children’s character that shines in each. The British song, “Soldier, Soldier” was brought by a mother who sang with her sister in their Northern England childhood. Her EVCS daughter added a verse where the maid takes her revenge on the soldier’s ungentlemanly behavior—a 21st-century twist to an old tune.

The album also captures a new generation, embracing traditions from the old. “Echi Bu Uka Amaka” is a Nigerian song that an EVCS parent learned from her father in their New York City apartment. Similarly, an African American family brought “Hambone,” which the father had sung in his grandparents’ house. These recordings are among the up-tempo highlights of the album.

“Every voice gets heard, like a camera focused on each child,” McKeown explains. “In this you get a great sense of how much is communicated in someone’s voice.”

Songs from the East Village will do more than document and celebrate these voices; it will keep them singing, both by encouraging musical performance at school and by raising money for the special arts-focused programs that make the EVCS such a jewel in the community.

World Music Wire:

This is the story of why the brilliant Queen of Sheba shaved her legs, how the stunning Vashti laid down the line for her drunken husband, and how a mysterious witch spoke King Saul’s doom and then served him a nice dinner. The Naming, the upcoming release from singer and composer Galeet Dardashti, draws on the Persian classical music and Middle Eastern Jewish singing deep in her bones to transform the ghostly outlines of Biblical women into full-blown flesh-and-blood personalities.

The Naming’s release on September 14 occurs smack in between the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah (September 9-10) and Yom Kippur (September 18). She is the first woman in her family to continue her family legacy of distinguished Persian and Jewish musicianship.

Leaping from passing mentions and phantom females, Dardashti seeks names and lives for the many women in the Bible, Talmud, and the Midrash, the millennia-old Hebrew commentaries. “I am not going to sugarcoat everything,” Dardashti explains. “We know that women get the short stick. Women are marginalized. I am trying to show how for the most part women try to overcome that inequity. And how they can rise to the challenge and be powerful and funny.”

Women like the Queen of Sheba (“Sheba”), whose interest in King Solomon blossomed into romance, but only after he had the brains to answer her riddles and only after she overcame one more obstacle. “In both Muslim and Jewish tradition, Sheba is a really cool character, a gorgeous queen who perhaps hailed from Ethiopia or Yemen. One of the stories repeated in both religious traditions says that just as they are about to make out, Solomon finds that her legs are really hairy, like a horse,” Dardashti laughs. “So, the commentaries say, he has her remove the hair before he is willing to sleep with her. It’s taking her down a notch. She’s not really a woman. She couldn’t be a woman and be that powerful and have such chutzpah and ask all those questions.”

Strong, powerful women—both Israelite and non-Jewish—are everywhere in the Bible, from the bold Persian Queen Vashti who refused her carousing husband’s orders to dance naked for his buddies (“Vashti”), to the witch of Endor, who foretold Saul’s bitter end but then showed him motherly kindness (“Endora”).

For Dardashti, these women’s stories intertwine with her own family’s tales of women breaking the rules: Just as the Biblical Michal donned the tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (leather prayer bands) only worn by men, so did Dardashti’s childless great-aunt Tovah in Tehran years ago, who reasoned that since she did not have children to care for, she should take on the same religious obligations as men and use the same accoutrements. Dardashti links their stories musically in “Michal,” singing the text recited while fastening the tefillin.

They also echo through her own story, and Dardashti’s personal transition into motherhood drew her to the intriguing female shadows flitting through Jewish tradition. “I don’t know if I would have done this project if I hadn’t been pregnant. I’d never written about gender or gone to women’s groups. But so much of what is mentioned about women in the Torah is about giving birth, or not giving birth and not being able to,” Dardashti reflects. “And suddenly, I was linked to those stories, that identity as a woman with a child.”

Binding texts in several languages from the Torah, Talmud, Midrash, and elsewhere, Dardashti crafts songs inspired by her heritage, the Persian classical music that her legendary grandfather Yona Dardashti performed in Iran, and the Persian Jewish liturgical tradition she learned from her father, Hazzan Farid Dardashti. The intertwined texts resonate with the sound of the Persian santur (hammered dulcimer) and Arabic qanun (zither), as well as in the Middle Eastern cantorial and Persian classical vocal techniques Dardashti employs to tell her stories. “In ‘Vashti,’ for example, I open with passages from the Book of Esther,” Dardashti explains. “I chant that in the Persian style,” the Hebrew liturgy sung the way it evolved among Iran’s Jews.

Though Dardashti grew up in the U.S., singing in a family band “sort of like the Partridge Family, but without the van,” she was separated from her grandfather’s world and her Persian heritage by language and custom. “At that point, I thought my grandfather’s music was beautiful, but it was definitely something foreign, different,” Dardashti recalls. “In Iran, my grandfather was huge. He was one of the biggest singers in his day. He would sing at the Shah’s palace, he had a weekly radio show, back when there was no TV, so everybody would listen every week. They knew he was Jewish,” Dardashti recounts. Yona Dardashti was so popular as a singer, in fact, that even when he acted as cantor at the synagogue in Tehran, Jews and Muslims would line up to hear him. Dardashti’s father carried on the family tradition with his own TV show, becoming a teen heartthrob before eventually leaving for the U.S. to attend college, and becoming a renowned cantor.

Only after she began research in Israel as a student, where Yona Dardashti and many other Persian Jews emigrated in the 1960s, did Dardashti come to a stirring realization. Her grandfather stopped performing locally after he established his new life in Israel. “The émigrés were less interested in keeping their Persian identity than in becoming Israeli, which was becoming more and more Western and less accepting of Middle Eastern culture. When I understood that, I was stunned.”

To reconnect with her roots, Dardashti set about learning classical singing from Persian Jewish musicians in Israel, including the elusive taqrir, a glottal ornament in the intro to “Michal” that at first confounded her then more Western-oriented voice. After weeks of frustrated attempts to emulate it, “My teacher mentioned that it was like crying. I remember that that really opened things up for me,” Dardashti muses. “Crying, but also laughing. It’s the sound of pure emotion,” a sound perfectly attuned to the bittersweet fates of Dardashti’s heroines.

While shedding light on the strong women of the Abrahamic religions, Dardashti also strives through her music to bring Middle Eastern Jewish traditions to wider audiences. “Most people don’t realize there was this shared culture or that there was such a thing as a Persian or Arab Jew. I am excited to share this music with people so that we can break these boundaries, these stereotypes of what Jewish is, what Iranian is,” Dardashti reflects. “It’s similar to what I am also trying to do in The Naming: breaking down walls about the characters I’m writing about.”

World Music Wire:

This is the story of why the brilliant Queen of Sheba shaved her legs, how the stunning Vashti laid down the line for her drunken husband, and how a mysterious witch spoke King Saul’s doom and then served him a nice dinner. The Naming, the upcoming release from singer and composer Galeet Dardashti, draws on the Persian classical music and Middle Eastern Jewish singing deep in her bones to transform the ghostly outlines of Biblical women into full-blown flesh-and-blood personalities.

The Naming’s release on September 14 occurs smack in between the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah (September 9-10) and Yom Kippur (September 18). She is the first woman in her family to continue her family legacy of distinguished Persian and Jewish musicianship.

Leaping from passing mentions and phantom females, Dardashti seeks names and lives for the many women in the Bible, Talmud, and the Midrash, the millennia-old Hebrew commentaries. “I am not going to sugarcoat everything,” Dardashti explains. “We know that women get the short stick. Women are marginalized. I am trying to show how for the most part women try to overcome that inequity. And how they can rise to the challenge and be powerful and funny.”

Women like the Queen of Sheba (“Sheba”), whose interest in King Solomon blossomed into romance, but only after he had the brains to answer her riddles and only after she overcame one more obstacle. “In both Muslim and Jewish tradition, Sheba is a really cool character, a gorgeous queen who perhaps hailed from Ethiopia or Yemen. One of the stories repeated in both religious traditions says that just as they are about to make out, Solomon finds that her legs are really hairy, like a horse,” Dardashti laughs. “So, the commentaries say, he has her remove the hair before he is willing to sleep with her. It’s taking her down a notch. She’s not really a woman. She couldn’t be a woman and be that powerful and have such chutzpah and ask all those questions.”

Strong, powerful women—both Israelite and non-Jewish—are everywhere in the Bible, from the bold Persian Queen Vashti who refused her carousing husband’s orders to dance naked for his buddies (“Vashti”), to the witch of Endor, who foretold Saul’s bitter end but then showed him motherly kindness (“Endora”).

For Dardashti, these women’s stories intertwine with her own family’s tales of women breaking the rules: Just as the Biblical Michal donned the tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (leather prayer bands) only worn by men, so did Dardashti’s childless great-aunt Tovah in Tehran years ago, who reasoned that since she did not have children to care for, she should take on the same religious obligations as men and use the same accoutrements. Dardashti links their stories musically in “Michal,” singing the text recited while fastening the tefillin.

They also echo through her own story, and Dardashti’s personal transition into motherhood drew her to the intriguing female shadows flitting through Jewish tradition. “I don’t know if I would have done this project if I hadn’t been pregnant. I’d never written about gender or gone to women’s groups. But so much of what is mentioned about women in the Torah is about giving birth, or not giving birth and not being able to,” Dardashti reflects. “And suddenly, I was linked to those stories, that identity as a woman with a child.”

Binding texts in several languages from the Torah, Talmud, Midrash, and elsewhere, Dardashti crafts songs inspired by her heritage, the Persian classical music that her legendary grandfather Yona Dardashti performed in Iran, and the Persian Jewish liturgical tradition she learned from her father, Hazzan Farid Dardashti. The intertwined texts resonate with the sound of the Persian santur (hammered dulcimer) and Arabic qanun (zither), as well as in the Middle Eastern cantorial and Persian classical vocal techniques Dardashti employs to tell her stories. “In ‘Vashti,’ for example, I open with passages from the Book of Esther,” Dardashti explains. “I chant that in the Persian style,” the Hebrew liturgy sung the way it evolved among Iran’s Jews.

Though Dardashti grew up in the U.S., singing in a family band “sort of like the Partridge Family, but without the van,” she was separated from her grandfather’s world and her Persian heritage by language and custom. “At that point, I thought my grandfather’s music was beautiful, but it was definitely something foreign, different,” Dardashti recalls. “In Iran, my grandfather was huge. He was one of the biggest singers in his day. He would sing at the Shah’s palace, he had a weekly radio show, back when there was no TV, so everybody would listen every week. They knew he was Jewish,” Dardashti recounts. Yona Dardashti was so popular as a singer, in fact, that even when he acted as cantor at the synagogue in Tehran, Jews and Muslims would line up to hear him. Dardashti’s father carried on the family tradition with his own TV show, becoming a teen heartthrob before eventually leaving for the U.S. to attend college, and becoming a renowned cantor.

Only after she began research in Israel as a student, where Yona Dardashti and many other Persian Jews emigrated in the 1960s, did Dardashti come to a stirring realization. Her grandfather stopped performing locally after he established his new life in Israel. “The émigrés were less interested in keeping their Persian identity than in becoming Israeli, which was becoming more and more Western and less accepting of Middle Eastern culture. When I understood that, I was stunned.”

To reconnect with her roots, Dardashti set about learning classical singing from Persian Jewish musicians in Israel, including the elusive taqrir, a glottal ornament in the intro to “Michal” that at first confounded her then more Western-oriented voice. After weeks of frustrated attempts to emulate it, “My teacher mentioned that it was like crying. I remember that that really opened things up for me,” Dardashti muses. “Crying, but also laughing. It’s the sound of pure emotion,” a sound perfectly attuned to the bittersweet fates of Dardashti’s heroines.

While shedding light on the strong women of the Abrahamic religions, Dardashti also strives through her music to bring Middle Eastern Jewish traditions to wider audiences. “Most people don’t realize there was this shared culture or that there was such a thing as a Persian or Arab Jew. I am excited to share this music with people so that we can break these boundaries, these stereotypes of what Jewish is, what Iranian is,” Dardashti reflects. “It’s similar to what I am also trying to do in The Naming: breaking down walls about the characters I’m writing about.”

World Music Wire:

"On stage, I’m The Cuban Cowboy, a superhero of exile and degeneracy!” exclaims singer and songwriter Jorge Navarro. Spitfire Spanglish blazing, Navarro sends the perfect American icon colliding with a whole family’s worth of émigré tension, exile, tenderness and lust. “I turn on the accent, I come out of it; switching back and forth. ‘Is it real; is it parody?’ It takes people a minute to decide.”

But The Cuban Cowboys are no joke. Riding in on churning post-punk distortion and quicksilver Latin percussion, Navarro and posse turn sordid tales and fantastic foibles into serious rock Cubano on Diablo Mambo. And with devilish glee, Navarro channels misguided love gurus from the streets of Havana, horny window gazers in Brooklyn, and sings of lessons learned from living life in between two cultures and languages.

“There’s a ferocity and vibe to what we do that’s missing in milquetoast, or more mainstream Latin music,” Navarro reflects, explaining his hybrid approach. “As a first generation Cuban-American, I want to rock it. There’s something in rock and punk that’s just as hypnotic as the rhythms in Cuban music.

Navarro knows a lot about both. He grew up in Florida, in a family where nostalgia and bitter exile permeated everything. He recalls being too white-looking to be accepted as Latino, but too Cuban to feel completely Americano. Cuba loomed large in the family imagination, an almost mythical place inhabited by larger-than-life characters. “In many ways, the music is my way of making peace and meaning with my upbringing, as a son of Cuban exiles who, by the age of nine, had a thing for cowboy boots and Kiss.”

Men like Navarro’s grandfather, a driving force behind many of The Cuban Cowboy’s tales. He was a bookie-turned-presidential advisor—“a kind of Rahm Emmanuel,” Navarro notes—in pre-Castro Cuba, where shady dealings and official business sometimes overlapped. Navarro’s father was thrown into prison during the Cuban Revolution and only released when Navarro’s grandfather agreed to teach Che Guevara about the Cuban banking system. He, along with other exiles, went on to work secretly with the U.S. government, earning the nickname “Cuban Cowboys” from their C.I.A. colleagues.

“I feel like there’s this twisted sense of loyalty to my family and upbringing,” Navarro muses. “The stories were so powerful. My dad, granddad, mom–all my relatives and their Cuban neighbors–they all had a certain way of talking about Cuba and exile.”

Their stories and voices are often rough, edgy, darkly funny, and rich with ambivalence. Witness "Señor Balaban," about his granddad's acquaintance, a street-corner Don Juan in Havana who acted as an impromptu relationship guru, dispensing somewhat dubious advice about how to seduce women. On the song, Navarro connects this infamous figure with his granddad and dad’s encouragement of the teenage Jorge to lose his virginity to a woman of the night.

Or take "Cojones," when his grandfather, wielding a knife, demanded that 8 year-old Jorge never again hit his sister or risk losing his balls, Navarro had a powerful response. “I said, ‘If that’s true why did your son hit my mom?’ He let go of my throat. He said that was different and walked out. With machismo, there’s a dark side that belies so-called ‘Latin Lover’ mythology.”

There's a sweeter, sultrier side to The Cuban Cowboy’s world, too. "La Ventana" melts in a gravelly doowop swoon over the hot chick in the loft across the way (based on the true story of several Williamsburg loft-dwelling exhibitionists Navarro encountered).

"Liberace Afternoon" tells of the endearing annoyance of his piano-practicing grandma who played an instrument Navarro’s mother scrimped and saved for after coming to the U.S. A former teacher in Cuba, his grandmother played piano each afternoon for hours at a time. Much to the young Jorge's irritation, who was known to shoot off bottle rockets in the house to try to get her to stop, though now he credits her with inadvertently giving him a musical foundation.

Navarro built on this foundation at a Catholic seminary in Upstate New York, where he was studying for the priesthood and where he picked up the bass. He began to play the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Church-approved hits by a group called the St. Louis Jesuits.

After reconsidering his religious vocation, Jorge wound up in college and in the Gainesville, FL rock scene, where he played in an improv/art rock band that began to make a name for itself. “We were adopted by River Phoenix,” Navarro grins (and he watched Joaquin Phoenix grow up from little brother to scruffy actor). Imbued with post-punk aesthetics, he got back into his heritage and eventually started writing songs as The Cuban Cowboy as part of his graduate studies in bilingual education.

I started writing songs in Spanish and English, to present a positive image of bilingualism, for teachers preparing to work with Latino kids.” Navarro recalls. “I melded the two for a while, and that’s when I hit on The Cuban Cowboy, an American icon, singing in Spanglish, with rock and Cuban elements. And it just took off from there. I moved to New York City, and started playing open-mics wherever I could. ‘I built it and they came’ so to speak, as a band came together.”

After developing a following in the New York City club scene, The Cuban Cowboys relocated to San Francisco in 2005. A post-SXSW record deal went south, so the band moved west. Two years on the Bay Area scene brought Navarro and TCC to the attention of producer Greg Landau (Susana Baca, Maldita Vecindad, Patato Valdez, Sambada).

For Diablo Mambo, Navarro drew on his rock experience while being taken much deeper into Cuban music territory by Landau. "The Pixies, one group that really inspired me, are often loud soft loud. Our soft is Latin, but Greg really brought an edge and groove to it.” Landau —who first went to Cuba while his father filmed a documentary about Castro—calls tracks like “Cojones” “Perez Prado meets the Ramones.” Landau suggested new sounds like calypso ( “Oh Celia”) and doo-wop balladry (“La Ventana”) to add to The Cuban Cowboy’s mix, and Navarro has relished the collaboration. “I wanted to let listeners know, right off the bat, that this here's a different sort of take on Cuban music and rock. I wanted to shatter expectations, or at least modify them from the beginning.”

Yet there’s something still very Cuban about The Cuban Cowboys’ music, something Navarro found when he finally got a chance to visit the island earlier this year. “What Greg did to our sound makes so much more sense now,” Navarro smiles. “It was a thrill to take my music to Cuba, to play it live with Cuban musicians on the street, or to pop it into the CD player at my relatives’ house. Everyone grooved to it, saying things like “Pero eso es musica Cubana!” I took that as a very good sign.”

World Music Wire:

Singer Susan McKeown has met the mad king forced to dwell with the birds in the treetops, and the witchy women and crazy ladies tearing through the night. Longing to counterbalance the persistent stigma of mental illness, McKeown turned to the poets, looking for the deep humanity, creative spark, and curious light that shines in even the blackest moments.

On Singing in the Dark, McKeown brings her fine-tuned sense for song to centuries of striking visions from across the Americas, Ireland and the British Isles, the perspectives of artists struggling with depression, mania, and substance abuse. Working with long-time friends (and fellow Grammy winners) Frank London and Lisa Gutkin of The Klezmatics, McKeown shaped the sometimes harrowing, sometimes circumspect words of everyone from 16th-century lutenist John Dowland to Pulitzer Prize winners Gwendolyn Brooks and Anne Sexton into quietly compelling windows into a misunderstood night.

McKeown will celebrate the release with a New York concert at Symphony Space on Oct. 30, featuring guest appearances by bestselling author Kay Redfield Jamison and New York Public Library Director of Public Programs Paul Holdengräber. A North American tour will follow, hitting Portland, ME (Oct 16); Boston (Nov 13); Baltimore (Nov 18); Eugene, OR (Nov 26); Portland, OR (Nov 27); San Francisco; Denver (Dec 3); Taos (Dec 4) and Albuquerque (December 5).

The idea for the album began in a hospital meeting room, filled with dozens of the nervous siblings, spouses, partners, and parents of people suffering from mental illness—and from the social stigma attached to it. They spoke in hushed tones of helplessness and frustration, trying to find ways of comprehending and supporting troubled loved ones.

It was never a place McKeown expected to land, but it sparked a seven-year journey through the darkness that has haunted creative souls for millennia. This darkness made its mark on McKeown’s family and on her native land of Ireland, where young men have long faced one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, even during economic boom times.

“I was able to trace back a line of manic depression going through my father’s family,” she says, “And all those men married musicians. I began reading about mental illness and creativity and discovered they are linked. It’s just a fact.”

This link fascinated McKeown and sent her digging through poetry books and library collections, as well as turning to roots music in her home of New York and on her native shores. She looked for lyrics with “singability,” as well as powerful perspectives. She followed Anne Sexton, who urged, even in darkness, to tell it true, and whose eerie poem Her Kind became the album’s single “A Woman Like That” (release: October 4).

There’s “Mad Sweeney,” a traditional Irish legend first recorded in the 17th century, of a king gone wild, forced by illness to live like the birds and beasts. And John Dowland’s sorrowful chestnut “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” refreshed by McKeown’s clear, firm voice.

“The Nameless One” uses words of 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, written a year before his life was cut short due to alcohol abuse and his final writings were thrown away by a hospital orderly. The song links Mangan’s tragedy to the great exodus of desperate Irish to America during the Potato Famine, bringing in a banjo and an unexpectedly upbeat chorus reminiscent of Woody Guthrie.

“The song was made of the lyrics of a man, written during the worst years of famine in Ireland, the year before he died at 46,” explains McKeown. “America and Ireland have always had a close relationship, and as the song evolved, it took on more and more of an American feel, though the melody is Irish.”

“We’ll Go No More A-Roving” finds another cross-cultural tie, this time binding Lord Byron’s lyric to Irish traditional song and a melody with deep family implications. “Byron had episodes of depression and mania, and was inspired by an Irish song, one that’s still sung in another form,” McKeown notes. “The melody is also traditional: ‘After Aughrim,’ an old song about a battle in 1691, in a town where my father’s family were living at the time.”

McKeown felt drawn to more contemporary resonances as well. Drawing on Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “The Crack in the Stairs” is set to a challenging piano-accompanied score by modern Irish composer Elaine Agnew. “I was hungry for a challenge like that,” McKeown exclaims with a smile.

It was impossible to imagine an album trying to encompass the world of depression without one of Leonard Cohen’s songs: “If you search for music about depression at an online retailer,” recounts McKeown, “his name inevitably comes up.” Yet “Anthem,” one of Cohen’s later bittersweet synth ballads, is shot through with hope, one of the surprising moments often found in many of the poems McKeown explored.

“For me, hope has always been a guiding force,” she states. “When I read Theodore Rothke (“In a Dark Time”), I hear his faith in humanity and the love of nature he learned as a child growing up in his family’s greenhouses. He saw hope reflected in nature even though he suffered terribly. It helped him immensely to express it.” Hope also burns in Chilean artist and folk innovator Violetta Parra’s “Gracias a la vida,” which McKeown arranged to follow the joyful lead of Brazilian singer Elis Regina.

Hope springs not only from finding striking ways to talk and sing about depression and illness, but in finding community, solace, and treatment for individuals and their families. McKeown has partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Fountain House, actress Glenn Close’s Bring Change 2 Mind campaign, and the Mood Disorders Support Group, organizations who offer different support and comfort to those struggling with depression and who will receive a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Singing in the Dark.

World Music Wire:

“We could be banging on mammoth skulls and logs millennia ago,” modestly exclaims Norwegian multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer Andreas Fliflet behind Jienat. “The feeling would be the same.” Yet if Jienat got their hands on them, bone and wood would resound in full-on, crystal-clear surround sound to the beat of samba, reggae, or candombe.

Recorded in an old parish hall 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a quaint church on a Finnish island, on the cobbled streets of Bahia, Brazil, Mira puts age-old sounds in a cutting-edge frame, thanks to Fliflet’s musical curiosity, instinct for found elements, and skill with his portable multi-microphone rig. To maintain the high audio quality of the album, Mira includes an audio-only Blu-Ray disc, as well as a standard CD/high-definition SACD, the first world music recording to use this format and recording approach.

Drawing on everything from Sámi (Laplander) joiking (a form of chant-like singing from an indigenous people in Scandinavia) and Finnish-style musical saw to Afro-Uruguayan rhythms and Argentine vendors’ cries, the band Jienat (“voices” in Sámi) imagines how the world might echo on the streets of Hammerfest, the world’s northern-most town.

“The influences are obvious: West Africa, Sámi culture, Bahia,” Fliflet explains. “We’re not playing Brazilian music or joiking, however. This is our music, Arctic world music.” Having played with everyone from Afropop diva Angelique Kidjo to passionate Sámi singer Mari Boine, Fliflet comes by his omnivorous interests honestly.

His music purposefully relies on purely acoustic sounds, to reflect the back-to-the-future spirit Fliflet finds intriguing, and to avoid the often time-stamped quality of electronic instruments. Yet he doesn’t shy away from technology. Fliflet used a sophisticated portable studio—small enough to fit under the seat of an airplane, powerful enough to record in surround sound—to capture unique sonic moments. These range from black market vendors in front of his in-law’s Argentine home (“Radio Belgrano”) to a beautiful balafon in a hallway in northern Norway (“Adama”).

“I’m presenting sounds that aren’t thought of as music in a musical context,” Fliflet reflects. “As far as I’m concerned, everything is musical raw material. It’s just the context that makes us think if it’s music or not. It’s not unlike Warhol’s soup can or Duchamp’s Fountain.”

To do the final mix of these recordings he turned to Lindberg Lyd in Oslo, one of the most innovative surround sound studios in the world. He attempted sonic acrobatics that left engineers shaking their heads in wonder and dismay. “The rhythm on ‘Fredrik Albert’ is stolen from Uruguayan candombe. We recorded it on the equivalent of about six hundred standard mono tracks,” he recalls with a smile. “It crashed the mainframe computer in the studio in Oslo, and the recording software programmers in Switzerland had to give up some vacation time to create a new version of the software. No one had been crazy enough to try that before.”

Though not originally from the Far North, Fliflet became fascinated by life on the tundra as a boy, when he won a drawing contest and got to spend a week in a Sámi summer camp. While living in a peat-covered shelter among the reindeer herds, he recalls being amazed by “seeing fresh bear tracks in midsummer snow, hearing adults joiking at midnight when the sun was still up, and tasting reindeer jerky and Sámi flatbreads.”

This first experience led to a life-long connection to the once denigrated languages and culture of the Arctic nomads. Together with Sámi singer Marit Hætta Øverli, Fliflet started Jienat in the late 1990s, as a response to the formulaic production and predictable arrangements on many Sámi recordings. Øverli and Fliflet wanted to get away from squeezing the joik into a jazz or pop template and started imagining what acoustic accompaniments would work harmoniously with vocal traditions.

This experimentation shines on tracks like “Andreas/André,” an acoustic mashup of two joiks, the first performed by Øverli. The second, “André,” is in Kildin Sámi, a language now spoken by just a few hundred people in far northwestern Russia. Composed for Fliflet and his frequent collaborator, percussionist André Ferrari, they reflect the uniquely Sámi understanding of this type of song. “People may dedicate a joik to a place, person, or mood,” explains Fliflet. “When they’re joiking, they’re not joiking about a person, say, but actually joiking that person. As Sámi multi-media artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää explained it ‘A joik is not about. A joik is.’”

Just as Øverli honored her long-time friend, Fliflet pays tribute to loved ones, such as his Finnish-born mother, for whom he composed “Tudeer,” a pensive ballad for the musical saw he picked up at a Boston hardware store. “It had to be a ballad,” Fliflet laughs. “You can’t cover a fast bebop tune on the saw. It’s like a weird form of singing.”

Mira also conveys Fliflet’s wry love for his chosen Arctic home, for its crazy weather, white nights, rusty Russian trawlers, and herds of errant reindeer (a fence runs around Hammerfest to keep them out of the streets). “It fascinates me to contrast the tiny languages and the small remote places with the big ones, the old sounds with new processes,” Fliflet muses. “While the recording technique is cutting edge, there is really nothing essential in the music that could not have been done 5,000 years ago—or 5,000 years from now.”

World Music Wire:

A new craft is winging its way through the sonic solar system, built from creaky amps and sleek laptops, powered by dayglo Caribbean sun and the brilliant pulse of street parties, and steered by hip-hop Afronauts from one of the globe’s new music hotspots.

Welcome aboard Colombia’s Systema Solar, the funkiest Technocolor hip-hop and DJ crew/Latin sound system ever to be pulled by donkey or graced with slammin’ beats. Uniting Afro-Colombian roots with rap, scratching with Afro-Latin percussion, and unstoppable dance grooves with a live video mix, Systema Solar has landed on the world stage with Systema Solar, the perfect intro to Latin America’s coolest musical-visual collective.

Systema Solar bursts with the colors and sounds of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, right down to the band’s glittering suits. This florescent exuberance is inspired by a favorite local institution, the pikos, or mobile sound systems akin to Jamaica’s pick-ups, movable parties that can be set up anywhere.

“On the coast, everyone has a huge stereo, as big as possible,” explains Systema Solar’s producer and sonic architect Juan Carlos Pellegrino. “When the pikos began, people started buying more and more amps and got into creating really big sound systems and these parties. They close a place on the edge of town, or a street in some village or city, and start blasting music. The louder, the better.”

The piko evolved into its own quirky, vibrant format, with passionate competition between crews, insisting they’ll blow away anyone else’s pathetic speakers. Announcers imitate the undulating r’s and over-the-top diction of radio personalities (Systema Solar do their own version on “Plakas”). And musically, they’re platforms for reshaping Afro-Latin styles on the spot.

“Champeta is African music reinterpreted by the Colombian people on the coast,” Dani Broderick, DJ and producer with the group, recounts. “You have African sounds, mixed with Colombian rhythms and lyrics, with their lives and feelings, and with live remixing, putting on beats. Lots of pikos DJ love that famous Casio machine with the dog sound. That’s a classic: You start doing the beat and the barking and making up lyrics as you go along.”

All the spontaneity and quirky aesthetics are the perfect launch pad for the group’s vision of a Colombian music that brings together the best of the country’s hip hop and techno scenes with the best of its roots. Made up of some of Colombia’s hottest rappers, techno DJs, percussionists, and video artists, the collective transforms the essence of the pikos into bangin’, infectious, vivid tracks that use everything from sampled 1940s vinyl to scratching to blazing drums.

Powering all this creativity is another aspect of the Colombian Caribbean, verbena, the good-time celebratory spirit guiding parties from tiny hamlets to big cities. This positive focus on lifting spirits and getting down stands out in stark contrast to other hip-hop movements in Colombia, like the gangsta-inflected hardcore rap of Bogotá.

“Verbena is the traditional party of the people. That’s what we do also. We make that moment of joyful gathering possible,” says vocalist Walter Hernandez, trying to convey the word’s complexity. “The verbena lets everyone express and liberate themselves, to be free, to change their ways. That’s why we call our style ‘berbenautics;’ we’re navigating the verbenosphere!”

This spirit of verbena slyly turns Colombia’s often harsh realities—corruption, violence, poverty—into moments for reflection. Systema Solar aims to do more than tear the roof of the sucker; they want to call out injustice in the service of social change. And with a cheeky grin.

“Our goal as artists is to project positivity and joy, as a constructive attitude to confront the hard times our world is facing,” Pellegrino muses. “A lot of artists in Colombia, who live in a rough political climate, feel the militant revolutionary chanting songs or actions ‘against’ the system are no longer a functional form of bringing about change. What drives us is creating music, videos and a performances that make people conscious about the the troubles of the world, but in a way that is not fatalist, by showing the positive in what seems negative at first glance.”

The hip-hop jam of “El Amarillo” decries the passivity of the populace, turned into sheep and kept ignorant to serve others’ political aims. “Quien es el patron?” lambastes Colombia’s drug-lord culture, in an ironic celebration of drug culture and its ultimate supporters in wealthy countries. "Mi Kolombia" criticizes the imbalance of power between North and South, by telling of the woes of Colombians seeking visas to visit the U.S.

The unusual yet engaging mix of medium and message has put Systema Solar in the unexpected position of uniting old folks and young hipsters, metal heads and Latin music lovers, on the same dance floors, something unheard of in Colombia and rare elsewhere.

“At this moment in Colombia, Systema Solar’s importance lies in the way we’re gathering different people from all different musical scenes, audiences from different movements and generations and social classes,” reflects Hernandez. “It’s our contribution to a real world music. Not just a marketing niche, a music that can unite the world.”

Via World Music Wire:

Most public schools facing the current funding crunch mount desperate donation drives or bake sales. But at the arts-based East Village Community School in the heart of one of New York’s historically bohemian and global neighborhoods, parents, students, and school staff opted instead to raise money by singing compelling ballads, making funky beats, and recalling unexpected family stories.

Fresh, savvy, and chock full of infectious songs and history, Songs from the East Village maps the world of childhood, as it spans the globe. Like the school and its neighborhood home, the album unites Iraqis and Tibetans, immigrants by choice and refugees, deep historical roots and edgy innovations.

Grammy Award-winning Irish vocalist Susan McKeown is among the accomplished musician parents at the school, and has led the project from brainstorm to production. The idea first came to McKeown under the tragic circumstances of the death of East Village Community School (EVCS) student Juliet Harper. During the memorial service, one of the school’s parents, flamenco singer and flautist Alfonso Mogaburo Cid, sang a heartbreaking lullaby learned from his mother.

“The song had the power to carry people through an event like that,” McKeown reflects. “It was overwhelming. It brought us all together.” It also sparked the realization that within the school community, there was a wealth of incredible musical talent and an opportunity to engage children in creating music.

The compilation that started as an extracurricular activity has developed into an exciting album, filled with world-renowned neighborhood talent as well as yet-unheard beautiful young voices. Behind each song is a story that is as much East Village as it is American, the tales of immigrants. And it is as much American as it is universal. These melodies of childhood playgrounds and imaginations express shared experiences of play, loss, and longing.

McKeown helped organize a “CD Club,” an optional group for students of different ages, with the end result being a professionally produced album. Wanting to draw on the rich cultural heritage of the families in the school, the club solicited songs from parents and staff, asking for children’s songs from their own childhood that could be included in the project. With each song came incredible stories that illustrate the web of experiences that brought people to the Lower East Side of New York.

The East Village has long been a multicultural bohemian space, rich in sounds, sights, and smells from around the globe. It’s also home to an extraordinary group of talented musicians, actors, writers, and artists—many of whom send their kids to the arts-based East Village Community School, and lend their striking voices and ideas to the album.

Ray Santiago, a Puerto Rican pianist who has been a staple in the East Village Salsa scene for decades, is featured on “Arroz Con Leche,” a Puerto Rican playground song. Bassist and Black rock icon Melvin Gibbs lays down the Afro-funk grooves he’s perfected in “The Tiger.” This track also features the words of actress Sarita Choudhury, who starred in films like A Perfect Murder, Mississippi Masala, and Spike Lee’s She Hate Me. “The Tiger” weaves a sonic forest around Choudhury’s tale of a trip to Rajastan where she comes face-to-face with the fearsome, stunning predator during the making of a documentary.

Two Iraqi girls, forced by war to stay inside their Baghdad home for two years  brought in a playground song that dates from the 1920s, “Belly a Belbool.” Belbool was a Jewish Iraqi swimming instructor, who would teach his students rhythmic strokes in the Tigris River, to the beat of the song. It is still sung by girls in Baghdad playgrounds.

“Snow” is a Tibetan song performed a cappella, by a Tibetan fifth grader in his first year at EVCS. The boy and his younger brother, who arrived just a year ago, walked through the snow-covered Himalayas to India, before settling in their East Village home, among other refugee families. The emotion of that experience seers their voices.

More commonly known songs like Irish tune “Molly Malone” and the classic Americana song, “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” are given a fresh take with this interplay of different voices—big and small—and the children’s character that shines in each. The British song, “Soldier, Soldier” was brought by a mother who sang with her sister in their Northern England childhood. Her EVCS daughter added a verse where the maid takes her revenge on the soldier’s ungentlemanly behavior—a 21st-century twist to an old tune.

The album also captures a new generation, embracing traditions from the old. “Echi Bu Uka Amaka” is a Nigerian song that an EVCS parent learned from her father in their New York City apartment. Similarly, an African American family brought “Hambone,” which the father had sung in his grandparents’ house. These recordings are among the up-tempo highlights of the album.

“Every voice gets heard, like a camera focused on each child,” McKeown explains. “In this you get a great sense of how much is communicated in someone’s voice.”

Songs from the East Village will do more than document and celebrate these voices; it will keep them singing, both by encouraging musical performance at school and by raising money for the special arts-focused programs that make the EVCS such a jewel in the community.

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World Music Wire

Bouncing along in a brightly painted cab or breathing the sweet sanctity of a Sufi shrine, melodies come unbidden to musician and composer Shye Ben-Tzur. And they burst into full blossom on Shoshan, a funky filigree of unexpected trans-cultural devotional songs encompassing the soaring sounds of Rajastan, the literary cadences of Hebrew, and the pulse of a rock bass line.

The seemingly quirky juxtapositions—devotional qawwali music with Hebrew poetry, Indian classical vocals with rocking bass and Spanish guitar—flow from Ben-Tzur’s decade-long love affair with India and his striking life experience. A published poet in his native Israel, he grew up studying music and playing in rock bands, until one fateful evening.

Ben-Tzur went to a concert given by two Indian classical masters, bansuri (flute) player Hariprasad Chaurasia and tabla player Zakir Hussain. He was so entranced by what he heard that he was soon packing his bags and heading to India, for what he thought would be a fairly short trip.

“When I first started out, I just focused on coming to India and learning the music,” Ben-Tzur recalls with a smile. “I didn’t plan to stay that long. I fell in love with the culture. That was ten years ago, and now my creative life is here.”

This exploratory stint turned into years spent learning from Indian musicians, performing professionally, and raising a family. Ben-Tzur found himself playing with Indian classical musicians, Rajastani gypsies, and the Sufi devotional singers whose soaring vocals resound throughout Shoshan.

Yet as Ben-Tzur dug deep into the infinitely rich soil of Indian music, he found new songs springing to mind. He heard melodies while riding through the streets of Bombay or while looking for musicians in Jaipur. “When I’m in a rickshaw or taxi, suddenly a melody arises. At first, I often work with these melodies in an Indian way,” Ben-Tzur notes. “I’ve been living and playing music here for so long; that’s the first way I hear them.”

The serendipitous melodies suggested texts, often in Hebrew, in their feel and sound. “Even when I write, I’m a musician, so the music evokes emotions and these emotions become lyrics very naturally,” reflects Ben-Tzur.

As they evolve, the songs begged for arrangements that embraced India’s sound and color, and the Western energy of Ben-Tzur’s youth. “There’s a cultural dialogue between the place I come from and the tradition I live in,” Ben-Tzur explains.

This dialogue plays itself out in the vibrant variety of musical expertise Ben-Tzur drew on when recording Shoshan. Rajastani collaborators such as qawwali singer Zakir Ali Qawwal lend their distinct sonic palette with rousing potency whether springing into a traditional arc of improvisation, or singing in Hebrew. Young but respected Indian classical vocalist Shubha Mudgal graces “Daras Bin,” sending her powerful voice over an artfully arranged string section composed by Ben-Tzur.

Another guiding force for Ben-Tzur came from Spanish guitarist Fernando Perez, whose flamenco and African-inflected guitar work lifts introspective moments like “Sovev” to delicate heights. Bassist Yossi Fine, who has backed stars from David Bowie to Lou Reed, laid down heavy grooves to match the ecstatic rise and fall of melodic lines on upbeat tracks like “Shoshan.”

Behind this diversity of sounds and colors, however, lies a unifying spirit. This ethos echoes in the words of Sufi saint Hazrat Nawab Khadim Hasan Gudri Shah Baba III, whose poems inspired “Dil Ke Behar” and “Dar-E-Yar.” Regardless of whether Ben-Tzur sings his own Hebrew lyrics or those of an Indian holy man, however, the motivating force is the same: the longing for oneness with the divine, a mystical ache transcending religion and culture and transforming experience into song.

“The songs on Shoshan are love songs to God, to music itself, as I experience it and try to express it,” muses Ben-Tzur. “Christian, Jewish, Muslim, it’s all one approach and outlook in the search for unity. It’s not always finding it, but it’s the longing for it.”

Shye Ben-Tzur video

World Music Wire:

Bosnian gems mingle with Bollywood bangles, while Rromani (Gypsy) hits mix with super-fly funk. Thanks to dreamed melodies and down-and-dirty bass lines, Brass Menažeri has been packing Mission bars with a heady mix of Balkan perfection and Bay Area eccentricity, of serious chops and serious joy, for years.

Now on Vranjski San¸ the brass band with attitude breaks out a fresh vision of how hip Balkan brass can be, while maintaining a rare depth of cultural knowledge. The group puts a new polish on favorite songs from Rromani, Greek, and Slavic masters, while shining light on unexpected sides of Balkan culture: the love of Bollywood, the funky production esthetics, the constant hunger for new sounds to try in old forms.

“We like to lay it down,” smiles Peter Jaques, Brass Menažeri director, clarinetist, and horn player. “We bring in elements of rock and funk, but subsume them into the tradition, something parallel to what’s going on in places like Serbia. They aren’t sticking to the sounds of the 1960s. They bring in whatever they hear as new color for their palettes.”

Witness “Opa Cupa Fly,” a funkified take on a classic by the popular Rromani singer and accordionist Šaban Bajramović. After years of playing their brass band arrangement of the song—and starting a minor “Opa Cupa” craze among belly dancers—the band was seriously sick of their big hit. So they reimagined the track, throwing in a heavy Earth, Wind, and Fire-style backbeat and inviting friends from the Afrobeat group Aphrodesia to leap in. The result was “a funk remix of the song, with a nod to Super Fly,” Jaques explains.

Or “Lal Lal Hothon Pe,” a Bollywood number big in the 1990s that somehow lent itself perfectly to Balkan-style brass band, hinting at long-lost ties between the Rroma and their subcontinental kindred. Or “Hassan’s Dream,” a tune by jazz saxophonist Benny Golson that in Brass Menažeri’s hands suddenly intertwines with new modes and scales to become utterly Ottoman.

Yet all this quirky creativity and unbridled innovation rests on a firm foundation of cultural knowledge and strong musicianship that speaks of decades playing and partying to Balkan music.

Jaques, who got into Balkan brass through what he humorously calls “the gateway drug of klezmer,” was mesmerized early on by the complex time signatures characteristic of even the most straightforward Balkan dance music. Fascination led to several stints at a California Balkan music camp and finally to a community band of sorts, made up of fellow fans from camp.

To this strong base, Jaques and his bandmates have added deep musical and cultural knowledge gleaned on extensive trips around the former Yugoslavia, exploring brass festivals, and finding and composing new tunes. The traditions have sunk into Jaques’s bones—and even disturbed his sleep.

One night in the Serbia town of Vranje, after a day at a small brass festival, “I woke up in the middle of the night and I had this melody in head. I wrote it down by flashlight in my music book,” Jaques recalls. “I played through it the next day and was surprised; I didn’t have to change the melody at all.” That melody became “Vranjski San (Vranje’s Dream).”

Like the melody, Brass Menažeri’s big break came from an unexpected quarter: an invitation to play a small bar in San Francisco’s Mission thanks to an unexpectedly enthusiastic booker. They packed the place, and have been filling dance floors with delicious songs in 7/8, fat sousaphone bass lines, and high-speed horn antics ever since.

While many groups in the Bay Area focus on precise recreation of traditional sounds, Brass Menažeri insists on a new twist, even for their straight-ahead Balkan numbers. They often take a song that was originally Bosnian, and give it a Serbian or Macedonian treatment, reflecting the creative process once common in Yugoslavian music, now fraught with bitterness. Jaques muses, “In some tiny way, this is about peacemaking.”

To understand the subtleties, it helps to understand the peculiar lives of songs in the former Yugoslavia. Songs can be dividing lines between people, even for those who share and love another ethnic group’s songs in private. Jaques experienced this situation firsthand while camping with a friend and his father at one of the biggest brass festivals in the Balkans. Jaques had his horn, and his friend’s father kept urging him to play something. Next to them stood a grim group of very unfriendly Serbian nationalists.

“I played what I thought was everybody’s song. I’d heard Serbian bands play it, but it’s a Bosnian-sounding song. The Rroma like it, too. I even heard him singing it just the day before,” Jaques recounts. “He pretended he didn’t know it. He wouldn’t sing along and was stonewalling. I left really frustrated, and my friend said, ‘Sorry, that was a Bosnian song.’ That’s one of the reasons I got into approaching this music as if those boundaries weren’t there—or crossing them.”

The boundaries melt away in Brass Menažeri’s pumping bass and nimble solos, capturing the ethos of the open-minded Bay Area and its Eastern European émigré community that relishes the band’s shows. “We have pan-Balkan fans, and they all hang out together. I don’t know how much credit to take for that,” Jaques laughs. “People who were at war come hear us and realize that they have everything in common, that Serbian versus Bosnian versus Albanian doesn’t matter too much. They all speak the same language and share same tastes. And everybody loves to dance.”

Brass MenazeriVideo on YouTube