Regional Music

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Summer treats

Whether classical, jazz, pop, or folk, 'tis the season to get out and enjoy the music
From Andean to zydeco, pick your flavor and there's a summer music festival ready to serve it up.
By CLEA SIMON | June 18, 2010

Mexican president flubs it at the Kennedy school

Yo No Tengo Huevos Dept.
Only a day before the Massachusetts Senate showed its true colors by approving a set of anti-immigrant amendments to the state budget — a recent change of heart that would probably not have happened had it not been for the so-called Arizona effect — the Harvard Kennedy School's Class of 2010 hosted Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa as its commencement speaker.
By MARCELA GARCIA | June 04, 2010

Two and fro

Kolosko and Dimow’s Border Crossings
It can be easy to get wrapped up in Portland’s pop and rock scene, the singalong stuff you hear in the clubs and on the radio.
By SAM PFEIFLE | March 24, 2010

Joe Cuba | El Alcalde Del Barrio

Fania (2010)
Fania kicks off 2010 with what is sure to end up being one of the year's most important archival releases of Latin music.
By GUSTAVO TURNER | March 09, 2010

Singer/songwriter Graeme Kennedy is back in town

Sibilance
... and he’s got ambitious plans for his McKeenstreet Music.
By PORTLAND PHOENIX MUSIC STAFF | March 10, 2010

The good old days

Max Raabe & Palast Orchester, live at the Paramount Theatre, March 6, 2010
As if it weren’t enough that the venerable Paramount Theatre on Washington Street was open for the first time since 1976, the Celebrity Series of Boston brought in as the initial act to play the new 600-seat mainstage Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 11, 2010

Alejandro Franov | Digitaria

Nature Bliss (2010)
Alejandro Franov is an Argentine multi-instrumentalist who's been involved in the more serious, and often experimental, side of the Buenos Aires music scene since he was a teen in the late 1980s.
By GUSTAVO TURNER | March 03, 2010

Jew note

First Annual Boston Jewish Music Festival, plus the Klezmatics
Defining "Jewish" music is pretty much a fool's task — not much easier than defining jazz.
By JON GARELICK | February 25, 2010

Review: El Perro Del Mar at the Brattle

El Perro Del Mar and Taken by Trees, live at the Brattle Theatre, February 19, 2010
Sharing a bill, a backing band, and the cramped stage of the Brattle Theatre last Friday, two Swedish singer-songwriters turned it up to the world-music equivalent of 11 for an audience that, for the most part, refused to dance.
By EUGENIA WILLIAMSON | February 24, 2010

Netsky notes

The KCB's main man talks Klezmer
Hankus Netsky founded the Klezmer Conservatory Band 30 years ago at New England Conservatory and sparked an American klezmer revival that continues to this day.
By JON GARELICK | February 25, 2010

Choir power

Ladysmith Black Mambazo raise their voices
The Romantic notion of artistic merit is that one must plumb the depths of despair to emerge with great work — and that the finest triumphs are often born of the direst misery.
By DANIEL BROCKMAN | February 02, 2010

No identity crisis

Nando Michelin and Matt Steckler know who they are
If great art and great artists are supposed to contain multitudes, then in music, at least, pianists have the edge: 10 fingers theoretically capable of 10 different simultaneous paths for the music to take. Of course, it's not that simple.
By JON GARELICK | February 08, 2010

Best in their field

An early 2010 harvest
The jazz scene continues to struggle — along with everyone else — through hard times.
By JON GARELICK | December 30, 2009

Various Artists | Nippon Girls: Japanese Pop, Beat & Bossa Nova 1966–1970

Domino (2009)
Girl-group records are great and everything, yet the countless compilations out there were becoming a little hit-or-miss until 2005, when the great Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found box set finally gave this diverse genre a proper taxonomy.
By JONATHAN DONALDSON | December 16, 2009

Good Fela! beats Nigerian drum

Boston and Broadway
Riddle this: what's more unlikely than the fact that the current toast of Broadway is a musical about a Nigerian agitprop pop singer, or that it owes its existence to a Caucasian commodities trader from New England?
By CHRIS FARAONE | December 09, 2009

Snacks

Trey McIntyre at the ICA
The most substantial item in the assortment of dances by the Trey McIntyre Project last weekend was an oddly proportioned 20-minute meditation on climate change and Glacier National Park. McIntyre, whose company appeared at the ICA as part of the CRASHarts series, has gotten a lot of press exposure as an up-and-coming choreographer with serious ideas.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | November 24, 2009

Various Artists | Panama! 3

Soundway (2009)
If you purchase a copy of Soundway’s wonderful Panama! 3 — and you should — you get two things for the price of one. First, this is a carefully curated CD of “Calypso Panameño, Guajira Jazz & Cumbia Típica on the Isthmus 1960-75” that will keep you smiling — and perhaps dancing — for a healthy while.
By GUSTAVO TURNER | November 25, 2009

Mixed media

Ran Blake's Pawnbroker, Sofia Koutsovitis's pan-American roots
Film noir has been a running theme in composer/pianist Ran Blake's work since the beginning of his career — his very first album, The Newest Sound Around (RCA, 1962), with singer Jeanne Lee, began with David Raskin's theme to Otto Preminger's Laura .
By JON GARELICK | November 18, 2009

Rhythm queens

The educational ecstasy of Zili Misik
It’s a chilly Monday afternoon, and at the head of the lawn in front of the Christian Science Center, Zili Misik are starting soundcheck, bear-hugging their instruments to keep them warm.
By MATT PARISH | October 21, 2009

No new age

Earthsound is for real
Yes, this Boston jazz trio incorporates the sounds of seals, tree frogs, and crickets. Yes, one of them is a working ecologist. Here's why you shouldn't hold that against them.
By JON GARELICK | September 25, 2009

No new age

El Mondonguito

A place to dance, drink, and maybe get a little Puerto Rican nosh
I keep finding good, inexpensive food in Boston in unlikely places: a commercial shipyard, a construction-company lot, a mall food court, and what looks like someone's house in a residential neighborhood.
By MC SLIM JB | July 29, 2009

Various Artists | Comfusões

Out/Here (2009)
The Portuguese pun on this compilation's title suggests both "confusions" and "with fusions."
By GUSTAVO TURNER | July 29, 2009

Music Seen: Femi Kuti, the Loblolly Boy

And Luke Kalloch
On record, Femi Kuti can't help but come off as a slightly vanilla version of his mad genius father Fela (popularizer of Afrobeat music, also known for having 12 wives at once, among other things).
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 15, 2009

Pleasure principles

King Sunny Adé still brings the beats
King Sunny Adé's music is bubbly as a tonic — a percolating, pop-infused update of the traditional Yoruba sound. "My songs are made to lift worries, so people can be happy and dance their troubles away," declares the 62-year-old Nigerian world-music star.
By TED DROZDOWSKI | July 10, 2009

French disconnections

The new-wavers at the French Film Festival
Last year's Boston French Film Festival featured Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two , and that, combined with this year's Chris Marker retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive and Agnès Varda's fine new The Beaches of Agnès , made it seem almost plausible that the New Wave might rise again.
By PETER KEOUGH | July 07, 2009

Trail of tunes

Music al fresco at summer fests
The best summer music festivals take something from the season: the smell of the surf, the sight of the mountains, fireworks, lawn seating — or, at least, fried dough.
By CLEA SIMON | June 09, 2009

Various artists | Open Strings: 1920s Middle Eastern Recordings

Honest Jon's (2009)
Over the past year, Honest Jon's has released three compilations culled from more than 150,000 78s of early music from the EMI Hayes Archive: music from 1930s Baghdad, early West African music recorded in Britain, and a more general compilation that moved across country lines and the first half of the 20th century.
By DEVIN KING | May 06, 2009

Diana Krall | Quiet Nights

Verve (2009)
Jazz as the language of love is the theme of this hitmaker's 12th album, an achingly pretty tribute to the spirit, pace, and sound of the bossa nova.
By TED DROZDOWSKI | March 23, 2009

The Irish rovers

The Pogues return to their other 'old main drag'
"The Pogues and Boston go together in ways that belong in the realm of the unexplainable."
By MIKE MILIARD | March 18, 2009