An archive of writings
Unexpurgated text of complete interview, partially published in October 2004 by The L magazine in New York City. Also available on Byrne’s website.
Q: As a solo artist you have worked with horn sections and now with string sections to color and embellish your songs. Aside from a more cerebral and cinematic atmosphere, what narrative abilities does a string section give your compositions that a horn section does not? Continue reading “David Byrne Looks Forward . . . and Back”
World-compilation label Putumayo successfully sells high concepts to well-heeled base
| Women of Africa PutumayoNuevo Latino Putumayo |
While the rest of the music industry downsizes like mad, an 11-year-old independent label the majors used to snicker at has scored a 15 percent sales increase over the past two years. Not only surviving but thriving, Putumayo World Music — based in New York but named for a picturesque river valley in Colombia — is getting the last laugh largely because it breaks the rules. Continue reading “Putamayo: The Little Label That Could”
| Globalfest Public Theater January 10Okay Player Tour Irving Plaza January 3 |
With an aural smorgasbord as ambitious as last Saturday’s GlobalFEST, it’s inevitable that a few choice items will go untasted. In five hours on three stages at the Public Theater, a sold-out crowd scrambled to see 16 multicultural attractions from around the world and around the block. Forty-minute sets were just long enough to leave most of us wanting more. Continue reading “Post-Iberia: Multicultural Musicians Attain Authenticity Without Purity”
Dapper, charismatic, and 68 years young, Johnny Pacheco is one of New York’s cultural lions, a Juilliard alumnus who revolutionized the way Afro-Latin swing, a/k/a salsa, was perceived around the world. One of the last of a vanishing breed, Pacheco holds a torch that now shines as much for fallen comrades like Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Héctor Lavoe, Celia Cruz, Pete “El Conde” Rodriguez, Charlie Palmieri, and José Fajardo as for himself. Simultaneously at work on a new solo album and a biographical memoir spanning his life at the epicenter of Latin club music, Pacheco is far from hanging up his clave. This week, he appears with his conjunto-style orchestra to inaugurate regular Latin nights at a spanking-new midtown venue–LQ at 47th Street and Lexington Avenue. Continue reading “Latin Swing’s Last Lion: Johnny Pacheco Returns to the New York His Salsa Once Changed”
| Macy Gray The Trouble With Being Myself EpicMya Moodring Interscope |
Both women crouch nearly nude on their album covers, gazing with feral yet somehow fetal reproach at potential consumers, like naughty fairy changelings who’ve had wings snapped off. Similar to Shakespearean sprites, these fey creatures seem a little mean, dangerous to woo. Mya’s Moodring and Macy Gray’s The Trouble With Being Myself are third-album efforts for both artists, who aim seductive funk at disparate peer groups. Ten years Macy’s junior, Mya panders to teens and twentysomethings, while Macy’s dark sense of humor is best appreciated by those over 25. Continue reading “Imps of the Perverse”
New Stances Sharpen Traditional Disciplines
Can perfect posture relieve severely debilitated victims of chronic pain? While the American Medical Association’s jury may still be out on the quantifiable benefits of postural and biomechanical therapies like yoga and Pilates, more and more medical doctors–as well as alternative health practitioners–are seeing patients achieve remarkable results from working with master teachers in these modalities. Continue reading “Straighten Up”
| Brooks & Dunn Red Dirt Road Arista |
In the rural east Texas graveyard where my father and his parents are buried, just a stone’s throw from a black church built on land donated by my father’s father, I embrace my country-and-western roots. On yearly visits to the ancestral homestead, I drive long flat highways between Longview, Marshall, and Shreveport, where I temporarily shed my native Yankee persona to blend into a very different world. It’s not easy. Continue reading “The Long Road Home: The World’s Biggest Country Duo Risk Backlash With a Great Rock Album”
ARTAGENT & Plum Blossoms Gallery request the pleasure of your company to the two-part preview of
For Immediate Release
A charity art exhibition to inaugurate the opening of a new gallery, in which a collective of 17 Thai contemporary artists will provide the backbone of the event with new works.
Dates: Thursday, June 5 — Sunday, August 10, 2003 Continue reading ““100@100””
| The Scissor Sisters Saturday at 11 p.m., Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, 212-219-3006 |
No one-sentence summation (no matter how correct or clever) really does justice to the Scissor Sisters. As a girdle-tight, piss-elegant rock unit unafraid to play “disco,” they reinvent the exhilarating DIY eclecticism of ’80s dance-oriented rock as if the ’90s never happened. What Rubén Blades once said about the irresistible appeal of salsa goes double for the pomo-homo electrodisco of the SS: This music’s got balls so big you can almost see ’em. Accordingly, SS songs sound a clarion call for the next sexual revolution–one triumphant over both AIDS and constricting gender categories–set to infectious dancefloor grooves that swing so hard you could come in your pants from sheer sonic friction. They may not be George Bush’s idea of a military band, but I’ll take marching orders from the Scissor Sisters any day. Continue reading “Regulars”