Music – Page 4 – Carol Cooper

Pure Percussive Pleasure

Kenny and Louie’s joyous retro reboots dominate clubs and living rooms alike

Gotham’s hippest and happiest underground nightlife owes its origins to the ever-streetwise and affable duo of Brooklyn’s Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez and Bronx-bred “Little” Louie Vega, known officially (and appropriately) as Masters at Work. Consider Vega’s parties at Cielo, co-produced by West End Records honcho Kevin Hedge and attracting a who’s who of underground production talent from around the world, all dancing, drinking, slipping demos to the DJs, and networking like mad. Kenny, meanwhile, recently funked up the venue with a solo DJ set mixing r&b rarities with new and remixed tracks, days after his Masters at Work cohort returned from a festival stint in Europe. Continue reading “Pure Percussive Pleasure”

Outward Is Heaveward

Presenting gospel’s modern sounds in praise and worship

There’s so much going on in gospel music today that you may have missed when Kirk Franklin paused from promoting Hero, his latest chart-topping CD, to go on The Oprah Winfrey Show with his wife to discuss his triumph over video porn addiction. His point? To publicly reduce himself to an imperfect everyman who overcame a troublesome vice with the support of prayer and faith. Continue reading “Outward Is Heaveward”

Princely Digs

At home with His Royal Badness, who shows us his secret stash

Prince
3121
Universal

In his long-ago heyday Prince complimented Kid Creole’s backup girls by admiring how Adriana Kaegi “used every beat of the music in her choreography.” Evidence of that admiration loomed large this February on Saturday Night Live, when Prince’s new band broke into a fierce little fit o’ funk called “Fury” in which Mr. Nelson’s own distaff trio adopted several signature Coconut moves. Támar and her crew do Ikettes meet Isadora Duncan, while Adriana’s Coconuts did Ikettes meet the I-Threes. But you get the idea — just the way Prince wanted you to. Because as with all of Prince’s stylistic borrowings over the years, every strategic cross-reference is intentionally transparent. Continue reading “Princely Digs”

Slightly Grey Feisty Females Strut Their Sassiest Stuff: Saffire — The Uppity Blues Women’s Deluxe Edition

Saffire — The Uppity Blues Women
Deluxe Edition
Alligator

If you buy only one acoustic blues album this year, why not a best-of from a self-affirming trio of feisty females? Culled from six previous Alligator albums, Deluxe Edition by Saffire — the Uppity Blues Women lets these slightly gray ladies strut their top-drawer vocal and instrumental licks on an array of sassy originals and vintage covers reverentially resurrecting the “wild woman” legacy of Victoria Spivey, Ma Rainey, Sippie Wallace, and Bessie Smith. Where contemporary pop “bad girls” from Shakira to the Pussycat Dolls evoke the sensuality and spunk of the blues but none of its wisdom, Saffire lyrics provide all three. Their allegorical “Silver Beaver” is as sexually explicit as anything Lil’ Kim or Foxy Brown might record, just more elegantly phrased. As players they embrace every shade of difference between country, urban, and vaudeville blues, even veering toward country swing and gypsy jazz in “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.” Omni-American and young at heart, Gayle, Anne, and Andra are as soulful as Alicia Keys, as defiant as the Runaways, and as heroic as the Dixie Chicks, with none of the career drawbacks of callow youth. Continue reading “Slightly Grey Feisty Females Strut Their Sassiest Stuff: Saffire — The Uppity Blues Women’s Deluxe Edition”

High Voltage

Before taking the Mercury Lounge stage on Easter Sunday, Aki Morimoto–guitar-wielding front man for Tokyo’s punk power-trio Electric Eel Shock–toyed with some electric blues licks, then let us watch him doff his Dickies tee for his Twisted Sister tour shirt. Was this gesture a symbol of bi-coastal respect? Pan-metal allegiance? or a sly hard-core gender fuck? You decide. From their naked drummer’s Chili Pepper cock-sock to Morimoto’s Hendrix-‘fro, EES loves to keep their growing global fandom guessing. Recently signed for America to the Gearhead label, their European CD (retitled Go USA for the States) is a headbanger’s smorgasbord of signature riffs. From hairmetal flash, to grindcore grit, to speedmetal energy, to Ramones-era brattiness, to Sex Pistol wit, to Eddie Van Halen cheese, EES find fresh, recombinant contexts for all of it. Live, their improbably hooky “Rock and Roll Can Rescue The World” becomes both a statement of purpose and an open index of influences . . . into which Aki howls unexpected ad-libs like a line or two from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” Continue reading “High Voltage”

The ‘Other’ R&B

Sophistipop at summer’s end, remembering the glboal fusion of the ’70s

Solu Music
Affirmation
Solu MusicSalomé de Bahia
Brasil
Tommy Boy

Summer’s end provides the perfect release window for albums like Solu Music’s Affirmation and Salomé de Bahia’s Brasil. Deceptively light, eminently danceable club music, they feature the kinds of sexy, soulful arrangements I term “sophistipop” — and which might otherwise be dismissed as archaic, especially during a radio season wherein classic r&b quotes can sound woefully atavistic unless fronted by some amazingly skillful white vocalist or a rap star. Continue reading “The ‘Other’ R&B”

David Byrne Looks Forward . . . and Back

Celebrating the release of Grown Backwards (Nonesuch Records) 2004:

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”

Putamayo: The Little Label That Could

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”

Post-Iberia: Multicultural Musicians Attain Authenticity Without Purity

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”

Latin Swing’s Last Lion: Johnny Pacheco Returns to the New York His Salsa Once Changed

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”