Tag: Village Voice

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”

Imps of the Perverse

Crouching tigers, dangerous to woo, aiming sex and ego at disparate age demographics

 

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”

Straighten Up

New Stances Sharpen Traditional Disciplines

Aligned Against Pain

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”

The Long Road Home: The World’s Biggest Country Duo Risk Backlash With a Great Rock Album

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”

Regulars

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”

Nice Girls Finish Last

The $64 million question? Why, in a post-Spice Girl world, are black girl groups still forming (and falling apart) as if the Spice Girls never happened? You have to admit that the successful game plan of five self-motivated British vixens who simply hired the right lawyer to help them sell their own (TLC-inspired!) pop group with a view toward maximum profitability (and a calculated expiration date) should have inspired legions of wannabes–girls looking for culturally specific ways to take control of their own ascendance and leave the roulette table ahead of the house. Why would young, talented black women still choose the slower, less flexible, less lucrative option of a production or “development” deal, when it might be possible to model one’s career on the 1964-to-1968 trajectory of the Beatles? Continue reading “Nice Girls Finish Last”

XXX-Woman: An Interview With Comic Book Artist Amanda Conner

Worlds collide at the yearly Comicon in San Diego, California. For over three decades it’s thrived as a universe where the comic and cartoon industry’s biggest stars are profitably orbited by an array of still-striving peers and ambitious newcomers. Corporate moguls like Stan Lee rub elbows with iconoclastic self-publishers. Wannabe writers pursue Marvel or DC editors. And Hollywood suits descend from the planet Money to wave their checkbooks at a true creative underground. Continue reading “XXX-Woman: An Interview With Comic Book Artist Amanda Conner”

Spaceballs

The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction
By Justine Larbalestier
Wesleyan, 295 pp., $19.95 paperBetter to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril
By Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary
Between the Lines, 282 pp., $29.95 paper

As inspirational as reading science fiction can be, the genre’s primary texts won’t tell you all you need to know about the “literature of possibility.” That’s because no other genre generates as much creative input or feedback from its fandom. Yeoman editor David Hartwell of TOR books, an SF tastemaker since the late ’60s, likes to recall that a few decades ago America’s SF production was so small that every fan could read every book and story published within a year, and potentially respond to every idea introduced into the field’s mind stream. Continue reading “Spaceballs”