Hermas Zopoula is a musician from Burkina Faso in West Africa. In the July-August Utne Reader, writer Frank Bures calls his new two-CD debut album Espoir “a great addition to any Afropop fan’s library.” Zopoula is not yet living the life of a world music star, however: He still works as a translator for Air Burkina at the international airport in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, as he prepares to record his second album and hopes for his star to rise. Bures recently caught up with Zopoula by phone to discuss his music and his life. Here is their conversation. —The Editors

Listen to a sample track from Espoir:
"Companion de Route" by Hermas Zopoula

Hello, Hermas. How are things in Ouagadougou?

I’m fighting with the heat.

Is it hot there now?

Well it’s six o’clock and dark is just coming, so now it is a little bit not hot. But to you it is hot. If you were here at around 12 o’clock I’m sure that you would melt.

How did you get your start in music?

In all my family are what we call griots, people who are singing and praising, giving praises to very important people in the village. My family used to do such a thing. Since when I was born, all my family are Christians, but this mark was still on me. I could still see some people singing and praising each other. I grew up with that. At around 12 years I said I will become a singer. So I started training myself. And in 1999 I moved from Leo to Ouagadougou and I continued in the music. When I was 18 years old I started to do music really well, doing my own songs. And in 2000 I met Jonathan [Dueck] and his wife. OK, I have spoken a lot. Now you must ask me another question.

So are you a still griot? Are there griots still around?

Yes, there are still griots. But with the religion, they are stopped. They are nothing like they used to be in the past. In the past we had our griots and they were using their abilities to sing praises to the idols. So now they are not singing in that same way.

Musically, which artists are your influences? 

We have some musicians in Burkina that are really loved much, but I don’t use the style they are using to play their instruments. I can say [Ivorian reggae star] Alpha Blondy is the first one. [Late South African reggae star] Lucky Dube is another one. And we also have some old musicians that are really—I liked the way they play. Pepe Kalle. You know how he dances and how he sings?

Yeah.

Sam Mangwana.

Yes, I know Sam Mangwana.

We have so many of them here in Burkina Faso.

Like how many musicians?

Wow. That is a great question. I really cannot figure it out. Because each year we have something we call the Musicians' Festival. And we can see on the television that they have more than 80 musicians registered.

Will you be in it?

I’m not sure because you have to have two albums for sale before you register. So maybe in the coming year I will be able to.

Are there many music venues around Ouagadougou?

We have so many places. Sometimes we don’t even need to go to a very remarkable place. Even you can just play on the corner. But if you want to organize a very big concert and we have places you can go to. And if you are a very, very well-known musician you can hire the stadium. Alpha Blondie. Lucky Dube.

So do people do in Burkina Faso like music?

Yes, they do. But in the past, Burkinabé people, they like music but they are not trying to play music by themselves. They were buying cassettes from Abidjan. We have more than 6 million people in Abidjan. So going and coming back they would just buy some tapes from there, and they don’t care about other musicians here in Burkina Faso. The new music from Burkina Faso is there in Abidjan, and we also have theirs here.

So is the music from Ivory Coast and Mali and Niger and Mali different from Burkina Faso’s music?

Yes, yes. Very different.

How so?

In Burkina Faso you’ll see that people are saying we are singing warba. Most people in Burkina Faso are Mossi people. And Mossi people used to dance warba. But if you go to Mali, it’s madang. And now in Abidjan, it’s very mixed. I can’t tell you what kind of music they’re dancing to there because they have a very mixed population. You will see Ghanaians. You will see Burkinabé. You will see Malians. You’ll see people from every country living there. They have everything: reggae, madang, and since they have more than 6 million Burkinabé there, if you bring a cassette, they can start dancing warba.

Are those dance styles or music styles?

They are dance styles, but all styles of dance are coming with their own style of music.

What is your dream as a musician?

I want to be a very well-known musician. And I want to have my own team and my own studio. If you have your own studio is very easy for you to perform songs. Very easy! Because you’ll have all the time to mix and remix them to review all that you have been doing before you let it go out. And I want to move around the world.

Do you want to fill the stadium like Alpha Blondy?

Yes, I want to fill the stadium! I want to have many fans on my back when I am moving across the city, and people say, “Here are the artists. Here are the artists!” (laughs)

Do you have any concerts coming up soon?

In Ouagadougou?

Yes.

No, not here in Ouagadougou. Not yet. My plan is that I’m looking to go to the U.S., where I will be making my second album. But now it is the period when people are going on vacation, so at the airport where I am working, we have so many flights. So I don’t have any time to organize anything during this period. Maybe from October to February, something can be organized. Now I’m working seven days a week. So that leads me to being not able to accomplish something of my desires.

Are you married and have children?

No, I don’t have any. I am free. I’m open.

I’ll put the word out. That is all of my questions. Was there anything else you wanted to say?

Yes. I had another thing to let you know: Out of 36 brothers and sisters I am the last born. My father was married to six wives. I’m the last one of the family. I was born when my father was nearly 80 years. Some people say he was 90 years.

So you still have time to have children.

Yes, I have to live more than my father! He lived more than 120 years before he passed away. I have a lot to do, because we have a saying here in Burkina Faso: Every child is supposed to do better than his father. So maybe I’ll be looking to make 40 children. (laughs) I’m joking. And maybe 10 wives, or 20. I don’t know. (laughs)

Image by  Inoussa Nadie , courtesy of  Asthmatic Kitty Records .

It’s hard to imagine music  that’s much happier than juju, the Nigerian-born style with peppy, repeating guitar lines, honeyed vocals, and an army of talking drums inviting—OK, imploring—you to dance. King Sunny Ade is its primary exponent, and back in the late ’80s he was my entry point into African music. Vaguely interested in African sounds from my Talking Heads records (what can I say, I was a white kid from the Midwest), I picked up the Ade album Live Live Juju and was swept up in the cascading drums and sweetly unfurling melodies. My ears took me further and further into African sounds and eventually led me to the legendary Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo Kuti, also a Nigerian but a much more complex, controversial character with darker, denser music and strongly political lyrics. In a sense they were the bookends to my aural African sojourn: the easy and the hard, the gentle and the ferocious.

I never saw Fela perform before his death from AIDS in 1997, and I never caught Ade on tour—until last week, when I caught both the King and Fela’s banner-carrying son, Femi Kuti, on an amazing double bill at the Minnesota Zoo. The concert was everything I expected and more, with Ade’s juju as vibrant as ever and Kuti’s music just as intense and forceful as his father’s.

Ade’s set came first. As the sun sank low in the summer sky, his band members, more than a dozen strong, took the stage in their brown patterned African dress, and then Ade entered, his sparkling blue gown and regal comportment announcing his arrival. (My 5-year-old son said, “I can tell which one is the king by his uniform.”) The band let its full force be known immediately, with the drummers—entirely half of the band—constructing a wall of rhythm that within minutes had rib cages shuddering and feet fidgeting. If there were any doubts about the health and humor of the 60-something bandleader, Ade soon displayed that the King is alive and very well, deftly dancing and stepping to the beat and commanding his band with a mere wave of his finger. Singing in Yoruba, Ade led the band through a blissful series of songs that reminded me just how powerfully his music had grabbed me 20 years earlier.

A small segment of the crowd were Yoruba speakers, standing out not just for their African dress but for their hearty responses to Ade’s call-and-response lyrics and their inspired dancing. Their enthusiasm was infectious and helped the somewhat staid Minnesota crowd get their Africa on. By the end of the set, after a particularly hearty sing-along, Ade himself seemed thrilled by the response: “I love you all,” he said, and the crowd responded in kind.

After a short break, Femi Kuti’s band Positive Force took the stage, distinguishing itself with far fewer drums, a five-man horn section, and three rump-shaking dancers. (Ade briefly had two dancers onstage.) Kuti appeared at the forefront with a serious, calm but piercing gaze that would seldom leave his face, and he established set the tenor of his set by leading off with “Stop AIDS” from his Fight to Win album. The song’s edgy horn bursts, driving rhythms, and blunt English lyrics announced that things were getting heavier—though, as the dancers proved, there was still a lot of shaking going on.

A couple of songs into his set, Kuti popped a quiz on the crowd. “Do you know Dizzy Gillespie? Do you know Miles Davis? … Do you know John Coltrane? Do you know Duke Ellington? Do you know Billie Holiday?” The crowd’s affirmative answers set up his own: “Then we won’t have any problem tonight.”

After several jazz-informed solos, he had one more question: “Do you know Fela Anikulapo Kuti?” The roaring response left no doubt that his father’s legacy was hovering in the cooling night air.

Jazz indeed proved to be one of the magic components in Kuti’s music, as he switched between vocals, saxophone, trumpet, and keyboards, always pushing the band toward raw and emotive sounds with an improvisatory edge. But there was also some house, hip-hop, and techno in the mix, adding a modern, sexy shine to the Afrobeat sound. Throughout it all, social messages leapt out from the lyrics: “Why all this fighting? Why all this suffering?” “The African man and the African woman find it very difficult to succeed.” “All in the name of peace we fight and kill to find justice.” The overall impression was that of a party whose host had an awful lot of his mind.

Kuti’s last number mixed up all these contradictions in one big mishmash. Singing “Beng Beng Beng” from his album Shoki Shoki, he gave a long mid-song lesson in sexual restraint—“don’t come too fast,” goes the song’s refrain—that took on an almost scolding tenor. But after he delivered his message, the band kicked in again, the big beat started up—and hips resumed swaying.

"When I'm singing I remember many things—the good times when we have the life in Somalia... Now everything is zero. The solution is to be dead. When I play music I remember the good times and I become very happy." That's Somali musician Mohammed Abbi Samantar. He lives with his wife, Kaha Mukhtar Mohammed, in a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. In this video, the two sing beautifully together in their mud shelter as photos from the camp and the conflict in Somalia flash across the screen.

Source: Global Post

It's happened again: We're knee-deep in baseball season. The University of Nebraska Press is capitalizing with the release of Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song. Those of you who need all 123 pages of that story will no doubt find your way to it. For the rest of you, let me attempt to distill the story to two rather fantastic elements.

First, there is this, as told by author Amy Whorf McGuiggan:

Dashed off, with accompanying doodles, on a scrap of paper during a New York subway ride by Jack Norworth, a vaudeville song and dance headliner who, it was said, had never attended a professional baseball game, 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game,' with music by Tin Pan Alley composer Albert von Tilzer (who also had never attended a game), was debuted on a vaudeville stage in April 1908.

Second, there are the copycat songs that went nowhere and, even better, the sheet music art work that accompanied those songs. Here's a sampling:

Driving to Louisiana for the Baton Rouge Blues Festival, music writer Sean Michaels learns that his beloved Percy Sledge is a regular in Baton Rouge car dealership commercials. When he hears this, he writes at the MP3 blog Said the Gramophone, a small corner of an imaginary world turns to ash. “The Percy Sledge in my mind,” Michaels writes, “the one who sings ‘When A Man Loves A Woman,’ is too distracted by love to ever do something so commercial. He is always staring out the window, or across the street, or over the butcher counter at a pretty girl. He stumbles on the sidewalk, neglects his chores, forgets to call his mum—all because of a passing woman's perfume, her smile, her lovely knees.”

It’s a beautiful snapshot on its own, but the up-from-the-ashes moment at the end of Michaels’ tale—when Sledge appears on stage in a royal blue suit, sunglasses, and a Hawaiian shirt—is even better.

Michaels marvels: “The gap-toothed singer glows. He is grinning wider than I have ever grinned in my life. He is grinning so wide that his grin cannot possibly be fake." Sledge, he writes, brings “the self-confidence of a man who was once at the top of the world, and who has decided to never leave. Like all the best soul singers, Percy Sledge's greatest talent is the vitality of his mind's eye.”

Friends, there’s only one place to go from here:

Source: Said the Gramophone 

The avant-garde record label ESP Disk helped blow the lid off mainstream jazz back in the ’60s and '70s, bringing the far-out free-jazz sounds of Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and other artists to adventurous listeners. Canada’s Musicworks (article not available online) reports on the label’s resurgence in recent years since founder Bernard Stollman reactivated it, releasing new recordings and reissuing the original catalog.

“The first ESP discs could look dangerous and provisional,” writes Stuart Broomer in Musicworks' Winter 2008 issue. “The music could sound dangerous as well.”

Broomer rightfully celebrates Spiritual Unity, Ayler’s first U.S. release and ESP’s first recording, describing Ayler’s “coruscating saxophone solos … with great roaring renditions of diatonic folk themes that suddenly turned into wails and honks and runs … .” And he notes the ESP back catalog contains “undeniable masterpieces” such as Ornette Coleman’s Town Hall. But he also encourages listeners to look past obvious ESP touchstones to “the less appreciated and sometimes most visionary of the original releases, as well as some very select new recordings”—notably Solar Forge by Totem and Expedition by Hans Tammen, Alfred Harth, Chris Dahlgren, and Jay Rosen.

Bernard Stollman recently spoke to All About Jazz, and anyone who’s into non-smooth jazz should read the interview, in which he discusses ESP's revival, archival projects like the label's new Charlie Parker box set, and his search for "truth and beauty." Here’s a taste:

On his approach to running the label: “It is a matter of spirit. The word I never hear around me is the word entertainment. These are not entertainers. They are thinkers. They are philosophers, and they are working toward some kind of higher—it is a language that is not explainable. I couldn’t explain it to you no matter how long I tried.”

On recorded music: “I think music should be experienced as a live phenomenon. We've frozen a second of their life, but the artist continues performing, creating, changing. It is just a reflection of what is possible. No more than that. Again, not an entertainment medium. I don’t think people should listen to these records. I think they should hear them, but as far as repeat listening? I don’t know how often they should repeat listening. It is about being stimulated, turned on, and inspired.”

On the state of music: “There is a current generation that represents the world as it is today and their music is just as inspiring, influential, innovative, and interesting as any other era I have lived through. Imagination, inspiration have not left the world.”

Sources: Musicworks, All About Jazz, ESP Disk

Image by Howard Bernstein, courtesy of ESP Disk.

Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate uses traditional Native American tunes as raw material, fusing them with old-fashioned classical forms like the fugue and the sonata.

In an interview with New Music Box, Tate discusses his approach to composition and his place in the history of both Chickasaw tradition and Western classical music.

Tate points out that, while he may be unique as a composer, the basic idea of synthesizing Native American culture with non-indigenous influences is hardly new. “The two things that Indians are known for the most are beadwork and horses, neither of which is originally from here.”

Similarly, Tate explains how his compositions fit into the tradition of several hundred years of classical music, which began, as he explains it, “with monks in a Catholic church…These guys were singing traditional tunes. I equate that with the traditional music of my tribe: It’s the old music of a culture, a certain group of people with a standard set of tunes and music that was used for the mass and different occasions and that was it…Then what happened was they started writing it down. That was the birth of what we call classical music…Now that you’ve got it down on paper, you can actually do what is so unique to classical music and that is the idea of abstracting your own music…So I don’t see it as assimilating Western music. I see it as participating in this way of classical abstraction…Once you start to reinterpret it, it’s not the same music. But like I said, I think you try to, at least I do, keep this ethos of the traditional music in the final product.”

Audio excerpts of many of Tate’s compositions are available on his website.

Source: New Music Box

Shakespeare wrote that music is the food of love, but for new booking and promotions group Substance, music is also the food of protest. This ambitious new organization envisions a fresh model of activism, one which utilizes multidisciplinary arts events as a means for drawing new audiences to political and social causes. Think of it as music with a heaping side of activism.

Substance member Jim Forrey describes their work in this way: “[The concert] brings someone to a political event, and they don’t even know it’s a political event.” This “build it and they will come” belief was realized at the organization’s inaugural event, Manifestation, which took place at the historic First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis this past weekend.

Manifestation brought together a diverse blend of local and national music acts, as well as community-based political and social activist organizations. New York hip-hop and spoken word artist Sage Francis headlined, while Building Better Bombs, B. Dolan, and the God Damn Doo Wop Band also performed. A capacity crowd of young people swelled the building and looked to be having a great time.

Lining the main floor were tables plying various social and environmental causes, from Oxfam America and United Students Against Sweatshops to Planned Parenthood and Alaska Wilderness League. Underneath the bars stood “Zero Waste” stations, with separate trash and recycling receptacles. Near the back corner, visual artists were painting large-scale works of art on the spot.

It all made tangible Substance’s vision of “rethinking what has become a standard preacher-and-congregation model of art and music as activism” in order to “engage, inspire, and involve concertgoers in urgent movements for tangible change.”          

Looking out over the impressive turnout, Substance organizer Nolan Morice seemed pleased and encouraged. When asked if the evening had brought any unforeseen problems, he replied, “The only thing unexpected has been that nothing unexpected has happened.”

Manifestation builds on the energy and enthusiasm that Substance created with the Ripple Effect event at last year’s Republican National Convention, which featured Rage Against the Machine.

“I never would’ve dreamed we could pull something like that off,” Forrey says in reference to the Ripple Effect. “We learned that if you stay focused and don’t listen to the naysayers, you can achieve anything.”

 

You could easily mistake Brooklyn-born Andy Friedman for yet another aging hipster with a Tom Waits fixation. But behind the soul patch and porkpie hat there’s a more complicated character. Friedman is a visual artist (he made his name as a New Yorker illustrator), and his initial forays into music were spoken-word riffs on the life of an artist. This experimental and philosophical tone informs Weary Things, his second album. The songs include a long story about art and impermanence, an obituary for a doomed Brooklyn bar, and a wistful tune about a well-adjusted father nostalgic for his past as a drunk loner. Friedman’s serendipitous stories, anchored by a rock-steady Brooklyn-blues backup band, offer an almost clinical examination of the insides of an artist’s skull.

Image by Matt Dellinger, courtesy of City Salvage Records.

Charlie Haden , a legend of American jazz music, has been detained in Portugal, followed by the FBI in Manhattan, and embraced as a hero by a South African parliamentarian who had been jailed during apartheid. All of this for his legacy of protest songs without words.

The bassist will bring his decades-old and ever-changing Liberation Music Orchestra to New York City's Blue Note jazz club in early November, the same week Americans vote for George W. Bush’s successor. At a show in Minneapolis last week, the longtime radical told audience members he’s sure the results will warrant celebration.

“He feels strongly that we're at a critical moment here,” says Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center and the person responsible for bringing Haden to Minneapolis. “He's completely convinced that the McCain camp represents a continuation of the Bush policies that have been an utter catastrophe for the United States and the world at large.”

Haden, whose contribution to jazz can be traced back to his bass playing on three seminal records by saxophonist Ornette Coleman, convenes his Liberation Music Orchestra only during Republican administrations as a soundtrack of resistance. The group's self-titled 1969 debut was a reaction to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War his administration inherited. Ballad of the Fallen, released in 1982, was a statement against Reagan's policies in Latin America. George H.W. Bush was president when Dream Catchers was pressed in 1990; a comment on the tragedies and struggles of Latin America (again) and South Africa.

The militarism of George W. Bush inspired the Liberation Orchestra's 2005 release, Not in Our Name. Haden chose the title while touring through Europe in the early stages of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. “We were walking down streets in different cities, and we would see unfurled from balconies of the apartment houses: 'Not In Our Name' … the people in Europe really cared … that stuck with me,” he recalled in a 2006 interview.

“Touring jazz musicians,” Bither says, “have a unique vantage point on how America is viewed in the world.”

In Minneapolis last week, Haden and his 11-member orchestra responded to what America has become by reclaiming it. A rambling medley anchored in “America the Beautiful” was equal parts somber, sentimental, joyful, and subversively discordant—a formula the group has held to since its inception.

Traditionally, the Liberation Music Orchestra—aided by brilliant pianist and composer Carla Bley, Haden's collaborator since 1968—has appropriated songs of liberation and protest mostly from other nations. On Not in Our Name, Haden decided to play music only by American composers—his own form of patriotism. “I wanted to do 'America the Beautiful,'” he said in an interview shortly after the album's release, “to show that there's a lot of work that needs to be done in this country.”

Here's a video of Haden and Bley and the Liberation Music Orchestra performing in 2003—convened in response to the prospect of a second term for George W. Bush.

Image by Thomas Dorn, courtesy of Walker Art Center.

If you still haven’t found something hopeful to latch onto in this election year, here is cause for optimism: Flight of the Conchords, a comedy-singing duo from New Zealand, is enjoying widespread popularity on American TVs, computers, and music-sales charts. Think of what this means! It means that a decade of reality TV, crappy sitcoms, and half-assed pop music haven’t necessarily destroyed the American sense of humor. Because Flight of the Conchords is funny—really, really funny—and Americans actually get it.

The duo, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, have a hit show on HBO (the second season is scheduled to begin next January), concert clips that have racked up millions of YouTube views, and a new album (self-titled) that debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200. Their May 13 concert in Minneapolis sold out almost immediately; as the enthusiastic guys sitting behind me helpfully explained, it was one of just 12 stops on their U.S. tour.

I’d seen their show, and seen their YouTube videos (if you haven’t had “Business Time” e-mailed to you at some time during the past year, you should get some funnier friends), so I was excited for the concert—but unsure how they’d spice it up enough to justify the $35 ticket price. That wound up being no problem. Everything, from their singing to their aimless chit-chatting, was hilarious. Yes, most of it was probably scripted, but their between-songs banter was brilliant and random. At one point, they set out to discuss “the issues,” including saving the whales. “Which is difficult,” Jemaine pointed out, “because they’re heavy.”

They mostly play guitar, but they like to rock out on strange, tiny instruments too: Bret had a cute little red keytar, Jemaine had a silver digital saxophone about the size of his forearm, and at one point they brought out a “rockin’spiel—it’s very similar to a glockenspiel,” Jemaine explained, “it’s just more rockin’.” They busted out more than a few crowd favorites, including “The Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room),” “Mutha’uckas,” “Bowie,” and “Business Time,” which included a bonus sitting-in-chair-sexy-dance by Jemaine.  

It may have been the rowdiest I’ve ever seen a Minneapolis crowd (though in all fairness, I’ve never been to a hometown Prince show). Various come-ons, including one high-pitched marriage proposal, were screamed across the room by lovestruck women; I’m guessing the guys are used to such overtures, since they seemed pretty unfazed. The notes thrown onstage by fanladies disarmed them a tad, though, and were perhaps so raunchy (or so drunkenly, illegibly scrawled) that they refused to share them with the audience.

The duo’s strangely broad appeal can be summed up thusly: Last month, Jemaine and Bret appeared in Bust, as two of the feminist mag’s “Men We Love”—but also in the much-maligned lad-mag Maxim. A friend of mine offers a cynical explanation for their popularity in such disparate camps—that 80 percent of their humor lies in the kiwi accent—but I’m going to keep hoping that Flight of the Conchords heralds changing times on the comedy-performance horizon.  

Photo courtesy of Sub Pop Records.

Devastated by a messy break-up, I returned again and again to the separation-themed lyrics of Tegan and Sara’s album So Jealous. I’m a little embarrassed to admit my dependence on the sisters’ squeaky voices and repetitive tunes, but listening to sad songs, according a Walrus article about melancholy and music, might have helped me accept the relationship’s demise. Rather than sinking us deeper into the doldrums (unless we’re clinically depressed), sad music can actually make us feel better. In tears, the hormone prolactin, “along with the release of hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin, mimics the well-being we feel in the most intense moments of connection with others—nursing an infant, having sex, receiving praise.” As musicologist David Huron says, “It’s biology wrapping its arms around you and saying, ‘there there.’” Feeling comforted can make us more realistic, whether about grades, like Huron’s student research subjects, or about losing loved ones.

Image by Patrick Doheny, licensed under Creative Commons.

What could be harder than taking your guitar or sax out on the street and trying to get people to listen?

Writing in Miami New Times, Arielle Castillo offers one fairly persuasive answer: doing the same thing with an upright piano.

— Steve Thorngate  

Image by Jean-Etienne Poirrier, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s ironic that we at Utne Reader have decided to give indie champ Paste magazine a shout-out this week. Because Paste Editor-in-Chief Josh Jackson had the same idea in the magazine’s May issue, offering his hip music mag a well-deserved pat on the back in recognition of 10 years spent bringing great music to its readers. Who cares that the hand doing the patting is Jackson’s own? The issue is exemplary of what Paste does best, offering a good balance of album reviews of new artists and old favorites, a roundup of musicians’ tributes to (and diatribes against) their mothers in honor of Mothers Day, and a hilarious two-page spread celebrating the 100th birthday of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” There’s even the much-loved accordion appreciation article.

The feature articles are excellent as well. The best is an essay by Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Paste sent Gibbard to a cabin in Big Sur—the same cabin to which he’d retreated to write the songs on the band’s latest album, Narrow Stairs, and also where Jack Kerouac wrote Big Sur—to “meditate on life, art and solitude.” Sometimes first-person thought experiments work, and sometimes they flop. In this case, Gibbard offers a very personal, not-quite-sentimental vision of Big Sur, Kerouac, and his own life in a truly enjoyable essay.

Paste brings together the best elements of the mainstream and indie music press, offering sharply written reviews (not exactly a mainstay in the underground music scene) of bands that go unwritten about in most big music glossies.

—Morgan Winters 

The latest issue of the bimonthly arts magazine Stop Smiling, dedicated entirely to jazz, is a veritable odyssey through space and time, bringing the reader from New York City’s 52nd Street to Storyville, New Orleans; cruising through the Roaring ’20s to the New Millennium; each leg of the journey accompanied by Nina Simone’s volatile tenor and the wailing trumpet of Miles Davis.

The magazine exhorts us to “start appreciating America’s greatest art form.” And it’s hard not to when grazing through the sections dedicated to classic jazz cover art, a famous 60-year-old vibraphonist with a death-defying passion for speedboats, and the top five jazz discs worth pilfering from author John Corbett’s album collection. The issue can be nostalgia-inducing, even to the casual fan. There are interviews with jazz luminaries from bygone eras—Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis—and a section dedicated to Eric Dolphy where musicians and historians pay homage to the extraordinary reedman. But more than anything, the issue is a testament to jazz’s place not only as an influential historical artifact, but as a still-thriving form of music in its own right.     

 —Morgan Winters 

 

Wax Poetics magazine is not for amateurs. There’s no doubt that the enthusiasm for funk, soul, jazz, and hip-hop displayed by the magazine’s writers can be infectious, but the articles aren’t written with lay-listeners in mind. They’re for music aficionados, scrounging through old vinyl collections in search of forgotten musical gems.

Current TV is airing a five-minute video about Wax Poetics that you can watch below. Rob Harvilla, the music editor of the Village Voice, also profiled the magazine for the March–April issue of Utne Reader as a part of a package called “For the Love of Music.”

—Bennett Gordon

A tension constricted the sold-out crowd at Minneapolis' Triple Rock Social Club last night as they nervously anticipated the arrival of the New York-based band Vampire Weekend. Dominated by college-aged males with the tails of their button-down shirts peeking out from below their sweaters, the crowd wasn’t just waiting to see the band. They were waiting to see the next big thing. The feeling jittering through the room could best be described as “hype.”

“By now everyone is familiar with the hype cycle,” the editors write in the post-hipster thought journal, n+1 (article not available online). It begins with early adopters latching on to a new or undervalued band, author, or artist before the general populous catches on. This phase of the hype cycle is exemplified by the sentiment, “I was listening to Fraz Liszt before Pitchfork ever even mentioned them,” write the editors of n+1. The initial excitement inevitably leads to a backlash, where the art is stamped with the label of overrated. The next step is the “backlash-to-the-backlash” eloquently expressed by n+1 as “Why’s everybody hatin’ on the [insert band here].”

Vampire Weekend is undoubtedly a beneficiary and victim of this fickle hype cycle. Formed barely two years ago in a Columbia dorm room, the African-influenced pop group now holds the dubious honor of being “the first band ever to be shot for a Spin cover before they'd even released an album,”  the magazine's Andy Greenwald wrote proudly. The quartet went from playing sparse crowds, as seen in the August 2007 photo on the right, to being one of the most-talked about bands in music today.

I experienced the backlash before the show began, when a bartender at the venue down the street told me, “Vampire Weekend? They’re overrated.” He had seen them at South by Southwest in Austin and didn’t feel their performance had lived up to the hype. Step three of the cycle came midway through the show, when a friend of mine said, “I’m definitely part of the backlash-to-the-backlash. I mean, they’re so cute!”

Google searches for “Vampire Weekend” over time. Source: Google Trends.

Of course, popularity doesn’t translate to musical prowess, but I doubt that anyone in the crowd was disappointed by the band’s performance last night. Everyone knew what they were getting into. The guys played every song on their self-titled, 34.2-minute album almost exactly as they had recorded it in the studio. Lead singer and guitarist Ezra Koenig worked hard to capture the vocal octave jumps originally recorded, as he banged out the pop guitar riffs the crowd knew and loved. For good measure, the band played one new song that was nearly as catchy as the rest of their repertoire.

Then, minutes before the end of the show, the band announced that they had run out of music. And who can blame them? Two years is not a lot of time to come up with new material. Koenig explained that they were working on a cover of Tom Petty’s "American Girl," but the song wasn't quite ready. After that, they played the final song on the album, politely said thank you, and left the stage with no encore.

—Bennett Gordon

Images by Anna Harris and Derek Webber, licensed under Creative Commons.

You can hear the song "Mansard Roof" by Vampire Weekend below.

The cultural history of Brazil is in danger. The roots of the country’s world-famous music, as well as its folk medicine, storytelling, dances, and visual arts, lie in traditions that could die out as the older generation ages. The government-sponsored Griô Action program is designed to protect this endangered culture by finding the keepers of historical knowledge and helping them pass on their music, games, and traditions to a new generation.

In this video, Elizabeth Dwoskin, author of “Slave Songs in Brazil” in the March-April issue of Utne Reader, talks about the Griô Action program and defenders of Brazil’s traditions.

—Bennett Gordon

 

To hear more Brazilian music from the members of Griô Action, click on the links below.