Now that Spring has sprung, here's a dose of soulful fiddle music from two masters: David Greely, founding fiddler of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and Joel Savoy of The Savoy Family Band and the Red Stick Ramblers. The duo was in town for GlobalFEST, at an "offsite event" at the Highline Ballroom. This performance (no interview -- it doesn't need it!) is a happy reminder that there are still places in the USA that treasure their ethnic heritage and play homemade music to enrich life. It's easy to imagine these two making music on the front porch in the midst of a warm Louisiana Spring day. So relax and bask in the sounds of some sweet strings.

Keep in mind that a lot of this is music for dancing off the work and cares of the day. In Cajun country there are still plenty of places to hear live, authentic music, be it Cajun, Creole or Zydeco. You go there to dance till you are ready to drop, till your endorphins kick in and do what they are supposed to.  For my money, that's a fun evening.

AND here's some other news:  When I attended WOMEX last October I met Karima Daoudi, a young woman with a major penchant for world music. She's got her own blog now, and it's off to a promising start. I love the video she chose to share and discuss. 

Hmmmmm....I'll have to try to get that for Link!

Five years ago Link TV sought to capture on videotape one of the BBC's most beloved deejays. Charlie Gillett was one of those great music people who had an unerring ear and a true passion for good music wherever it was from. (He quite literally discovered Dire Straits.) He seemed a natural for us to collaborate with, and we sent the filmmaker Celia Lowenstein into one of his radio shows with a camera to see what it would be like to film right there in the studio. We were all very excited with the result. Charlie had such knowledge and charm (and as you will see, was also quite a handsome gentleman) that we thought we had the making of a fine series. It was only a few short weeks later that we found out that Charlie had been diagnosed with a serious desease that could be kept at bay, but not cured. He discontinued his show, and we scrapped our idea and filed the tape away.
Charlie died last week. It took some searching, but we found the old tape.  Here is a brief snapshot, if you will, of the music he loved, and just how engaging a presence he was.

To find out more about Charlie, there is a good obit in the Guardian UK.
Click here to find out more about the BBC radio episode with Justin and Seckou.

I first met Josh Norek about ten years ago when he sent me a low budget video of his Latino-Jewish band the Hip Hop Hoodíos. It was a song about Chanukah sung in Spanish and English, and there were plenty of surreal shots of the "Bagel Babe" - a hot young thing wearing a bra made from that circular staple - even in a Jacuzzi! I sensed there was an unusual mind behind this.

Further down the road, Josh sent me an email about a new event: the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) that he was co-organizing in New York City. I wished him well. He continued to send me press releases about bands I had never heard of but which were pretty damned good. I started to trust his taste.

Five years ago, he helped Tomas Cookman launch the company Nacional Records. Between them, they had tons of experience managing and promoting "Rock en Español" acts, and soon they began aggregating the strongest roster of Latin Alternative Music extant. Then, prior to the past presidential election, Josh sent an email around, saying he was taking a sabbatical (or should that be shabattical?) from the music biz, and donating significant time to his favorite grassroots organization, Voto Latino, working to register and activate young Latinos in battleground states to get the vote out. Since then he has also gotten his radio show "The Latin Alternative" up and syndicated. So when I heard that Josh was going to be in town, I jumped at the chance to interview him. His time as usual, was tight; we had just half an hour, so we plowed into it despite the noise from construction on an adjacent floor.

No matter where we fall on the immigration issue, the undeniable fact is that the burgeoning Latino population is changing the face and culture of the USA. I wanted Josh to talk about this, to reflect on the relationship between music, demographics and activism. He did that and more; his conversation was so far ranging that I may have to present those parts of it that dealt specifically with Rock en Español, Nacional, the LAMC and the state of the music industry in general, at a later date.

I find myself in the timely position of reporting on a fine Celtic artist and band just prior to St. Patrick's Day. Cara Dillon was in town for GlobalFEST, and treated the crowd to some truly wonderful singing and playing. My own affection for Celtic music probably stems from my early love of bluegrass and later, of country music. The Scots-Irish contribution to these idioms is inextricable and has influenced the way we hear our own popular music so much that we tend to slide right into it easily. It certainly felt that way to me, walking through GlobalFEST with its three stages and four acts each, from all corners of the earth. No matter how good they all might have been, when I landed on Cara's set, I felt like I was home.

The band, comprised of Sam Lakeman on keyboards and guitar, Ed Boyd on guitar, Brian Finnegan on various whistles, and Cillian Vellely on pipes, burned through jigs, ballads and reels. Dillon's voice can sound ethereal at times, but it is in fact a strong and precise instrument, and her choice of repertoire kept the audience by turns enthralled and bouncing. 

Some of the most exciting musical collaborations are happening between jazz, classical and world musicians these days. Musicians have always fed off interaction with other players, but the sheer variety of music that is available coupled with access to international artists has led to some truly exquisite sounds. In the classical world the work of Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble and its spinoff collaborations between Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider come to mind, and of course, the by now venerable Kronos Quartet and maverick violinist Giles Apap. In the jazz world the same foment is apparent (the kora seeming to be the instrument of choice these days, appearing alongside jazz heavies) and when the world music extravaganza of GlobalFEST blew into town in January, it brought Nguyen Lê's "Saiyuki" with it.

Lê's name is practically synonymous with polyglot music; witness allaboutjazz.com describing his 2006 CD "Homescape" as a combination of  "post-Hendrix rock, Milesian harmon-mute free improv, Maghrebi trance music, Ellingtonia, ambient, a Papua New Guinea vocal choir. . .Delta blues, Vietnamese folk tunes, flamenco, Iranian modes, a Sardinian choir, Australian aboriginal ritual music, French chanson, Gregorian chant, and Indonesian gamelan/gong music." The man is eclectic, and joyfully so.

"Saiyuki," his latest aggregate, is a trio. In it, he has brought together Mieko Miyazaki (Japan) on koto and Prabhu Edouard (India) on tablas. (Lê played his backups in mid to low range to fatten up an otherwise treble sound.) The group's performance was one of the highlights of GlobalFEST, and I'm glad I got a chance to catch it on video, even with the uneven sound, and video quality attendant on these kinds of situations. . .note the shattered glass sound from the bar. . .oh well.

Each player brought so much of their own culture along that at times it seemed more like the music was "jazz enabled," with that form giving the musicians a more liberal harmonic matrix and greater freedom to fly. But the end result was something unusual and hard to classify; I guess "world music" as a term still has its uses.