With his longtime drummer and percussionist Tommy Larkins and former Modern Lovers bandmate Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) on keyboards, balladeer Jonathan Richman returns with his 18th studio album Only Frozen Sky Anyway, following in his longtime tradition of injecting his lyrical wit into indie rock in a fashion that he has perfected over decades.
…Harrison plays keyboards on five songs, including two tracks that have been made available in advance of the album — “I Was Just a Piece of Frozen Sky” and “O Guitar.” Harrison’s daughter, Aishlin, sings backing vocals on a song titled “But We Might Try Weird Stuff.” Richman’s wife, Nicole Montalbano, plays tamboura on the album’s final two tracks — “The Wavelet”…
Category: latin
Guitarist and producer Adrian Quesada made a big splash with his 2022 album Boleros Psicodélicos. On it he explored the lush and romantic baladas of his youth with the help of a stellar guest list made up of singers from across the spectrum of contemporary Latin music. The record was brimming with brilliant performances, wonderfully loose and occasionally funky arrangements, and enough moments of thrilling drama to give chills to anyone whether they are fans of romantic baladas or not. It all went so perfectly that Quesada figured he’d take another crack at it and 2025’s Boleros Psicodélicos II turns out to be another triumph. He sticks to the same basic idea of pairing vintage sounds with exciting vocalists on a batch of dramatic songs and it’s…
For his seventh solo outing, MVD LUV, singer/songwriter Juan Wauters returned to his birthplace of Montevideo, Uruguay, to record an album in loving tribute to the place where he grew up, something he’d always wanted to do but never had a chance to before now. Wauters explains this more or less exactly over a jaunty piano on “Amor Montevideo,” the short, spoken introduction that begins the album. While in Montevideo, Wauters enlisted a crew of backing musicians and collaborators from the region, bringing elements of Uruguay’s musical heritage into his lighthearted and exuberant songwriting. This can manifest as the Spanish-sung lyrics and persistent hand drum rhythms that join woozy synthesizers on “Manejando por Pando” or as a spontaneous…
Singer Roxana Amed blends her sophisticated fusion jazz with Argentine rock traditions on 2025’s sonically engaging Todos los Fuegos.
A collaboration with Argentine pianist, arranger, and co-producer Leo Genovese, the album finds Amed reinterpreting songs by foundational figures of Argentine rock, including Charly García and Serú Girán, Soda Stereo, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Fito Páez, and Gustavo Cerati. These are songs that American audiences might not be as familiar with, but which helped to define the sound of rock en espanol in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
Joining Amed and Genovese is an all-star ensemble, featuring saxophonist/clarinetist Mark Small, bassist Tim Lefebvre, and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Together, they dig into these lyrical…
A little over a year after she released Miss Colombia, Lido Pimienta became the first woman of color to compose a piece for the New York City Ballet: 2021’s sky to hold, which presented folk genres like dembow and vallenato on the City Ballet’s esteemed stage. But she had already been composing another orchestral work, one that took notes from a deep well of historical sources: 16th century Italian castrati singers; Czech composer Luboš Fišer; the Gregorian liturgical chant Lux Aeterna. Pimienta uses these inspirations to create La Belleza: an acoustic, liberatory record of personal homecoming and ancestral communion where rumbling timpani, portentous strings, and rising and falling woodwinds meet in conversation with claves, drums, and celestial dembow.
Let’s not beat around the bush: Camila Domínguez, aka Lila Tirando a Violeta, is one of the greats of modern electronic music. Her ability to traverse ambient, industrial, psychedelia, bass, and club music, as well as the various rhythms of her native Uruguay without ever tripping up on any one of them rates somewhere well beyond impressive. And though the dream-like, meandering nature of her early work, and the sheer volume of her output (20+ albums and EPs in the past decade) has made the world a little slow to catch on, she’s only gotten more confident with time — and Dream of Snakes is easily her hardest-hitting record yet.
Her last big release, 2023’s Accela for Hyperdub, was dense and jagged, full of swarms of microsound that could overwhelm you if you…
In 1977, New York’s Fania All-Stars toured Japan and introduced salsa to the country. That performance directly informed the creation of Orquesta del Sol by percussionist, composer, and arranger Masahito “Pecker” Hashida. Motivated by the Fania tour, he formed Orquesta del Sol in early 1978. Among the first musicians he recruited was veteran jazz drummer Shuichi “Ponta” Murakami. His presence made it easier for Hashida to enlist other prominent players from Tokyo’s studio scene. Thanks to Ponta, the 18-piece ensemble scored a record deal with jazz label Discomate. They stayed together until 2002, releasing five albums. The band’s gigs and recordings influenced better-known acts Orquesta de la Cruz (still active, they include former…
The third album of throwback fusion and funky soul from Don Glori, 2025’s Paper Can’t Wrap Fire is a feel-good summer jazz album. The stage name of Australian-born, London-based bassist and multi-instrumentalist Gordon Li, Don Glori has carved out a niche on the international nu jazz scene with his evocative, vintage-inspired grooves. These are the kinds of organic, club-friendly tracks that artists like George Duke, Lonnie Liston-Smith, and George Benson pumped out in the ’70s and ’80s. As Don Glori, Li crafts his own infectious songs that build upon the warm, analog vibe of those original LPs, but with a freshness and immediacy that feels genuine.
While Glori impressively plays a plethora of instruments on his album, including bass,…
“Banjo, harp, drums…what the hell is that?” Those words, spoken by drummer Antonio Sanchez at a concert played by himself, banjoist Béla Fleck, and harpist Edmar Castañeda, the men who made BEATrio, this international group’s debut album. Fleck played with both men previously: He met the Mexican jazz drummer at a tribute to Hindustani percussionist Alla Rakha, and then they played together as a duo in Mexico opening for Dave Matthews. Fleck and the Colombian harpist played a duo in Riverside Park, and performed similarly at 2019’s Big Ears Festival.
After the jams with Sanchez offered real possibility, they reached out to Castañeda and formed a trio. The musicians wrote and improvised together, and in September 2024,…
Links between Cuba and Mexico go back a long time: there is evidence of multiple prehistoric population movements.
On Ritual, Havana’s Rita Donte fuses traditional Cuban forms with the more relaxed, less brash spirit of her new homeland, Mexico, where certain older styles are preserved while being drastically transformed at home.
Sometimes sparse and transparent, as on the lively ‘Paseo de las Misiones’, and sometimes lushly romantic, as on the bolero ‘La Vida es Hermosa’. Ritual showcases Cuban music seen through a Mexican lens, with some unexpected echoes from the Spanish-speaking Jewish diaspora and ’80s Brazil (the carefully organised ‘Calle Libertad’, whose cheerful progress smuggles in…
Based in Spain with two Irishmen (frontman Garrett Wall and bassist Dave Mooney), an Englishman (trumpeter Howard Brown) and an American (Robbie K. Jones on cajon and banjo) and named for workers on the New York subway system, the quartet came together in 2006 since which time they’ve released eight albums of generally lively and upbeat songs built around the core instrumentation of acoustic guitar, electric bass, trumpet and cajon with smatterings of banjo, uke and mandolin. So Tracks Laid, Tracks Covered is a sort of taking stock retrospective and looking ahead, a double set that pulls together back catalogue material from their first six albums and numbers only previously released on EPs alongside new songs and a collection of covers…