From left, the dancer Aurelia of Fanfare Ciocarlia; the Congolese singer Ricardo Lemvo; the Brazilian songwriter Carlinhos Brown.
This summer, world music floods into New York City, introducing audiences to music with lower commercial profiles.
Music from all over the world floods into New York City year round, but especially in summertime. That’s when outdoor stages supplement clubs and theaters, and free concert series can introduce audiences to music with lower commercial profiles.
Born to Be Wild (Borat Version) by Fanfare Ciocarlia (mp3)
Hay Un Son by Orishas (mp3)
The Celtic fiddler Kevin Burke.
This summer’s world music concerts include return visits by superstars who will have expatriate fans singing along with hits, like the Brazilian songwriter Carlinhos Brown, who is at the Nokia Theater tonight, and the Mexican rock superstars Café Tacuba, at Central Park SummerStage on July 14. And because it seems that everyone wants to be heard in New York City, this summer also brings a rare event like the July 21 SummerStage concert of music by 12 acts from Sudan, which is now torn by civil war and genocide.
Not so long ago, world music — the usefully vague marketing category, not the music itself — romanced isolation. A new album or a concert promised a rare chance to share what people half a world away were dancingto all night long, or a ceremony formerly closed to outsiders or sounds shaped through generations of a particular family or a village. Of course, the fact that the music had traveled at all was the beginning of the end of that isolation, for both the musicians and their new audiences.
Now there’s a circuit of world music festivals where Irish fiddlers regularly run into Guinean griots and Lebanese oud players. There are world music concert producers who draw connections across national and stylistic boundaries, like the World Music Institute, whose continent-spanning Gypsy Caravan has now been preserved as both CD and documentary. Although world music performers are well aware of the importance of tradition, they aren’t so purist that they’re afraid to experiment. Why not, since their music is already being sampled and mixed by everyone from hip-hop producers to lounge D.J.’s, who care only about the sounds, not the pedigree.
Albums that were once stocked only by the most comprehensive record stores are now much easier to find than the surviving comprehensive record stores themselves, at online sites like calabashmusic.com and emusic.com. Information that used to be tucked into academic enclaves or shared by word of mouth is now easily accessible at sites like worldmusiccentral.org, afropop.org and worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com.
Meanwhile, musicological forays that once meant journeys deep into the outback — where satellite TV and Internet connections are now wreaking cultural changes — have been supplemented lately by visits to the archives of local labels. Hearing world music has always been a kind of vicarious travel, and now it’s more like time travel than ever. What follows is a selection of some of the most notableworld music CDs released over the last year.
‘AUTHENTICITé : THE SYLIPHONE YEARS’ (Stern’s Music)
After Guinea gained independence in 1958, its government supported regional and national big bands to nurture “authenticité”: modern music with traditional roots and politically correct messages. In songs recorded for the Syliphone label from 1965 to 1980, authenticité ended up wildly untraditional, mixing ancient griot songs and local rhythms with Afro-Latin and American borrowings, horn sections, electric guitars and keyboards (complete with distortion), suave vocals and dizzying beats. The 28 songs collected on this double album range from delightful to downright mind-boggling, testimony to how well musicians can subvert specifications.
CARLINHOS BROWN “A Gente Ainda Não Sonhou” (Sony International)
Like other titans of Brazilian pop, the songwriter Carlinhos Brown wants it all: history and sensuality, melody and rhythm, comfort and startling technology. His new album apparently aims for an international market, with two songs in English and a flamenco-pop hybrid for Europe, and it loses its balance. Its best songs, like “Página Futuro,” “Te Amo Familia” and “O Aroma da Vida,” blend kindly melodies with smart constructions of beats and samples. But they’re outnumbered by gooey ballads.
KEVIN BURKE AND CAL SCOTT “Across the Black River” (Loftus)
Born in England to Irish parents and now living in Portland, Ore., Kevin Burke is one of the great living Celtic fiddlers. His first album on his own label is a collaboration with the self-effacing guitarist Cal Scott and various guests that’s cozy and mature, full of modest tributes to fellow fiddlers. It’s all straightforward, songful melody, until Mr. Burke gets to a set of reels that show how many trills, twists and curlicues he can add without losing that singing line.
FANFARE CIOCARLIA “Queens and Kings” (Asphalt Tango)
The Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia has already proved itself in the breakneck, muscular oompah tunes of its own Gypsy music, which has never been shy about incorporating funk or jazz. “Queens and Kings” goes international, as the band backs up Gypsy singers from around Eastern Europe, including the witchy-voiced Hungarian singer Mitsou and the cutting-voiced Bulgarian singer Jony Iliev, all with raucous good humor. The album’s last oompah extravaganza isn’t Romanian: It’s “Born to Be Wild,” recorded for the soundtrack of “Borat.”
GYPSY CARAVAN: MUSIC IN AND INSPIRED BY THE FILM (World Village)
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The Gypsy Caravan was quixotic musicology: a nationwide tour bringing together musicians spanning the Rom diaspora, from their roots in Rajasthan (the group Maharaja) via Eastern Europe, with Gypsy musicians from Romania (Taraf de Haidouks and Fanfare Ciocarlia) and Macedonia (the singer Esma Redzepova), all the way to flamenco musicians and dancers from Spain (Antonio el Pipa). What they share is a penchant for zigzagging modal tunes, high-speed playing and throat-tearing vocals.
CDs by the singers Nawal (top), from the Comoros Islands, and Lura, from Portugal.
The album is kaleidoscopic, not didactic; it has songs from studio albums, live recordings, backstage bits, even a club remix of Maharaja. While it makes more sense after seeing the documentary, the album is full of adrenaline.
‘THE INSPIRING NEW SOUNDS OF RIO DE JANEIRO’ (Verge)
What unites this collection is the socially conscious messages of the songs, which zero in on urban problems like poverty and crime. The music is a Brazilian miscellany — hip-hop, reggae, pop and funk — and it’s at its best when acts like A Filial or BNegão e os Selectores connect with samba and rural Brazilian roots.
RICARDO LEMVO AND MAKINA LOCA “Isabela” (Mopiato)
Ricardo Lemvo, a singer from Congo, has been pursuing a new generation of connections between Caribbean and Congolese music. (The guitar rumbas of soukous, which spread across Africa, were an earlier Cuban-Congolese fusion.) While Mr. Lemvo sings in a honeyed Congolese croon, the styles on “Isabela” bounce back and forth across the Atlantic in separate songs: Cuban charanga, Angolan kizomba, boogaloo, Congolese soukous. Mr. Lemvo wrote most of the songs — though not the bolero in Turkish — and his fusions are supple, never forced.
LURA “M’bem di Fora” (Times Square)
Lura was born in Portugal but embraced the music of her parents, who are from the Cape Verde islands off the coast of Senegal. The irresistible songs on “M’bem di Fora” (the title means “I’ve come from far away”) envision life on the islands and as a homesick expatriate. They draw on Cape Verdean rhythms, particularly the brisk, six-beat rhythm of the funaná.
Lighter-than-air acoustic guitars, percussion and an occasional accordion carry her through songs that hint at the islands’ problems — the poverty that causes so many Cape Verdeans to emigrate — but dance through them.
NAWAL “Aman” (nawali.com)
Nawal sets her gritty voice to sparse, staccato patterns of upright bass, thumb piano and the banjolike gambusi on “Aman.” She is from the Comoros Islands, which are in the Indian Ocean between Africa and Madagascar, and her music is a personal fusion that draws on the repetitive power of Sufi chants, along with modal acoustic vamps that can sound both African and Arabic. Her songs are lean and incantatory, and they may benefit from a language barrier; every so often she deflates the music with a phrase in English, like “too much pollution.” But more often, she can be hypnotic.
ORISHAS “Antidiótico” (Universal Music Latino)
The politics are complicated, but the music is a pleasure for Orishas, a tuneful hip-hop group of Cuban expatriates who now live in Paris, Milan and Madrid. On this compilation their singing and rapping styles are so diverse that they can sound like a different group on each track. Orishas often draws on old Cuban music — rumbas, sones, boleros — for songs (almost all in Spanish) about cultural pride and the country’s current hard times. Even earnest messages arrive with a grin.
MUSTAFA OZKENT “Genclik Ile Elele” (B-Music)
The song titles are in Turkish, and Mustafa Ozkent has had a long career as a Turkish studio musician. Yet except for an occasional belly-dance-tune phrase on his electric guitar, the campy music on this instrumental album, originally released in 1973, could havebeen a forgotten spy-movie soundtrack. Conga drums, electric organ, scrubbing rhythm guitar, funk bass lines, wah-wah-pedaled leads; who says world music has to be exotic?
POR POR “Honk Horn Music of Ghana” (Smithsonian Folkways)
Old rhythms, new instruments: that’s how truck and taxi drivers in Accra, the capital of Ghana, came up with honk horn music. Using squeeze-bulb horns hooting back and forth in syncopation, and tire rims for percussion, along with drums, bells and voices, the La Drivers Union Por Por Group plays frenetic, clattery, jubilantly kinetic songs, even if most of its performances are at funerals for members of the drivers’ union. The drivers incorporate rhythms from the many ethnic groups along their routes to make true urban village music, and it’s far more danceable than the Cross Bronx Expressway at rush hour.
‘THE IDAN RAICHEL PROJECT’ (Cumbancha)
The Idan Raichel Project was a huge hit in Israel for good reason: it envisions a modern, multicultural nation where voices of young and old, Ethiopian and Yemenite, are all heard in songs devoted to love and tolerance. Idan Raichel is the keyboardist, songwriter and producer behind the scenes, and he’s clearly as familiar with Peter Gabriel as with Middle Eastern traditions. His arrangements bind the voices together in somber minor-mode anthems paced by electronic beats, earnestly seeking to uplift.
‘THE ROUGH GUIDE TO THE MUSIC OF TANZANIA’ (World Music Network)
Tanzanian music encompasses Arab-inflected taarab, lilting electric dance bands, urban hip-hop and traditionalist styles built on local rhythms. This compilation picks superb examples of them all, from the cascading thumb-piano counterpoint of the Master Musicians of Tanzania to Saida Karoli’s delicate pop (rooted in Haya traditions) to the bubbly guitars of the Mlimani Park Orchestra. It’s a tantalizing glimpse from afar.
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