There are few musical geniuses who can be properly credited with founding a genre of music: Fela Kuti and Afrobeat, Miles Davis and Jazz Fusion, King Tubby and Dub. Here at my place in Recife sipping cachaça with the pescadores, peixeiros, and the paulistano sun-bathers everyone will tell you that when it comes to Bossa Nova João […]
Read More João Gilberto: Original GIn recent days, my mind has been awash in a cascade of Hawaiian saudades, a phenomenon that has occasionally accompanied me since the 80’s, when American television networks forced their viewers, even here in Europe, to choose between tropical miniseries. The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Magnum P.I. battled weekly for supremacy in the working […]
Read More Haoles on the Pequod“No wrong turns – they do not exist. You cannot diverge from the path – it’s impossible.” Daniel Higgs Inimitable and visionary, the singer, musician, poet, painter, and tattoo-artist Daniel Higgs is a modern-day troubadour, or better yet perhaps a shaman from the post-industrial state. Lyrically and visually Higgs has constantly turned symbols and concepts […]
Read More No Wrong Turns: The Daniel Higgs Appreciation SocietyNothing says “This conversation is OVER!” quite like flipping the table at which one is seated with company. Indeed, the Table Flip looms large in the arsenal of “big moves” one has at one’s disposal when cornered or enraged in a public setting, and everyone should make the effort to flip a table at least one […]
Read More The Table Flip!WUGAZI. Fugazi meets the Wu-Tang Clan in a mash up produced by Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy. Skeptical? Me too. Being a hard core fan of both groups, I initially rolled my eyes when I heard of the project: I had an instinctive aversion to the thought of mashing up Fugazi, who based their sober […]
Read More WUGAZI: 13 CHAMBERSWell not really, but I would be proud to if I were cool enough to play this off-the-charts sport that combines the best elements of soccer, Brazilian footvolley and Kung-Fu wrapped up into an incredible spectacle of gravity-defying athleticism and badassery, that, outrageously, I had remained ignorant of until a missive arrived last night from […]
Read More I Lost My Tooth Playing SEPAK TAKRAWComing straight outta Oxnard, Otis Jackson Jr., a.k.a. Madlib is the youngest member of our illustrious league of Appreciation Societies. Hip hop DJ, producer, lyricist, multi-instrumentalist, expert musicologist and crate-digger extraordinaire, Madlib (also known as The Beat Konducta in addition to a wide host of aliases and alter-egos) is arguably America’s most creative and certainly […]
Read More The Otis Jackson, Jr. Appreciation Society (aka MADLIB Sound System)As a fine Uruguay are crowned the deserved Champions of the 2011 Copa América, the football world mourns the death of International Football after more than a century personifying on the pitch the hopes, dreams, culture and style of the nations it once represented. Fans of the beautiful game have noticed over the past handful […]
Read More International Football: Dead at the Age of 139Recently a youth I hold in high esteem asked me about some hip hop to listen to. Kindly allow this not to be a comprehensive hip hop history, but rather, my hip hop history, from the remote island of Tristan da Cunha to here under the starry skies on the beach in Recife, Brazil. For […]
Read More Hip Hop Saved My LifeBuenos Aires-born electro-ambient-folk genius Juana Molina blows my mind with her absolutely intriguing and masterful on-the-spot sampling. Great stuff – enjoy a few groovy tracks.
Read More Juana Molina: sálvese quien pueda…
saudade brothers 