Via Da List - Rumba Para Bebo

Concerning el V's latest Afropop Worldwide program; materials recorded in Barcelona, at the end of October this year.

Tell your friends:

My one-hour Afropop Worldwide episode based on the Rumba Para Bebo is available now on Soundcloud. It came out good. Described in the [nedslist] post of November 3, this concert-memorial-Cuban-jazz-jam-rumba-Kongo-ceremony honoring Bebo Valdés (produced by Joan Anton Cararach) was held on October 29 in Barcelona as part of this year's Voll-Damm Barcelona International Jazz Festival. Starring Chucho Valdés (whose powers continue to increase) and the Afro Cuban Messengers (Gastón Joya, Yaroldy Abreu, Dreiser Durruthy, Rodney Barretto), and featuring Jerry González, Omar Sosa and Malongo, Mayra Caridad Valdés, Lázara Cachao, Javier Massó “Caramelo,” Javier Colina, Mauricio Vallina, Paloma Manfugás, Eladio Reinón, David Pastor, and more! With the voices of Chucho Valdés and Omar Sosa.

I had ridiculously more material than I needed to make this show. There were almost two and a half hours of music, and Afropop Worldwide is only an hour, so it was painful deciding what great music and which interviews to leave out, but I think I did a good job of getting every featured performer into the show. Just click here to stream.

For those who prefer ether charm, the program will air on the radio this week wherever Afropop Worldwide is heard. In New York, that's WNYE, 91.5 FM, at 11 p.m. Saturday.

There's a beautifully shot video version of two hours of the Rumba Para Bebo available streaming on arte live web, well worth watching, but it omits two substantial numbers that are central to our Afropop episode: Jerry González's interpretation of "Bésame Mucho" and Omar Sosa and Malongo's spine-tingling "Invocación," a palo monte call to Bebo. You gotta go to Soundcloud for that. (You can also get there through the Afropop website.)

Happy Holidaze.  

Angola 2 -- El V Speaks

El V-- not Foxessa --here:

[ ".... excitement abounds . . . the product of a *lot* of work has come to fruition . . .

HIP DEEP ANGOLA PART TWO is up, with the unwieldy title of 21st CENTURY URBAN ANGOLA: KIZOMBA, KUDURO, AFRO-HOUSE, AND BEYOND. 

Of the four shows I am producing about Angola this fall (the last two will air in November), this is the densest. Besides the music, it has twelve different speaking voices, and it's entirely about African electronic music. In particular, much of it is at 140 BPM.

If you cut & paste into your address bar -- for some reason the platforms el V has to work with on this side won't hyperlink this one -- you can hear it right now at:

http://soundcloud.com/afropop-worldwide/hip-deep-angola-part-2-kuduro

And feel free to leave a comment.

It will be available on the HIP DEEP website at www.afropop.org. In New York, it will air on WNYE 91.5 FM in New York Saturday at 11 p.m. and Monday at noon.

Meanwhile, HIP DEEP ANGOLA 1 is still up and available for listening at

http://soundcloud.com/afropop-worldwide/hip-deep-angola-part-1-music

Press release follows:

HIP DEEP ANGOLA 2: 21^st CENTURY URBAN ANGOLA: KIZOMBA, KUDURO, AFRO-HOUSE AND BEYOND (distribution: September 27) takes us to the street in Angola’s dense, smoggy, oil-booming capital city of Luanda. Peace came to Angola in 2002 after forty-two years of war, and now everything is different.

The postwar generation of the last ten years communicates via text-messaging and electronic music. Producer Ned Sublette checks out kuduro (literally, hard-ass) – the high-energy electronic dance music that dominates Luanda today, as well as the the zouk-like couple dance of kizomba, a phenomenon that began in the 80s and still packs in dancers to Luanda clubs, and, farther underground, the computer-driven style called Afro-House.

We’ll talk to musicologist Stefanie Alisch, who’s been studying the world of kuduro in Luanda this year; historian Marissa Moorman about kizomba and the early days of kuduro; transgendered whirlwind dancer and rap diva Titica, the first out-gay African music star; 21-year-old superstar Cabo Snoop, whose “Windeck” became a hit via Bluetooth; Coréon Dú, executive producer of the weekly kuduro TV program Sempre a Subir; the charismatic, comic hosts of that program, the duo of Os Namayer, better known as Príncipe Ouro Negro e Presidente Gasolina (Prince Black Gold and President Gasoline); DJ Satelite, a leading beatmaker and producer on the Afro-House scene; Angolan music historian and critic Jomo Fortunato; and Jó Kindanje, the Angolan writer who published the first book on kuduro. " ]

Music, plus Media and the Occupation: Today's Da List

El V's new episode of Afropop Worldwide, "A (Jazzy) Visit to Barranquilla," airs tonight (Saturday) in NYC on 91.5 WNYE at 11 p.m. (and will be repeated Monday at 11 a.m., a new time for Afropop in NYC).

It's available streaming on demand here (click on the orange "play" icon). The program features music by Alfredo Naranjo (Venezuela), Jo ão Donato (Brazil), Justo Almario (Colombia), Diego El Cigala (Andalusia), Terence Blanchard (New Orleans), Andrés Ortiz (Colombia), Harold López-Nussa (Cuba), and Eddie Palmieri (New York), plus El Joe Arroyo's "Rebelión," along with bits of conversation with some of the above. There's also a li'l slide show. I hear they're tweeting it in BQ.

Now to the streets:

30 people, including Cornel West, were arrested outside the 28th precinct NYPD station in Harlem at a protest against the NYPD's racist stop-and-frisk policy, which stopped and frisked 601,055 people, according to an article in the NY Daily News by Matthew DeLuca and Jose Martinez that continues: >"You have to do nothing else except live in your neighborhood and be a young black or Latino male to be a suspect," Matt Main, of the National Lawyers Guild, told the Daily News.

Jonathan Demme has uploaded End the War, Tax the Rich: We're the 99%, a 15-minute video he shot at OWS. I especially like the audio.

NOLA's Truth Universal has a new Occupy-related rap over what Alison Fensterstock identifies as a Rick Ross track.

The NY Times continues to be clueless about Occupy. No amount of snark from its writers will obscure the fact that they slept on a huge story in their home town while New Yorkers went to the UK Guardian to find out what those shouts we heard in the street were about.

Today the Times offer a front-page piece by Kate Zernike that focuses entirely on pushing a frame of reference in which the Tea Party and Occupy are counterparts of each other. The editorial synopsis says: >Where the Occupy forces and the Tea Party differ is in where they place the blame. No, they differ in many other ways, including that the Tea Party has been treated far more respectfully by the mainstream media. Zernike is the author of a new book on Tea Party activists that (reading the prologue) peremptorily dismisses the idea that the TP was astro-turfed and claims it as a true populist movement (that just happened to be promoted nonstop by Fox News and underwritten financially by billionaires, I guess, though I haven't read her book). The Times article ends with a quote from a Tea Partier:
Ms. Martin, of Tea Party Patriots, said the next year would determine whether more Americans agree with the Occupy forces or the Tea Party.

“That’s what the whole election comes down to,” she said, “what direction do we think America’s going to go in, and what’s the proper size and scope of government.”

No, the election, which the Republicans will do their best to steal, comes down to whether we will have a fascist president or a conservative one. Neither is an appealing option to people who are taking to the streets.

The Times also devoted a piece to the non-issue of whether Occupy is anti-Semitic, a straight-up libel floated by the far-right media in order to achieve precisely this effect: associate the words Occupy and anti-Semitism in the mainstream media.
Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow continues to condescend and trivialize. In a piece that asserts people are showing up at Occupy for no other reason than it's cool, he calls the action Occupy-apalooza, and, confusing his generational references, compares it to . . . a Nirvana album.

Then there's Bill Keller. It should be noted that the Times changed executive editors in September, and as per Times tradition, outgoing exec editor Bill Keller is now a dreadful columnist. He began his new column on Monday with a breezy >Bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street? In his subsequent column, Keller seemed taken aback by the torrent of generally polite but firm rebuttal in the comments section before comments were closed. The first relevant comment said: >I, for one, am not at all tired of hearing about "Occupy Wall street". To the contrary, I can't get enough of it. Yeah, and that's why we go to the Guardian, YouTube, and http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution instead of the Times. In a piece in Truthdig, Robert Scheer wrote: >Perhaps [Keller's] contempt for anti-corporate protesters was honed by the example of his father, once the chairman of Chevron. In any case, it is revealing, given the cheerleading support that the Times gave to the radical deregulation of Wall Street that occurred when Keller was the managing editor of the newspaper.
And there was Is Occupy Wall Street Being Overhyped?

Then there is the concern-troll meme that the protestors don't have clear demands. I think if you can read the signs people are carrying -- e.g., "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one" -- you get it pretty quick. My paraphrase of some of the demands:

We demand a government that operates on behalf of the 99% instead of the 1%. Stop pretending the super-rich aren't actively waging class war against the rest of us. Stop pretending that the system the right has put in place isn't rigged against us. Stop expecting this problem to be solved by elections, because there is no political party that represents the people. Go out in the street everywhere and say this in public, since we have no other way to express it and the mainstream media is either actively hostile to this point of view or is kept safely in check. Re-regulate the financial industry. Hold financial criminals accountable. End corporate personhood. Stop privatizing public resources.

It's a nice cool day in New York. I'm going out.

From "The List"

Vaquero writes:

[ I just produced "Shout Out to New Orleans," an episode of Afropop Worldwide that uplinks this Thursday, in which Georges Collinet talks to special guest deejay T.R. Johnson from WWOZ.

The music is particularly strong, from, among others, Dr. John (his new album "The City That Care Forgot" is tremendous), Big Sam's Funky Nation, Dumpstaphunk, Donald Harrison Jr., Dr. Michael White, Terence Blanchard, and there's a killer track from a forthcoming album by Brother Tyrone.

If APWW is on your local public radio station, it will probably be the episode on air this week (it's at a different time on every station, so i don't know exactly when.) At some point, the program will be available for streaming on www.afropop.org, but that lags a few weeks behind. (There is a podcast, but the podcast is only a few minutes long and doesn't include most of the music for legal reasons.)

In New York City, APWW is on six nights a week at 11 p.m. on 91.5 FM. Five of these nights are reruns, but the music doesn't age. ]

Afropop Worldwide Returns to the New York City Airwaves

We've been associated with this program almost from the beginning -- coming in, maybe a couple years after it first began, maybe? Vaquero's researched, written and produced many, many, many shows for the program, as well as providing other support.

[ Afropop Worldwide Returns to the New York City Airwaves Saturday Nights at 11 PM on Radio New York.

Brooklyn, NY (March 27, 2008) - Afropop Worldwide will make its broadcast debut on Radio New York (WNYE 91.5 FM) on Saturday March 29th at 11 p.m. Afropop Worldwide celebrates the music and stories of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and of course the program’s hometown, New York City. The weekly serieswill bring New York listeners to dynamic capitals abroad, exclusive live concert recordings, interviews, and historically based programs on golden musical eras. Afropop Worldwide is hosted by international broadcast personality Georges Collinet from Cameroon and distributed by PRI Public Radio International to over 100 stations in the U.S.

Says Jon Pareles, Chief Popular Music Critic for The New York Times, “The music that Afropop Worldwide covers so well is a well spring of American and world culture, and no other organization I know does so well in helping it reach the listeners it deserves…The shows and the web site take scholarly care to communicate with a general audience, in a rare and welcome combination of depth and directness.”

“It is really exciting to add Afropop Worldwide to our new world and indie music schedule,” said Matthew Tollin, GM of Radio Operations for Radio New York. “This dynamic showcase of contemporary African music and culture is a perfect fit for Radio New York’s new diverse music programming.” ]

For more information go here.