Caught Between Piety and Desire: A Q&A with Author and Musician Ned Sublette

By Larry Blumenfeld, music critic for the Wall Street Journal. This is in an international art magazine, and lengthy.

LB prefaces the Q&A with a long prelude.  Here's a pull:

There sat Ned Sublette at a table near the rear of the FB Lounge in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem a couple years ago, as drummer Bobby Sanabria’s big band played loud and great. Sublette was surrounded by stacks of T-shirts he’d designed — he wore one, as did each member of Sanabria’s band — and copies of his brilliant 2007 book, “Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo.” 

Both the shirt and the book were expressions of what Sublette calls “Postmamboism” — “a portable theory that places music at the center of understanding” and “begins with the study of African diaspora musics,” as he explained in a post on Boing Boing. ....

Sublette is something of a trickster figure, popping up in various guises to inform, yes, but also to challenge our notions about music and culture, language and shared history, throughout the Western hemisphere.

Fun to read though, particularly if you are interested in music generally, history, Cuba, New Orleans and other matters of import.