Angels and Depots Listening Post 363. Forget the billionaires’ rockets: Commonfolk have probed the heavens for millennia through the power of music. Case in point—Stand Together, Fall Apart by Palms Station (aka Hillel Tigay), a nine-track exploration of despair and...
Freshly Beaten Tracks Listening Post 361. Like Appalachian dew at sunrise, Lily Henley’s voice sparkles on her second full-length album, but beneath the surface of her songs run forces that have rearranged landscapes for more than 500 years. The pillars of Oras...
A Musical-Moral Compass Listening Post 335. There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life, wrote Dickens, as the simple truth.* “Emergency of life” is as good a description as any to describe humanity’s plight these past two years, and few contemporary...
Soundtrack of Memory Listening Post 331. There’s an exquisite balance in Sarah Aroeste’s homage to a bygone community that lives in her heart under a bygone name. Bitola is North Macedonia’s second largest city, a place of Ottoman and Neoclassical architecture, of...
The Sound of Walls Listening Post 311. It’s not news that great music emerges from dire circumstances, but bravissimo to Frank London, composer, trumpeter and co-founder of the Klezmatics (among myriad exploits) for his new album, a breathtaking journey through the...
Of Routes and Roots Listening Post 304. Migration is a universal story: All humanity came out of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Voluntary or involuntary, migration is constant, driven by push-pull factors like dreams, exploration, climate change, conflict, hunger and...
Virtuous Circle Listening Post 298. Leyla McCalla stands enigmatically on the cover of Vari-Colored Songs, her dress pattern suggesting the solution to a puzzle: Connect the dots. On the album she sings eight Langston Hughes poems that she set to music, five...
Lyrics After All Listening Post 297. Over a career spanning 40-plus years and more than a dozen albums, Beppe Gambetta has steadily added talents to his repertoire. From a young acoustic guitarist channeling Italian and American folk and bluegrass into a signature...
The Namesake Listening Post 288. Mother Nature showers humanity with gifts but she gave Ila Paliwal a little more—her name. “Ila” is Sanskrit for “Earth” and on her second album Paliwal, a classically trained Indian vocalist, songwriter and producer, celebrates her...
A Man for All Seasons Listening Post 287. Just as we remember Bach and Beethoven, future generations will surely know Pete Seeger (1919-2014). From McCarthy-era blacklisting to performing at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, with an ebullient tenor and wielding a...
Bluegrass & Big Shoulders Listening Post 273. A week after it began broadcasting from Chicago on April 12, 1924, radio station WLS debuted National Barn Dance, one of the pre-eminent country music programs of its day; over the decades it hosted leading stars—Gene...
Transcendental Orchestration Listening Post 263. Aditya Prakash describes his Los Angeles childhood as “socially American and culturally Indian” and observes that growing up the two aspects of his life were largely separate. He began studying Carnatic music—the...
B.A. in Bluegrass Listening Post 255. Joe Troop doesn’t so much play fusion as embody it: Since his North Carolina childhood, every sound he ever heard seems to have become part of his music personality. At 14 he was inspired when he saw Doc Watson perform, but as...
Two Cultures, 26 Strings Listening Post 252. “Pity the nation,” wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “that knows no language but its own.” Far more satisfying than pity is listening to Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn, who know one another’s languages and express their familiarity...
Home Away from Home Listening Post 249. Iko Iko is a much-covered song about the collision of two Mardi Gras Indian tribes. On their second album, the Haitian ensemble Lakou Mizik reworks it as Iko Kreyòl, leaving the cryptic chorus intact but applying new verses...
Stars from the Underground Listening Post 246. Imaginary exercise: Build an album around three quotes that express enduring truths. 1) “All you need is love;” 2) “Immigrants strengthen the fabric of American life;” 3) "A woman is like a tea bag – you never know how...
United States of Music Listening Post 234. The U.S.-Mexican border looms large in American discourse these days, but when it comes to the mariachi landscape the frontier barely exists. From Guadalajara to Hollywood to the facing shores of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, one...
Getting to Hallelujah Listening Post 221. In a recent social media post, Carrie Newcomer described an unexpected layover at O’Hare Airport: In a comfortable Starbucks booth she opened a book, but didn’t get much read because of a barista singing mini arias. “He was...
Learning to Fly Listening Post 213. Sitting in a New York theater, Rhiannon Giddens was angered by a movie scene of a slave being raped. As the victim emerged into a group of onlookers, the camera focused not on her but on her husband, impelled by the assault to join...
Homes Away from Home Listening Post 212. Can art and politics remain separate? Can musicians avoid banning? Can corrupt leaders escape satire? Freedom is everywhere in the imagination and often scarce in the real world. Songs from a beautiful album like Placeless...
Artist and Island, Uncovered Listening Post 171. The personal and the universal, the yin-yang of human connection. Artists strive for the formula—individual experience finding broad audience—and the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Kany García has scored with her...
Fireside University Listening Post 169. There is wisdom in movement and movement in wisdom. That’s an essential takeaway—and a lyrical one it is—from Nsimbi, the album and partnership of Ugandan hip-hop pioneer GNL Zamba and American singer-songwriter Miriam Tamar....
Subcontinental Jazz Listening Post 165. Wall Street, Broadway, Bollywood… Legions of aspirants would give anything to work in just one of the places Subhi Khanna passed through on her winding road—from India to America, through finance, journalism and music—pursuing...
A League of Their Own Listening Post 164. The five women and one man of Bonsoir, Catin do superbly everything you’d expect of a Cajun band, and they are always tossing something new into the gumbo. They set any feet within hollering distance two-stepping and waltzing...
All the Breaks Listening Post 150. “Whatever women do,” observed the feminist pioneer Charlotte Whitton, “they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.” No surprise that when Flor de Toloache became the first...
Good Vibrations Listening Post 143. Bondeko, the work of three prodigiously gifted artists who mix voices and compositions to produce a dreamy, multi-layered sound, is a transcendent microcosm of the musical diversity of Africa and its Diaspora. The...
The Sacred Garden Listening Post 131. For an age of battered facts, closing doors and short attention spans, the folksinger-songwriter Carrie Newcomer is blessed with a superpower: Many talented singers can engage us and touch our heartstrings, but she has the...
Perfect Fifth Listening Post 107. Most of Prince Royce’s career as a singer and songwriter has been dedicated to bachata, but with an open window letting in subtle flavors from outside. The Bronx-born son of Dominican parents, Royce has released albums in Spanish and...
Songs for Troubled Times Listening Post 105. Bob Dylan warned the Establishment that a raging battle would “soon shake your windows and rattle your walls/For the times they are a-changin'.” Five decades later, If I Was President, the signature protest track from Las...
Bluegrass on Ice Listening Post 82. Among Claire Lynch’s many talents is an uncanny ability to embody a man’s song—her angelic voice not imitating the opposite sex but simply erasing the importance of gender. She memorably personified a Civil War soldier in Kennesaw...
