Ozomatli - Don't Mess With The Dragon

Ian Mann reviews Ozomatli's "Don't Mess With The Dragon".

Formed in 1995 Ozomatli are a ten strong aggregate of musicians from Los Angeles who fuse music from several traditions into one energetic whole. Their sound has the primal urgency of the best rock music but has a substantial Latin influence as well as drawing on funk, hip-hop and world music elements.

The band’s edgy energy and multi racial line up presents a vivid snapshot of cosmopolitan Los Angeles. Their music is an explosive cocktail and their performances have won them a substantial following in the US and further afield, although they remain relatively little known in the UK. However, on the evidence of this album a recent British tour should have done much to raise their profile. This is a hard gigging band who tour extensively.

With twelve tracks crammed into forty minutes there is no flab on this record. From the rousing opener "Can’t Stop" to the closing "La Segunda Mano" the pace rarely flags. The music is highly rhythmic and with two percussionists and a kit drummer it has tremendous drive. Besides conventional rock instrumentation the band also make extensive use of horns, turntables and rap vocals. It’s all in there. This is a band with attitude as encapsulated in the rapping on "City Of Angels".

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Balkan Beat Box - Nu-Med

Joe Tangari reviews Balkan Beat Box's Nu-Med.

That colorful jumble of instruments new and ancient, parachuting camels, Martian dirt, and bright banners on the cover of Nu-Med, the second album from Balkan Beat Box, is, to be perfectly honest, a really cheesy Photoshop job. But it is also apropos for an album that sounds like this: the band stirs klezmer, gypsy horns, surf, dub, Arab taqsim, hip-hop, funk, jazz, electro, circus music, and a few dozen other things together to make a raucous ethno/electro-acoustic gumbo that highlights the increasing inadequacy of the generic "world music" tag.

Founded by drummer/programmer Tamir Muskat and woodwind player and former Gogol Bordello member Ori Kaplan, both originally from Israel, the band gleefully adds its name to the ever-lengthening list of groups drawing inspiration from Eastern European sounds while rigorously avoiding sounding traditional. The lyrics, on the songs that have them, are in several languages, reflecting the music's transcendence of borders. The instrumentals simply revel in the collision of genres, and are played with a jazzy looseness in spite of their programmed undercarriages. "Quand Est-ce Qu'on Arrive?" even includes a sly quotation from Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" that brings the album's primary theme to the fore without saying a word.

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Interview with Antibalas

Twelve musicians and no band leader: Sounds like a recipe for disaster in logistics, organization, command, finances, you name it.

But the musical "collective" known as Antibalas wouldn't function any other way.

"Operating this way can be frustrating," allows Martin Perna, the band's saxist. "But in the end, it's more rewarding. You can get very lazy when you have a leader. You just let somebody else figure it out. Here, everyone has to figure it out."

Ironically, Antibalas' messy setup has resulted in music with a rare sense of order. In the past few years, this Brooklyn-based band has become one of America's prime promoters of the "Afrobeat" sound, a complex style pioneered by the Nigerian artist Fela in the '70s.

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Review: Antibalas - Security

Antibalas, the horn and percussion driven Brooklyn collective, is best known for their energetic afro-beat grooves that channel the legendary Fela Kuti. But with careful attention to refining their sound—adding distinct Latin, jazz and funk elements—the group has emerged as a well-rounded and diverse sonic force. On Security, they demonstrate their growth, with the capable guidance of producer John McEntire (of Tortoise and The Sea and Cake fame), post-rock pioneer and a consummate shaper of dynamic soundscapes.

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Review: Antibalas - Security

Aside from the Brazilian Girls, there's probably no other Brooklyn band that embodies and embraces the cultural melting pot of New York City's five boroughs better than Antibalas. At their deliriously funky live performances one finds an eclectic smorgasbord of fans, listeners from different scenes, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds. Antibalas' bombastic cannonade of horns and polyrhythmic beats proves that music will always be a barrier breaking common language for the people of the world.

Sure, some are quick to point out the Fela Kuti vibe, but Afrobeat is only the foundation of Antibalas' sonic dynamic. Security finds this 14-member plus collective grooving on a wave of Latin, calypso, reggae, salsa, juju, world jazz, Middle Eastern accents, and a whole lot more to create a simmering cauldron of spicy world stew.

Security's opening salvo, "Beaten Metal," is a thunderous array of clanking tremors and guitar riffs, while "Filibuster XXX" is evocative of a car chase scene from a '70s Blaxploitation flick with a meringue sizzle and a lashing Farfisa organ. Frontman Duke Amayo ponders what GOP stands for ("greedy old people," "gas, oil and petroleum," "guilty of perjury"). "Hilo" is funky, shadowy, and exotic. "I.C.E." is an album highlight that starts out like soundtrack composers John Barry or Lalo Schifrin writing for a cock fight scene in the back room of a Bushwick bodega at 3 a.m. before descending into an ambient, psychedelic flurry straight out of a 19th century opium den.

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Interview with Ry Cooder

If Ry Cooder were English, it's near certainty that he'd have a sizeable shed at the bottom of his garden in which to potter about. As it is, the 59-year-old singer, guitarist and producer - he celebrates his 60th birthday later this month - has lived most of his life in Santa Monica, California, and a few years back took possession of a small hangar at the local airfield in which to potter about. It is where 'Okies and Arkies' - migrant workers from Oklahoma and Arkansas - flocked during the Second World War to build Douglas fighter jets, but now it more suggests tumbleweed.

The taxi driver ferrying me from west Hollywood, near where Cooder briefly experimented putting down roots when he married (later writing the funky 'Down in Hollywood': 'You better hope that you don't run out of gas!'), certainly has no clue where he's going. But when we eventually find the site, there's a weathered figure, in a red, zip-up corduroy jacket, blinking in the early spring sunshine, already waiting. Cooder leads me into the small, dark room, perches himself on the leather sofa and starts talking.

Cooder doesn't like to dwell on the past, can be cranky, cantankerous even; on the walls, there is nothing to suggest that this is one of the most influential figures in the history of contemporary popular song. No old photographs posing with Captain Beefheart or the Rolling Stones (Cooder played on Let it Bleed, but fell into a dispute with Keith Richards, who confessed he took him 'for all that he knew', over ownership of the 'Honky Tonk Woman' riff); no gold discs commemorating his string of classic Seventies solo albums such as Chicken Skin Music; no framed guitar from the soundtrack sessions for the Wim Wenders movie Paris, Texas, the most feted of several film scores he wrote in the Eighties; nothing to mark his ground-breaking collaborations with Malian bluesman Ali Farka Toure or Hindustani musician VM Bhatt in the 1990s, never mind his work with Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club, whom he helped rediscover and produce. Put it to Cooder that he's nothing if not versatile and he says genially: 'Well, I'm sort of an osmotic fellow.'

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