Ibrahim Ferrer: Mi Sueño

Selection from Jim Harrington's Top 10 jazz records of last year.

1. "Mi Sueno," Ibrahim Ferrer (World Circuit/Nonesuch) -- The title translates to "My Dream," a reference to Ferrer's lifelong ambition to record an entire album of boleros. That dream remained just that for decades, due to a widely held belief in the industry that his voice wasn't the right fit for the deeply romantic style of Latin music, but he finally got the chance to record such an album. Unfortunately, the Cuban vocalist, who came to fame as part of the "Buena Vista Social Club" documentary film and recordings, died in 2005 before he could put the finishing touches on the album. From his deathbed, as the story goes, the 78-year-old star dictated a letter asking that "Mi Sueno" be completed in his absence.

Two years later, the album finally surfaces, and it's nothing less than an absolute dream. The tracks are all breathtaking, and Ferrer's performance, in my mind, further cements his place among the very best singers in history. "Mi Sueno" is a work of understated elegance, yet bursting with romance, and it's the single greatest new disc -- of any genre -- that I heard in 2007.

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Top Ten Albums Of 2007

Selection from Cinema Blend's Top Ten Albums Of 2007.

1. Gogol Bordello – Super Taranta
Gogol Bordello tops my list this year, if only because their music is intelligent, addictive and actually makes you laugh out loud. “Who's crawlin' up my spine – alcohol/ I've been waiting long long time – alcohol/ Now you teach me how to rhyme – alcohol/ Just don't stab me in the back with cartisol,” frontman Eugene Hütz sings on “Alcohol”, one of the most surprisingly successful tracks on the album. It’s surprising because it’s a slow ballad (albeit to alcohol) that grabs as much attention as any of their manic tracks have on their past releases. This isn’t to say, though, that their usual style of frantic Eastern-European folk-punk is anywhere near forgotten; if anything, they’re at the top of their gypsy-punk game with songs such as “Wonderlust King” and “American Wedding”. It’s like Borat in audio form—hysterically brilliant, subtly clever and topped with an awesome moustache.

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Tcheka: Lonji

Robin Denselow reviews Tcheka's Lonji.

It's suddenly a golden era for Cape Verde, off the coast of Senegal. Once known for their mournfully brilliant superstar, Cesaria Evora, the islands have produced a batch of impressive new singers, from Lura to the exquisite Mayra Andrade. On this showing, Tcheka deserves to join them, thanks to an album that matches light, soulful vocals with rhythmic, subtle and inventive acoustic instrumental work. He was once a cameraman for the islands' TV station, and there is a wide-screen quality to his stories of childhood and local life, and songs that often change mood and pace, under the confident control of his producer, the Brazilian star Lenine.
The album is dominated by the acoustic guitar work of Tcheka and his co-writer, Hernani Almeida, which is matched against unexpected percussive effects (including "hubcap" and "telephone book with brushes"), along with trumpet and accordion. The result is a gently driving, constantly changing set. However, it's unfortunate that no translation is provided for such apparently clever and thoughtful songs as Scarecrow and The First Time I Went to the Cinema.

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Selection from the Sunday Times Records of the year.

1 SIMPHIWE DANA The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street (Gallo/Warner) A 21st-century take on Miriam Makeba, if you will, as the charismatic South African singer glides through an ethereal song-cycle that blends township soul with black-consciousness slogans and dreamy mysticism. Dana’s ingeniously layered vocals create their own utterly individual soundscape.

2 BUIKA Mi Nina Lola (Warner Jazz) If you can imagine Billie Holiday or Nina Simone being reincarnated as a flamenco artist, you have some idea of the intensity of Buika’s fusion of Andalusian fire, sleek jazz and upmarket R&B. A voice to die for. The sultry piano-based arrangements are flawless too.

3 TARAF DE HAIDOUKS Maskarada (Crammed Discs) Have the wild men from the Romanian hinterland finally been tamed? Not at all. This high-spirited assault on the classical repertoire - from Bartok to Khachaturian and Manuel de Falla - is a million miles from bland crossover. The reckless spirit of the gypsy strings sweeps all before it.

4 IBRAHIM FERRER Mi Sueno (World Circuit) Farewell, old friend. The valedictory performance from the great Cuban singer, his ballads given exemplary backing by that young keyboard firebrand Roberto Fonseca. Ferrer’s wistful duet with the great Omara Portuondo on the standard Quizas, Quizas is simply heart-stopping.

5 MAYRA ANDRADE Navega (Stern’s) Just pipping the delightful album by her Cape Verdean rival, Lura, the youthful Paris-based vocalist celebrates the multifaceted heritage of the islands, and throws in a hint of chanson for good measure. The lissom Andrade briskly upstaged Angélique Kidjo at the Barbican recently. Remember the name.

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Interview with Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz

Joe Adler interviews Gogol Bordello's lead singer Eugene Hütz.

Does Eugene Hütz, strike you as particularly laid back? You think he stands stoically in front of his microphone like Thom Yorke? Nope. Hütz, the Urkranian born lead singer of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is particularly animated, and he’s not ready to stand back and let his guitarist do the talking.

Gogol Bordello’s latest offering, Super Taranta! is their second stellar album, following 2005’s GYPSY PUNKS: Underground World Strike and has put the band as leaders of a new genre. Gogol Borello is molding Eastern European and Gypsy influence with Western culture within a scene that includes Balkan Beat Box, Beirut and DeVotchKa. Comprised of eight other members, Gogol is arguably one of the most captivating live acts today, with Hütz leading the band to their on-stage blow-up of fury and joy.

As an avid supporter of Romani Rights, Hütz uses his music to introduce the gypsy culture to a wider audience. He is also one of the curators of the annual New York Gypsy festival and an acclaimed actor having starred in 2005’s Everything is Illuminated alongside Elijah Wood. In 2008, Hütz will play the lead character in Filth and Wisdom, the film that marks Madonna’s directorial debut.

Glide recently had a chance to talk with the always energetic Hütz, who, with song titles like "Think Locally, Fuck Globally" speaks his mind as openly as making the moustache cool again.

Eugene, it’s been a crazy few months for you, how are things?

Been fantastic man. Doing multiple nights in the cities and bombing people with new material. And I’m already, pretty much in the middle of writing the next record.

Is that going to be an expansion of your past work or something completely new?

It’s always a new revolutionary incarnation of it, you know. I don’t have the outline of it and I imagine it will sound not like what I think now. The writing process is well in the middle of it. Right now for me a lot of things came into focus, a kind of coherency of what we’re doing came more into focus. So I’m not sure if we’re now going to fuck it all up and make it entirely incoherent or make it even more coherent. I don’t know.

Do you collaborate with the rest of the band in your writing process?

I collaborate on arrangement a lot, which is why you read: words by Eugene and music by Eugene and Gogol Bordello. I write the songs but because there are so many different instruments and with the process of arraignment, things can really expand.

So please talk about back in your childhood, the Refugee Relocation program and your move from Kiev to the U.S. How did it affect your creative experience?

By the time I was done with the Refugee program I could swear in five different languages only because I was living with Czech and Romanian and with Albanian and so on and so forth. So, of course, that developed more to play with as I met many different kinds of people. And that brought new color for me right away you know. And these were not people on the calmer side of things, these were pretty much the more wilder kind of ethnicities. I would say that. So we had the good times and the bad times with them but it was just a kind of school of getting along I suppose. A school of getting along with people that you would not
normally choose to hang out with.

So about how old were you when you first started playing music?

There are many photos of me when I was two, three, four, five and six years old with guitars. I don’t know, somewhere around that time.

At this point have you met any of the musicians who influenced your style?

Oh for sure. Now I know people from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and one of them produced our first record and then their producer produced our last record. I guess I didn’t fall off that fucking far from the tree you know. So I guess that kind of made me feel more optimistic in a sense of, that life, is once again possible and things can get better. And the romantic idea that I had in youth, that this kind of aesthetic tree is growing throughout the world where this kind of school keeps on living. So that’s a very exciting part for our band and me.

Are there other influences of yours that you would like to get together with?

You know Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Sonic Youth, Primus and yeah I haven’t met Tom Waits yet. But at the same time he is one house away from Les Claypool and Les Claypool has been playing on his records for the last ten years.

So is Tom Waits someone who had a great influence on you and your musical style?

Actually he didn’t influence it all that much, he is more like somebody that I could easily understand and I can have an affinity for and I can relate to. Actually we were casted for a movie together except for that I ended up not doing that movie because of a tour. It is a movie called Wristcutters and I was supposed to play the lead role but I bailed out on that movie because I had a European tour, three month log tour and music is my life you know. Tom was in this movie and we made the soundtrack so there is an interesting connection like that going on all of the time. But I don’t feel like Tom Waits influenced me in one way or the other. He was just great. I gained much more from The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and that neck of the woods.

So going more into the movie thing. First, your role in Everything Is Illuminated is inspiring. You portrayed or embodied the role of “Alex” in a way that came across as maybe being close to your own personality. Do you identify with the character?

Well you know, I greatly appreciate when people say things like you just said, that they completely see me in the character. And that’s because a lot of thought goes into it because, essentially that character is an absolute creation and there is nothing what-so-ever similar between that character and me. When I was doing press for the movie, people were always looking so disappointed that Alex was not sitting there, that was sitting there was the person that played Alex. Which just shows that the role was very successful.

People were literally in grief because the guy actually doesn’t exist. But that’s what good acting does, you completely convince people that that character should be alive. I was playing a 20 year-old virgin. I was 32 years old by that time and what I had behind me was far from being misinformed.

Could you tell me a little about your new film Filth and Wisdom.

I can say a little about it. I play the lead role, this time it’s much closer to my actual character, to actual me. I play the lead singer of Gogol Bordello you know. The whole band is in it and the reason for that is that actor herself, Madonna.

She’s been a great supporter and fan of our band. It was almost just a matter of time before we did something together. People, even the creators of Everything Is Illuminated, from them I knew she was a fan of our band. So I wasn’t entirely shocked when it happened, when I heard from her.

Did Gogol Bordello record music for the soundtrack?

There is about four or five or six songs from Gogol Bordello in that movie. I’m flying to London to do the screening to see the film next week actually. And it’s not a short film anymore, it’s a full feature. So to hell with the shorts man, nobody needs ‘em!

Was it during the filming of Filth and Wisdom that the opportunity came together for you and Sergey (violinist Sergey Ryabstev) to perform with Madonna at Live Earth?

Yeah it actually came together on the last day of shooting. And I always carry my guitar with me. Madonna very cleverly noticed that the songs that I’m playing, the gypsy songs, during the breaks (in filming) just to entertain people and myself, they were very much connected with the Spanish key and she had a song ("La Isla Bonita") in a Spanish key so we put two songs together, basically five days before the Live Earth.

I watched the performance online and that was by far the best performance of the day. It came across as being so polished.

That’s what we were shooting for, something that people could not conceive in their minds. Do it cleverly and do it musically well. The way that the songs were put together was very much with respect to both songs. And the only real part that she changed from my suggestions is she made our parts twice as long. I had an incredible time working with her. Coming from the underground and never knowing that much about pop culture and never being a part of pop culture for me to work with somebody like Madonna was like a walk on another planet. I just realized how special she was as a person and how different her methods and how hard her work is in contrast to most of the people in pop culture with power and huge bull dozing egos and no message. That was the way I learned why she was such an inspiration to the whole generation. Person to person, that’s how I learned.

So I was reading about your New Rebel Intelligence concept, could you talk about that and where it came from?

It came directly from the nature of the band. Obviously it’s very diffuse personnel, not only country-wise but interest-wise. It’s like one person is into meditating, and another person is into mysticism, and the third one is into aliens, and the forth one is completely happy and doesn’t drink. It’s very diverse, all the walks of life, we are in the middle of it. We become the center of all these things at once.

To me that is like a new picture of the world because I believe the people that are gathered in our band are very progressive and intelligent personalities, just of different kinds. Processing everybody’s information all at once, from cosmology to basic remedies in art and therapy and so on and so forth are coming together with this idea of connecting dots and just having a certain walk of life that keeps all those things together. Which is most notably is independent intelligence, independence of thought and open mindedness. But not the new age kind of open-mindedness and, fucking, raising the awareness. I don’t fucking believe in raising the awareness, I believe in fucking getting down. Getting down with the shit and making it fucking happen. Not tomorrow, but today, starting now!

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