ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florcita_Motuda
The biography of a celebrity asshole, in three short chapters. Excerpts below all come from news stories published in October of 2009.
From the Associated Press, on Sting’s deep thoughts on Obama:
The former Police frontman said that he spent some time with Obama and “found him to be very genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world.” Sting, 58, said he’s hopeful that the world’s problems can be dealt with, but is frustrated that “we seem to be living in a currency of medieval ideas.” “My hope is that we can start talking about real issues and not caring about whether God cares about your hemline or your color,” he said. “We are here to evolve as one family, and we can’t be separate anymore.”
From EurasiaNet, on Sting’s visit with the daughter of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime killed one prisoner by immersion in boiling water:
Tickets to see British singer Sting perform in Tashkent will cost between $1,000 and $2,000 dollars, organizers say. The former Police front man will play at the Alisher Navoi Theater on October 18 as part of Art Week Style, a fashion and art event masterminded by Gulnara Karimova, President Islam Karimov’s daughter. Even the cheapest ticket will cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan, the report notes. Previous entertainers at Karimova’s showcase include Rod Stewart and Julio Iglesias.
Previous · Next · More Washington Babylon · Respond via emailSting made it all way to Uzbekistan for the event, where he joined beautiful Dr. Gulnara Karimova at fashion shows and beyond. The superstar closed the week with a concert at the Tashkent Sate Opera and two giant screens were positioned in the square outside the State Theater to accommodate all of those who couldn’t get tickets to the charity performance. And believe it or not, the entire city knew every word to nearly all the songs in the set.
Free love for $75 a ticket – does Woodstock the Musical mark the end of the legendary festival's countercultural cachet?
It's been a while since uptown audiences could expect a psychedelic experience on the Great White Way (though I suppose some could argue that Starlight Express was a pretty bad trip), but Michael Lang, one of the promoters of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair has announced plans to turn three days of peace and love into a Broadway musical.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Lang announced plans for a production that would draw upon his memoir, The Road to Woodstock, revealing "the human condition and stories affecting people's lives" as well as "something of what we experienced on that weekend". Lang rejected the idea of capturing the event in showtunes. (So audiences cannot, alas, look forward to Oh, What a Mud-Covered Morning or My Fair Hippy). But he mentioned that instead musicians who performed at Woodstock might be called upon to write stage-appropriate songs – though it's hard to imagine Joan Baez or Pete Townshend agreeing to do so. (Maybe Grace Slick needs the work?)
Of course, there's plentiful irony in turning the consummately countercultural experience into a mainstream musical, but Woodstock has long since become a T-shirt and pop-culture staple. The current Broadway revival of Hair is a useful example of how a piece once considered daring now plays to family audiences. Its songs namecheck LSD and fellatio, yet even speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi got onstage at one performance and boogied with the cast. Can you really fight the man when she's dancing with you? It's also important to remember that while promoters eventually declared Woodstock a free concert, it was initially designed as a commercial venture. The $18 tickets would today retail for $75-$105 – not dissimilar to a Broadway ticket price.
But Woodstock does have a few natural plot points. The production of the festival – recently chronicled in the Ang Lee film Taking Woodstock – was certainly full of drama, and during the course of the festival there were births, deaths, miscarriages, and many hearts united and broken. And yet, containing the festival within a theatrical scenario doesn't really seem like the right approach. Michael Lang might do better to worry less about "the human condition" and more about great music. He could create a concert-style musical of the order of the West End's Thriller Live, or Fela!, soon to open on Broadway.
Some amalgam of Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Joe Cocker, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Janis Joplin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival could make for a pretty super original cast recording. (I think we can probably leave the Incredible String Band out of this.) And who knows, Lang may have a hit on his hands – 40 years from now, people might joke that if you can remember Woodstock the Musical, you probably weren't there.
Bill Wyman, the former Rolling Stones bass player, has criticised music video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, claiming they will lead to fewer young people taking up real instruments.
"It encourages kids not to learn, that's the trouble. It makes less and less people dedicated to really get down and learn an instrument".
"I think it's a pity," he said, speaking at Abbey Road studios while recording a charity Beatles song for Children in Need.
His concerns were echoed by Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, who described the games as "an interesting new development".
Pink Floyd had not ruled out working on one in the future as a new way of selling music. But, he added: "It irritates me having watched my kids do it. If they spend as much time practising the guitar as learning how to press the buttons, they'd be damn good by now".
The news comes on the eve of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band game, which allows players to play along as The Beatles through their career in environments such as The Cavern Club in Liverpool, and Shea Stadium, the home of the New York Mets.
But Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems, which created the Rock Band series, refuted the musicians' claims.
"We're constantly hearing from fans who were inspired by Rock Band to start studying a real instrument," he said.
Rock guitar pioneer Les Paul dies | ||||
Les Paul, whose pioneering electric guitars were used by a legion of rock stars, has died at the age of 94. Mr Paul died from complications of pneumonia in New York, according to Gibson, the firm that sold his guitars. He is credited with developing one of the first solid-body electric guitars, which went on sale in 1952 and contributed to the birth of rock. He also developed other influential recording innovations such as multi-track recording and overdubbing. And he was credited with inventing the eight-track tape recorder. U2 guitarist The Edge, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, Guns N' Roses star Slash and The Who's Pete Townshend are among those closely associated with the Les Paul sound. Slash described him as "an exceptionally brilliant man".
He said: "Les Paul was a shining example of how full one's life can be. He was so vibrant and full of positive energy. I'm honoured and humbled to have known and played with him over the years." Fellow guitarist Joe Satriani called Paul "the original guitar hero," saying: "Les Paul set a standard for musicianship and innovation that remains unsurpassed." Henry Juszkiewicz, chairman of Gibson Guitar, said: "His influence extends around the globe and across every boundary." Gibson president Dave Berryman said: "As the 'father of the electric guitar', he was not only one of the world's greatest innovators but a legend who created, inspired and contributed to the success of musicians around the world." Hall of Fame Mr Paul was also a successful performer in his own right, notching up 11 number one singles and 36 gold discs with his wife Mary Ford. He was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Les Paul began as a country and jazz musician, playing with such acts as Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. Unhappy with acoustic guitars, he had begun experimenting with guitar amplification at the age of 13 by placing a telephone receiver under the strings.
He created his first solid-body electric guitar, dubbed "the log", in 1941. "I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labelled as a nut," he later said. It did not go on sale for another 11 years, by which time Leo Fender's rival Telecaster model was already on the market. In 1948, Mr Paul almost died in a car crash that shattered his right arm and elbow. Afterwards, he convinced doctors to set his broken arm at a right angle in the guitar-picking and cradling position. He continued to refine his guitar design throughout the 1950s. Its basic structure has barely changed over the decades and continues to be popular among stars and amateurs alike. "Suddenly, it was recognised that power was a very important part of music," he said. "To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible." His work on taping techniques began after World War II, when Bing Crosby gave him a tape recorder. 'Beautiful guitar'
Multi-tracking - where separate recordings are combined - was first heard in the 1950 number one hit How High the Moon, a duet with Ford. Stephen Lawson, editor of Total Guitar magazine, said: "It was a beautiful guitar… it was hand crafted, it was carved, it was a really beautiful looking instrument. "I've been trying to imagine a world without Les Paul - it would be so different. Until he invented multi-track recording, you had to make a record gathered round a microphone in the middle of room. "One of the most obvious classic Les Paul Guitar solos is Sweet Child of Mine by Guns N' Roses - that intro has such a distinctive Les Paul sound to it. "It can go from a mellow beautiful sound that really hits you in your soul, all the way to a shredding searing lead guitar tone." |
The Argentine songwriter Juana Molina sang oohs and ahs and la-las on Wednesday evening at SummerStage, while loops of guitar and keyboard lines meshed and billowed in beautifully hypnotic patterns around her voice. Wordless vocals were one way to bypass any language barrier, the persistent but not insurmountable challenge for the performers at the 10th annual Latin Alternative Music Conference, which ends on Saturday.
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
Since the conference started in 2000 it has become a showcase, strategy session, networking tool and pep rally. It brings together musicians and businesspeople who are devoted to music that straddles boundaries of style and nationality.
Josh Norek, who founded the conference with Tomas Cookman, said there were about 1,200 participants this year, a number that has held steady despite the recession and layoffs across the music business. “In 2000, the goal might have been ‘How can I get signed to a major label?,’ ” he said. “Now the questions are about self-promoting your band and getting it out there. Artists feel a lot more empowered than they did before.”
Over its five nights the conference presents polyglot music from across the Americas and Spain, with concerts in New York City clubs and parks, including another free SummerStage concert on Saturday by the Puerto Rican hip-hop and reggaetón group Calle 13 and the Colombian group Bomba Estéreo, which plays what it calls psychedelic cumbia. (It is replacing the Spanish songwriter Bebe on that bill.)
There were, inevitably, performers who simply sounded like translations of English-language rock or pop, as well as many songwriters who used English lyrics for at least part of their repertories. Yet Latin alternative music’s better impulse is not assimilation but a proud disregard for purism.
Bomba Estéreo’s set at the Bowery Ballroom on Thursday night — part of a six-band lineup — was kaleidoscopic and danceable, mingling the clip-clop bounce of cumbia and another Colombian rhythm, champeta, with echoey guitar, reggae backbeats and the singing and rapping of Liliana Saumet. “We are exploring the tradition, but in our independent way,” said Simón Mejía, the band’s guitarist, producer and composer. “We’re not thinking too much about the radio or making big hits. We want to break through the frontiers.
“Our idea is to take our music to the whole world.”
The conference brought plenty of other ingenious, resourceful music. Curumin, a singer from São Paulo, Brazil, shared Wednesday’s SummerStage bill with Ms. Molina; he led a sparse three-man band — bass, drums and sampler — in tunes that casually bridged 1970s samba-soul, hip-hop and electronica, mingling sun-drenched hedonism with hints of politics. (Curumin is at S.O.B.’s on Wednesday.)
In a 10-act acoustic showcase at S.O.B.’s on Thursday night, Los Deliqüentes, from Spain, played wry flamenco-pop that included passages for kazoo. The Mexican songwriter Natalia Lafourcade glided from lilting, Brazilian-tinged pop to abstract reveries in which her soprano voice started to swoop like a theremin. At the Mercury Lounge on Wednesday night, Los Hollywood (from Los Angeles) played bilingual punk-pop songs full of melodic hooks; Banda de Turistas, from Argentina, harked back to mid-1960s garage-rock and psychedelia; and Maluca, from New York City, revved up a techno-merengue-hip-hop hybrid complete with dance routines.
On Tuesday night there was a quintuple bill of Latin heavy metal. And throughout the conference — during its daytime sessions at the Roosevelt Hotel and between sets at concerts — disc jockeys played some of the most joyfully multicultural hybrids of all: electronic dance music that segued from Mexican ranchera accordion to synthesizers, from Bollywood pop to hip-hop. Dance rhythms, one of Latin music’s perpetual strengths, also leap past language barriers.
Latin alternative music — a purposely open-ended term — has demographics in its favor, as the Hispanic minority in the United States grows and spreads beyond established urban centers. There’s the promise of a growing bilingual audience for music that reflects its own American experience. Mr. Norek said he saw increasing geographic diversity at this year’s conference, including aspiring Latin musicians from places like Denver, Nashville, Minneapolis and Orlando, Fla., well outside the music’s old strongholds.
Still, Latin alternative music hasn’t become a Next Big Thing. More often than not it is stranded between commercial radio formats. “It’s not going to be exploding tomorrow and then gone nine months later,” Mr. Cookman said. “It’s not about one song, one band, one dance move, one fashion. We don’t need our Macarena moment.”
Instead it has percolated slowly and determinedly, making inroads in varied ways: club nights, appearances on “Austin City Limits,” blogs like clubfonograma.com, and placements in commercials and soundtracks. (ABC’s “Ugly Betty” is one television show that has been hospitable to Latin alternative music.) Mr. Norek recently began his own Latin alternative show on the Albany public radio station WEXT; the music has long been heard regularly at stations including KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., and KUT in Austin, Tex., which are also Webcast.
Like other independent and niche categories, Latin alternative music now travels digitally; it is featured at online stores like iTunes Latino, Amazon and eMusic. Lately, more booking agencies have picked up Latin alternative bands. Mr. Cookman said he had noticed something new in this year’s conference registrations: representatives of major Latin labels that had previously ignored the music.
For Latin alternative music, the progress is not meteoric but incremental, which may make it more lasting. “As long as we’re not going backwards,” Mr. Cookman said, “it’s a beautiful thing.
Following on from our ten best rock'n'roll comebacks, we take a look at some less successful rock'n'roll reunions.
Click on the image to the right to launch our guide.