• Sofia Ribeiro

    Sofia Ribeiro

    Hearing the Portuguese jazz singer Sofia Ribeiro last weekend at Cornelia Street Café was, for me, a real discovery. She is, to begin with, wonderful in front of an audience, good-naturedly self-effacing, bouyant and open in a way that wends its way through her personality and into her music. The most wistful and reflective of…

  • Tango-Fado

    Tango-Fado

    One of the happier minor features of the Cornelia Street Café is that from some seats in the house you can change your vantage by watching the musicians in a wall mirror rather than face on. This isn’t a bad metaphor for the reflections of and on musical forms that I saw and heard when…

  • Sara Serpa

    Sara Serpa

    I’ve heard good report of the Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa for a while now, and I finally heard her live on Friday night. Her genre is jazz, but do not expect to hear the standards from her, at least not in their usual form. Serpa is an experimentalist, and an intellectual, and her repertory includes…

  • Camila Meza

    Camila Meza

    Camila Meza has once again executed the rare feat of both singing the standards and playing the guitar, this time at the Cornelia Street Café’s downstairs cabaret, one of my favorite New York venues for food and music. When I first heard this Chilean artist sing in her native Spanish, I thought there was something…