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Tatiana Eva-Marie
Tatiana Eva-Marie sings in overlapping genres, with a touch of the surreal in how they mix and match and where they take you—French jazz, swing (especially Zazou), old time folk, gypsy, Balkan, Klezmer, New Orleans, occasional standards, and, recently, holiday. The heart of her art is French; where her talents would have gone but for…
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Beatriz Nunes
The pairing of an innovative but sensitive guitarist with a singer who works and explores the voice is a bracing, all-too-rare format. Raül Refree perfected it with both Sílvia Pérez Cruz and Rosalía, to stunning effect. The Portuguese singer Beatriz Nunes and the guitarist André Silva, whom I saw Friday night at Drom, are of…
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Monsieur Periné
I don’t know when last I was so invigorated by a group of live musicians as I was by the Colombian band Monsieur Periné at the Highline Ballroom on Saturday night. Their sound is as fresh and varied as it gets, with a repertory that blends Latin and tropical, swing, New Orleans, gypsy, Parisian jazz,…
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Rosalía & Raül Refree
Rosalía sang flamenco Friday night at Joe’s Pub. She has height, and lankiness, and long expressive fingers, and a perpetually sensitive face, hot with emotion and soft with a kind of yearning. The air seems strung with filaments when she sings, quivering above, behind, and before her, and her tremulous lips part from time to…
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Nella
Hearing the young Venezuelan singer Nella in real space for the first time felt like stumbling upon a new species. I wanted to collect specimens, come to understand it, preserve it. To the songs she sang from Spain and Venezuela she gave something familiar but utterly distinct, an Ibero-American sound completely her own, effuse with…
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Women in Music
There were two highlights for me in WOMEN IN MUSIC, billed as “a musical conversation between the United States and Spain” by way of Shakespeare and Cervantes inspired works composed and performed by women, one of solo piano, the other a suite of vocals. The first was Consuelo Díez’s Ser y tiempo (2011), a piano…
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iLe
The Puerto Rican singer iLe does for bolero and other of the ritmos of the Caribbean what a handful of Portuguese and Argentinian singers have done for fado and tango: capturing the lush glory of the past while bringing it with ease and relevance into the present. At 28 years, she understands that its happinesses…
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Por amor al tango
A visit to Colombia to attend the Festival International de Tango de Medellín in June overlapped with a tour of the country by La Guardia Nueva, the guitar trio from Argentina that, earlier this year, won a first annual world competition for tango orchestras. They presented POR AMOR DEL TANGO, a CD featuring the singer…
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Festitango 2017
June 20-25 was my third time at the Festival International de Tango Medellín, a festival I like for its musical programming, its focus (in the city of Gardel’s death) on singers, and the window it opens on the city’s tango culture, which values professional distinction and amateur achievement in equal measure. There are competitions for…
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Tania Stavreva
My first sight and sound of Tania Stavreva was at a tribute to the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera in his centennial year. The Bulgarian-born pianist opened the concert, to great effect, with two Ginastera pieces and one, “Bulgarian Prelude” (2016), that she had written in his honor. I noticed afterward, following her career, that she…