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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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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…
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Guitar Sapiens
The Peruvian guitarist Yuri Juárez sets scenes and drafts landscapes, with sounds put down, like paint, by his expert fingers. He is the guitarist for the Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet, for whom he calls up images and implies great distances, providing song after song, whether studio or live, with a visual field uncannily provoked by…
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Xi.me.na
The vocal artist Xi.me.na wore paper at Joe’s Pub, which was only so surprising since, when I first saw her, at DROM, she was be-hooped in plastic. The clothes do not, of course, make the singer – the voice does – but they carry an attitude. Hers is fiercely self-assertive and unafraid of ornamentation so…
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Bria Skonberg
It was her sophistication as a storyteller that leapt out when I saw the Canadian trumpeter-vocalist Bria Skonberg’s “Love Songs from the Big Easy” at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in February. It was a few days before Valentine’s Day and she basically told love stories, both in her banter (which was word-for-word in both sets) and…
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The Tango Fado Project
Manhattan Camerata will deliver again, this time with flowers, THE TANGO FADO PROJECT to (le) poisson rouge for, albeit a day late (on Presidents Day), a “Valentine’s Concert.” This is not a gimmick: the heart of the camerata is, in its own words, “a couple in love who were invited to participate by another couple…
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Tango for Import
TANGO FOR IMPORT is, as a tango album, remarkably literate. The liner notes by Adam Tully are, to begin with, unusually astute, capturing the arterial flow of a long tradition. The CD ranges from early 20th century tangos to two of his own compositions, which could, on a casual listen, have been composed decades ago.…
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Mariel Martínez
BUENOS AIRES … CUANDO LEJOS ME VI is the title of a show by Mariel Martínez & La Porteño Tango Trio currently in Madrid to promote a CD of the same name. I have admired Martínez’s recordings since listening to her 2010 Perfume de tango. The album includes a compelling interpretation of “Luna curiosa,” a…
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Granada
There is something in Sílvia Pérez Cruz’s voice so pure that it makes you lose your mind. You wonder where it possibly can be coming from, for it seems a thing of nature, but utterly unique, a plant never before seen, yet born organically. There ought to be many of them, but there is only…
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Russian Red
I opted on St. Patrick’s Day for Russian Red in lieu of Irish green. It was her shimmering interpretation of the song “Loving Strangers” on the soundtrack of Julio Medem’s beautiful film Room in Rome that first set me on this young Spanish singer-songwriter. Her given name is Lourdes Hernández, but she took as her…