Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • 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…

  • Origin of Adjustable Things

    Origin of Adjustable Things

    It was by whim and circumstance that I found myself, on Tuesday night, at SubCulture for the CD release of THE ORIGIN OF ADJUSTABLE THINGS, by the singer Joanna Wallfisch and the pianist Dan Tepfer. The strange poetry of the title belies the eccentricity of how it came to Wallfisch while water skiing on a…

  • Mariel Martínez

    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…

  • Granada

    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…

  • Alondra de la Parra

    Alondra de la Parra

    I had no sense, before seeing her, of the impact Alondra de la Parra would make when she conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas in a Dia de los muertos (Day of the Dead) concert at the Town Hall. There is an expression I heard once from a professional dancer – “making air” –…

  • Karina Beorlegui

    Karina Beorlegui

    When Karina Beorlegui alternates between tango and fado, she discerns a unity deeper than the obvious affinities and plays with something more than complementarity or contrast. Going from one to the other feels more like rounding a bend in the lane than switching to a parallel road. She gives voice to the shared historical drama…

  • Malena Muyala

    Malena Muyala

    Malena Muyala is, at age 43, a distinctive tango vocalist who just might be generationally defining. She advances a view of time that has little, if anything, to do with nostalgia. This distinguishes her, by way of comparison, from two of the innovative female vocalists who came before her. Adriana Varela, two decades older, is…

  • Adriana Varela

    Adriana Varela

    Last night, at Teatro Metropolitano in Medellín, Colombia, I heard Adriana Varela sing tango. This was no small matter. There are those who say she is the best living tango singer (among those still active), and although she recorded her first tangos in 1991, she carries the patina of an earlier era. She commands the…

  • Gisela João

    Gisela João

    To hear and see Gisela João is to be reminded of fado in its familiar glories, but also to be divested of its stereotypes. We remember, or learn, that fado can be cheerful as well as sad, that the feet can move as well as the body sway; that the deep emotion is restrained before…

  • Blues for Dixie

    Blues for Dixie

    It should not have surprised me that Allison Moorer singing about the South brought tears to my eyes. Indiana, where I was born, and St. Louis, where I went to fourth grade, are more Southern than is obvious from the map. A strain of my ancestry runs through Virginia and Kentucky, and the nursery years…