Since her debut on the British music scene in the late 1970s, the West Indian-born singer, songwriter and guitarist Joan Armatrading has enjoyed a cult following for her confessional lyrics and genre-defying blend of folk, rock, jazz and blues. Her husky yet ethereal voice evokes comparisons with Odetta and Nina Simone, yet remains uniquely recognizable. […]
Sylvia Pfeiffenberger
Bio: Sylvia Pfeiffenberger lives in Durham and hosts a weekly Latin music show on WXDU.
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The boss of Latin radio
There’s a new badge in town: Raleigh’s Curtis Media is now home to “La Ley” 96.9, an all-Spanish, all-the-time FM station broadcasting Mexican regional music. With their 100,000-watt radio tower located in Princeton, their signal footprint extends north to the Virginia border and south to the Wilmington coast, with a huge listening area that covers […]
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Pocos caminos, muchos andantes
Out of the many speakers and sessions at El Pueblo’s 8th Annual Foro Latino, held last weekend on the North Carolina Central University campus, one message came through loud and clear: The sooner Hispanics are integrated fully into American institutions, the better not just for Hispanics, but for American society as a whole. From basic […]
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Live!
Cat’s Cradle Friday, Feb. 28 Dancers were ready, but not waiting for Bio Ritmo by the time they took the stage near 11:30 p.m. Friday night in Carrboro. Local mambo royalty were already spinning to the band’s pre-show tape at the Cat’s Cradle–not usually known as a ballroom–as the Richmond-based salseros unpacked their instruments.This […]
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Latin Beat
Imagine you grew up in Havana in the 1950s, and the Tropicana–the world’s hottest nightclub, where your father played piano for Beny Moré and Dizzy Gillespie–was your kindergarten. That’s a crazily idyllic scene from the real life childhood of Chucho Valdes, the Cuban piano genius who graced the Hill Hall stage in Chapel Hill on […]
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Bailando
Doesn’t anyone go Latin dancing on Friday nights anymore? Time was, in recent memory, you could go out to a Salsa Carolina dance on a Friday night that was even bigger than their longstanding ritual at the Page Road Holiday Inn that used to pack them in every Saturday night. Their Friday night dances in […]
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Tread Setters
“To be perfectly honest, the origins of the group are pretty hokey,” says Pablo Valencia, a lead singer and guitarist for Chapel Hill-based band Grupo Camaleon. A Chilean native, Valencia moved to the area in the ’90s and starting making music with friends who were, like himself, “not necessarily musicians, but people who loved to […]
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Music as Friction
“I’m always looking for musical answers to social problems,” says David Harrington, founder and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet. For almost thirty years, Kronos has been producing avant-garde art for the masses, demonstrating on over 50 albums that aesthetic experimentation and radical politics can and often do go together. From their notorious rendition of […]
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Ballad of Borderlandia
FronteraDreams is the latest of Paco Ingacio Taibo II’s eight Mexican private eye novels to be translated into English starring Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the Coca-Cola-drinking Mexican detective descended (on his mother’s side) from American pulp fiction heroes of the 1950s. A hybrid creature wandering the U.S.-Mexico border, Belascoarán Shayne feels like a “foreigner” even in […]
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Another Day in Aztlán
In the ’80s, Los Lobos was known as “the best band you’ve never heard.” Three Grammys and two decades of music later, you’ve probably heard them whether you know it or not, either through their soundtrack work (La Bamba or Desperado) or their specialty music side projects like Los Super Seven, Houndog and The Latin […]