An oldie but goodie from one of the seminal Spanish pop groups of the 1980′s and 1990′s, reunited just about a year ago. Two brothers, Nacho and José María Cano wrote and played the tunes and Ana Torroja sang ‘em, and many were quirky doozies — I Can’t Get Up Today, This Isn’t a Serious Cemetery, I Crashed a Party, Stereosexual. This one, from the 1987 album Descanso dominical (Sunday Break) describes the annual New Year’s Eve revelry in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza — “sa
Tiny Costa Rica holds a very special place in Latin America — largely literate and completely armyless as well as beautiful and exciting. And Malpaís, a six-dude band named after a remote beach area at the end of the road on the Nicoya Peninsula coast (literally, the word means “badlands”), is an unmistakable product of the Tico culture and ethos, fusing jazz and rock with local musical and folk traditions. “Boceto para esperanza,” from their first album, Uno (2003), is a mel
photos: ProColombia
by Miguel Martínez Rabanal
Along with cumbia, the folk music form known as vallenato is a calling card of Colombian culture, and its Vallenata Legend Festival is a particularly momentous one, marking its 52nd edition this year April 26-30 in the city of Valledupar, in Colombia's northeast, about an hour and a half flight from Bogotá and just under four hours' drive from Cartagena.
Truth to tell, Colombian culture wouldn't be the same without this music, which goes back more
In the West these days, we rarely if ever spare a thought for North Africa's largest and second-most populous country, but as this blog has reported several times, Algeria is an underrated gem, from the history and culture of capital city Algiers to ecotourism to ancient Roman ruins to amazing ecotourism. The world was much more aware of it during the middle decades of the 20th century, though, thanks to the works of Paul Bowles and French Nobel-prize-winning writer Albert Camus
dubassy/shutterstock
Globalization has been a sometimes controversial mixed bag in different areas and different parts of the world, but I think we can all agree that on the plus side, one of its grooviest benefits has been to bring to spread many of the exciting cultural achievements of societies much different from our own.
Nowhere is this more exciting than in the field of “world music”, a term that came into vogue beginning in the 1980s to describe music both non-Western and non-mainstrea
Dalmatia.he
by Nelly Huang
Croatia, a land of more than a thousand islands splattered off the beautiful Adriatic Sea coastline in the Balkans of Eastern Europe, is chock-full of intriguing history, Mediterranean cuisine and Slavic cultural heritage. And on a recent visit to its Dalmatian coast, I decided to delve deeper into its less explored side of the country, and so I ditched the crowds on the beach, left the tourist trail behind me, and headed deep into the world of music.
Journey int
Not too many people know much about (or have even heard of) the tiny, 10-island West African country of Cape Verde, on Boavista island). But even though relatively few actually understood her song lyrics, plenty in Europe, Africa, and the rest of the world certainly knew and loved its most famous native daughter, a soulful singer whom we lost a year ago today at age 70.
Like one of my favorite U.S. jazz icons, Alberta Hunter, Cesária Évora started her career young and at one po
