Siddhartha Mitter

Remembering a world-music giant

Boston Globe, April 4, 2008
Last October, Andy Palacio, a brilliant musician and activist from Belize, capped a landmark year by standing on a stage in Seville, Spain, to accept world music's highest tribute: the WOMEX Award.

Victor Wooten trades his funky soul for a spiritual one

Boston Globe, March 28, 2008
Mystical visitations are much on the mind these days of Victor Wooten. In addition to a new album, "Palmystery," out next week, the Nashville-based contemporary bass guitar hero is also releasing a book, a work of fiction titled "The Music Lesson," in which a young player learns wisdom well beyond musical technique alone from a chance encounter with a spiritually advanced stranger.

New York's Clergy Talk Politics

WNYC News, March 23, 2008

Today is Easter Sunday and many New Yorkers are headed to Church. Last Tuesday Democratic Candidate Barack Obama talked about the conflicts he as a congregant has had with some of what his pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright has said in the past. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter spoke with some New York clergy about how they handle potentially divisive topics when addressing their congregations.

Surviving a rough patch

Boston Globe, March 21, 2008
Last year was a time of transition for the Drive-By Truckers, the Athens, Ga., band with the dual gift for high-octane rocking and magisterial front-porch storytelling. Personnel flux and a sense of fatigue led the group to pare down its sound, perform acoustic gigs, and take time out to serve as backing band on a soul-music project.

An Iraqi Musician in New York

WNYC News, March 19, 2008

Five years after the US invasion of Iraq, an Iraqi-American musician is preserving the classical music of Baghdad here in New York. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.

Prezens is all over the map -- and that's the point

Boston Globe, March 14, 2008
One of the most interesting recent albums to beam back from the frontier where jazz, rock, electronica, and free improvisation intersect was David Torn's "Prezens." It's a digitally enhanced quartet led by a guitarist-producer whose career has taken on the most abstract projects as well as some of the most commercial, as a composer of Hollywood soundtracks or a session musician on major pop and R&B releases.

Arab Music Thrives in New York

WNYC News, March 10, 2008

A major festival of Arab music is taking place in Brooklyn all this month. After 9/11 there were fears that funding and opportunities for Arab artists would dry up. Siddhartha Mitter reports on the thriving scene for Arab music in New York.

A banjo, a piano, and two willing masters

Boston Globe, February 29, 2008
In four decades exploring seemingly every nook and cranny of straight-ahead jazz, Latin jazz, and fusion, the pianist Chick Corea has exemplified versatility and spirit of adventure to as great an extent as any musician today. But even omnivorous curiosity has limits. So when asked how much interest he had ever taken, until recently, in working with a banjo as accompanying instrument, Corea's reply is frank and succinct: "Zero."

Structure and roughness

Boston Globe, February 24, 2008
In the Japanese tradition, the ronin is the masterless samurai. The consummate free agent, he rejects conventional authority and moves through the world with defiance and dignity. In jazz today, Ronin designates something no less rigorous and idiosyncratic. It's the name that Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch chose for his quintet, a one-of-a-kind unit that performs what Bärtsch calls Zen-funk - a cerebral music influenced by minimalism, yet blessed with head-nodding, foot-tapping rhythmic tendencies, and an exhilarating sense of pacing that makes each composition a fascinating adventure.

For saxman, it's all adding up

Boston Globe, February 15, 2008
NEW YORK - He's a self-described egghead, a numbers nut who could have become a mathematician or economist. He's a science-fiction fan who loves William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and is liable to zone out to sci-fi reruns on TV. But when Rudresh Mahanthappa takes the stage, it's with an alto saxophone, not chalk and blackboard, that he burrows into theorems and explores alternate planes, in a musical language so vivid and complex that hard-bitten jazz arbiters have dared to compare him to Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane.

An avant-garde thinker takes a turn with a trio

Boston Globe, February 8, 2008
Improvised music never happens in a vacuum. It's the product of an encounter, when musicians listen and respond together in a way that none could have achieved alone. The deeper the encounter, the more fully present the players, the greater the liberties they can take with conventions and still produce beautiful music.

Campaign Theme Songs: A Tough Balance

WNYC News, February 02, 2008

It’s not exactly the Grammys, but as the presidential field winnows down, so does the list of campaign theme songs that might – come November – be crowned the Winning Presidential Anthem of 2008. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter evaluates the contenders.

Playing around with nature's soundtrack

Boston Globe, February 1, 2008
Jazz and the great outdoors aren't commonly associated with each other, but for bassist and bandleader Jason Davis, they've been the twin poles of an emerging career that's as much - pardon the pun - about timber as it is about timbre.

Spanning, spinning global beats

Boston Globe, January 30, 2008
NEW YORK - She's as conversant in the arcana of classic, early-'90s hip-hop as she is in the folk music of her family's native Punjab, India. Spinning on her turntables today, you might find Bollywood anthems, baile funk from Brazil, or neo-Balkan brass-band grooves from her adopted Brooklyn.

Spirit guides Moses on his journey

Boston Globe, January 25, 2008
When John Coltrane passed away in 1967, he was just a few years into the spiritual quest that his later albums document, with titles like "Om" and "Interstellar Space," and the liberation they reflect from conventions of jazz form and expression. Coltrane was only 40 at his death, and no one knows where his music might have gone had he lived longer. It's been left to his collaborators and others whom he inspired to imagine this invisible yet compelling legacy.

Dr King's Impact on Political Oratory

WNYC News, January 20, 2008

In this election year, political oratory is back in the spotlight. WNYC's Siddhartha Mitter sat down with one of New York's best known orators to talk about the art of the speech forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King.

All-American hybrid

Boston Globe, January 11, 2008
The song opens with a banjo furiously strumming, the lines tumbling out like torrents down an Appalachian mountainside as warm fiddle notes poke out. Soon the drums kick in and - wait, is that a saxophone?

A Gangs-Eye View of the Bronx Streets

WNYC News, January 9, 2008

Street gangs have always been a part of life in New York City; in some neighborhoods they’re a constant fact of life. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter spent time in the Bronx with a teenager to get a street level view.

Interpreting anew the King's rich repertoire

Boston Globe, January 4, 2008
The songs of Elvis Presley aren't commonly considered fare for jazz interpretations, particularly for jazz with highbrow aspirations. But such limits of taste or curiosity don't apply to Cyrus Chestnut, the accomplished pianist who visits Scullers this weekend to open the new year on the jazz scene.

The torchbearer

Boston Globe, December 21, 2007
Of all the great expressive traditions in jazz, the male vocal is one that has had difficulty maintaining its position in the music's evolving marketplace. The shortage of prominent male singers is especially pronounced when it comes to African-American voices. For all the reinvigoration of jazz today, few if any inheritors of Nat King Cole or Johnny Hartman have emerged, and there's a case to be made that something important beyond the music itself is thereby threatened.

Top CDs of 2007

Boston Globe, December 16, 2007
Below is my list for the Boston Globe's year-end roundup feature. The copy is here. The multimedia version with audio commentary is here. The whole package with picks from my colleagues (highly recommended!) is here.

From the Philippines to Upstate

WNYC News, December 14, 2007

Two percussionists, making a life together and building a family to the rhythm of dozens of drums. She is Filipino-American, he is Cuban-American and they make music that combines both their cultures - and many others. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter spent time with Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez for our ongoing series about musicians, The New Americans.

Three for the records

Boston Globe, December 14, 2007
ROY HAYNES,  "A Life in Time"
Among the flurry of jazz albums released in the past few months, just in time for holiday gifts, few have the heft - in length, and in sheer historical value - of Roy Haynes's "A Life in Time," newly out on Dreyfus Records.

A decade of hip-hopping across the pond

Boston Globe, December 11, 2007
Various artists, Well Deep: Ten Years of Big Dada Recordings (Big Dada)
Hip-hop in Britain never achieved anything like the commercial behemoth status it has here. As a result British hip-hop, though uneven, retains a certain underground freshness as well as reflects the greater porousness of genre boundaries across the pond, with cross-fertilization abundant from reggae, funk, and endless varieties of house and electronica.

A sonic treasure out of Africa

Boston Globe, December 8, 2007
He's known on a first-name basis - Youssou - not just across Africa, but around the world, which is remarkable when you think about it, when you consider that Youssou N'Dour emerged in the early 1980s as just another African bandleader, wildly talented yet from a small country at the margins of the global economy, singing in Wolof, an interesting-sounding language but one understood by few outside Senegal.

An old-school take on jazz

Boston Globe, December 7, 2007
On her most recent album, last year's "Timeless Portraits and Dreams," pianist Geri Allen applies her crystalline touch and graceful melodicism to such varied fare as Charlie Parker's bop classic "Ah-Leu-Cha," the devotional "Well Done," and the African-American anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing." With old-school luminaries Ron Carter and Jimmy Cobb as the rhythm section, the record features guests such as vocalist Carmen Lundy and pioneering black tenor George Shirley.

World AIDS Day: New York's Immigrant Community Responds

WNYC News, December 1, 2007

Today marks World AIDS Day. It’s a time to commemorate victims of the epidemic and take stock of the fight against it around the world. Here in New York, the city estimates that over 100,000 people are living with HIV, and there are 4,000 new AIDS diagnoses each year. The stigma that prevents people from dealing openly with HIV can be especially strong for recent immigrants. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.

Pianist embraces the heritage of two countries

Boston Globe, November 30, 2007
In the geography of jazz, the New York-Paris axis has long been a thoroughfare for artists and ideas. From the Harlem Renaissance through the bop era, Paris offered shelter and a creative setting to African-American musicians. Although the days of Bud Powell or Dexter Gordon playing in the Latin Quarter are long gone, the City of Light remains home to more recent expatriates such as saxophonist David Murray, as well as feeding ground for a busy homegrown scene.

From simple start, a sophisticated style

Boston Globe, November 16, 2007
A small-town childhood in southwest Minnesota, complete with figure-skating lessons and swoops across the vast emptiness of the plains in a six-seater aircraft piloted by a dad who works in the crop business, isn't exactly a classic antecedent of a career in jazz. But there's nothing conventional about the career of composer Maria Schneider, whose one-of-a-kind reimagining of a big band, the Maria Schneider Orchestra, has blazed daring new trails in the jazz landscape, expressing its leader's highly personal vision with empathetic and exhilarating group interplay.

Uganda: Singing for Life

Afropop Worldwide (Public Radio International), November 15, 2007
In just fifteen years, Uganda lowered its HIV/AIDS infection rate from 30% to just 5%. The life-saving info was best channeled by grassroots theater groups, and especially, women's choirs who turned health advice, sometimes blended with religion, into entertainment that could move freely to even the most remote regions of Uganda. Ethnomusicologist Gregory Barz helps us get below the surface. We'll also hear from popular musicians ...  Produced by Siddhartha Mitter. Click here for audio streams.

Exploring the mysteries of bossa nova

Boston Globe, November 7, 2007
From rock to electronica to regional traditional rhythms, musical exports of Brazil are as varied as befits that country's size and diversity. Still, one style above all has come to symbolize the Brazilian sensibility. There's no sound more quintessentially cool than bossa nova, the quietly seductive distillation of samba and jazz that first took form in the late 1950s. And in Rosa Passos, who visits the Berklee Performance Center tomorrow for a rare North American concert, bossa nova has one of its purest interpreters, a scholar of the genre's classic songbook and an acclaimed composer in her own right.

At 65, he increases range

Boston Globe, November 2, 2007
Caetano Veloso has never been one to rest on his laurels. At 65, the great Brazilian singer, who plays the Orpheum Theatre tonight, still shows the restlessness that first earned him fame in the late 1960s, when, together with fellow Bahian Gilberto Gil, he helped forge the ebullient, edgy, multi-arts movement called Tropicalismo. Their music at the time associated the rhythmic energy of Afro-Brazilian culture and the poetic sophistication of bossa nova with the angularity and dissonances of European modernism.

Musicians look forward to a grand time at Pianofest

Boston Globe, October 20, 2007
One of the most original and forward-looking events on the Boston music calendar began almost by accident, as the result of the purchase of a piano. Five years ago composer Gill Aharon busted the bank to buy a 7-foot Kawai grand that ate up most of the space in his basement apartment. Now Aharon owns the Lily Pad, a gallery and performance space in Cambridge, and the Kawai is the house instrument. It is the centerpiece of Pianofest, a one-of-a-kind music marathon unfolding this weekend at the Inman Square venue.

Mtukudzi sings a song of survival

Boston Globe, October 19, 2007
In the 27 years since the hard-fought overthrow of white minority Rhodesian rule, Zimbabwe has tumbled from an exalted symbol of African liberation to an exhibit of almost all that could possibly go wrong. A paranoid regime in the grip of an aging president and his cronies, and hunger and shortages in an agrarian country once seen as a regional breadbasket, are just two symptoms of a crisis whose human cost is exacerbated by rampaging HIV. The latest disaster is the onset of hyperinflation, with prices rising at a nearly unimaginable annual rate of 5,000 percent or more.

Homeward bound

Boston Globe, October 14, 2007
The idea of returning to Africa has been an essential theme in American arts and culture ever since Africans were brought to this country. But it is a theme that has dwelt mainly at the margins of mainstream culture, whether by political choice of the artists involved or from lack of interest and commercial appeal outside (or even sometimes within) the African-American community.

New York's Muslims Celebrate Eid Al Fitr

WNYC News, October 13, 2007

This weekend the Muslim world celebrates Eid. The holiday marks the end of Ramadan and is a high point in the Islamic calendar. In New York, many of the city’s Muslims will gather today for festive meals with family and friends. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.

Tour shares the diverse traditions of Central Asia

Boston Globe, October 12, 2007
Sixteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union supposedly threw open the doors to travel and cultural contact with the republics of Central Asia, the vast region of deserts, steppes, and mountains that stretches from the Caspian Sea to the edges of China remains a vague notion in Western minds.

A Visit with the President

WNYC News, September 28, 2007

This week world leaders have been gathering for the U. N. General Assembly, delivering speeches and holding summit meetings and snarling up traffic on the East Side. But for some presidents and prime ministers, the trip to New York has a local dimension too. It’s a way to connect with immigrants from their country who live here and send money home. And immigrant leaders look forward to the chance for face time with the head of state. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work out the way they hoped. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.

For the love of Joyce

Boston Globe, September 28, 2007
NEW YORK - Few life stories in jazz have been as fulfilling as that of George Wein, the pianist and promoter who virtually invented the jazz festival at Newport in 1954 and went on to become the music's most iconic and influential impresario.

To pay tribute to an old friend, Hancock adopts a new approach

Boston Globe, September 23, 2007
NEW YORK - When Herbie Hancock embarked on making "River: The Joni Letters," his new album out Tuesday based on the music of Joni Mitchell, he quickly found himself treading at once on familiar and unfamiliar ground.

He's carrying the Tormé torch

Boston Globe, September 21, 2007
In 1977, Steve March, a Los Angeles pop singer, released an LP called "Lucky" on the old United Artists label. He earned some decent reviews and a gig singing for a television game show, and within a couple of years he disappeared from the visible portions of the showbiz world.

Corona Plaza, Center of Everywhere

WNYC News, September 14, 2007

INTRO: There’s been a multi media art project going on all summer in Corona Plaza, off Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. But walking by, you might not even know it was there. Siddhartha Mitter caught up with some artists working to connect their art with their communities.

Pianist Michel Camilo's latest project is a triple treat

Boston Globe, September 14, 2007
One of the most complete jazz pianists around and also one of the most engaging, Michel Camilo has spent the past few years working outside the trio format that has been the anchor of his three-decade career. Now, the Dominican-born virtuoso is returning to the trio re-energized by his recent solo, flamenco, and orchestral projects. The results include a concise and compelling trio album, "Spirit of the Moment," released this year on the Telarc label, and a tour that visits Regattabar for a three-night engagement next week.

East Village Hosts Howl Festival

WNYC News, September 9, 2007

This weekend the East Village celebrates its offbeat cultural legacy with the Howl Festival. The event is named for the famous 1957 poem by Allen Ginsberg, who died ten years ago. The neighborhood has gone through big changes, but the festival shows it hasn't lost its quirkiness. WNYC's Siddhartha Mitter checked it out.

Reaching out to new listeners: Hindustani singer goes extra mile for her audience

Boston Globe,  September 9, 2007
From yoga to outsourcing to nuclear weapons deals, American awareness of India is as strong and multifaceted today as it has ever been. In music, exposure to the culture of the world's largest democracy has come lately via bhangra, the party sound based on folk music from Punjab, and through the Bollywood songs that sometimes seem to be the soundtrack to daily life in India.

All-star lineup keeps it classy at Tanglewood Jazz Festival

Boston Globe, August 31, 2007
The Tanglewood Jazz Festival program, which runs tonight through Sunday evening at the al fresco concert venue in Lenox, chooses to err on the side of elegance. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Au contraire: The highbrow picnic vibe of the place matches better with classic straight-ahead jazz delivery than it would with avant-garde deconstruction or wild honks and screams.

He works to raise hope, and homes, in New Orleans

Boston Globe, August 24, 2007
Days before the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, the righteous anger animates Terence Blanchard just as it did in the storm's wake. The distinguished New Orleanian trumpeter, who remembers being evacuated by rowboat from the Ninth Ward as a child during 1965's Hurricane Betsy, came home after Katrina to find his mother's neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain leveled. Images of Blanchard escorting his mother to her first sight of the void that was her house, and his own candor negotiating the outrage and sadness, are emotional highlights of Spike Lee's HBO documentary, "When the Levees Broke."

Melding sweet soul music with Afrobeat

Boston Globe, August 22, 2007
At the start of the new second album by the Budos Band, simply titled "The Budos Band II," a double blast of horns ushers in a liquid groove that channels the spirit of Fela Kuti, Tony Allen, and a generation of Afro-funk innovators. It's to the point of osmosis, but this isn't Lagos circa 1972: It's New York City in 2007, at a time when Brooklyn hipster label Daptone has become curator and celebrant of an old-school soul revival. And the Budos, 11 mostly white dudes from Staten Island, have expanded that movement's scope into Afrobeat.

No time to quit the blues

Boston Globe, August 17, 2007
Koko Taylor's new album is called "Old School," and rarely was a title ever so succinct and so apt. There's no blues artist active today who so perfectly channels the thrill, the sadness, and the power of classic Chicago blues as Taylor, who left sharecropper Tennessee for the Windy City in 1953 and resides there to this day. With a new album and a busy tour schedule that brings her to Lowell's Boarding House Park on Thursday, after five decades of raw-soul singing Taylor is going plenty strong.

At Newark Funerals "It's Sadness All Over"

WNYC News, August 13, 2007

Newark police are seeking a fourth suspect in the execution style murders of three college-age young people on August 4th. Newark mayor Cory Booker announced the warrant for Rodolfo Godinez on Saturday morning at a brief press conference wedged between funerals. The victims were buried on Saturday after funerals at three different Baptist churches around the city. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter spoke with the mourners.