Siddhartha Mitter

B-Boys Gone Wild

WNYC Soundcheck, June 5, 2007
When hip hop was still in the ghetto in 1982, the film "Wild Style" put the music and graffiti art on the map. Today on Soundcheck, the story behind a classic hip-hop movie that still matters. Plus, Broadway veteran Audra McDonald talks about her Tony-nominated role in the musical "110 in the Shade." And: The story of imaginary soul superstar Mingering Mike.

I guest-hosted the show. Here's the interview with Charlie Ahearn, the maker of Wild Style, and Ralph McDaniels, founder of Video Music Box and host of the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival:

 

And here's the interview with singer and actress Audra McDonald:

Is Militant Islam in the Caribbean a New Phenomenon?

The alleged plot that was revealed this weekend to bomb the fuel lines leading into JFK airport has cast light on Islamic militancy from an unexpected corner: the Caribbean. The three men being held by officials, and a fourth man who's still at large, are Muslims from Trinidad and Guyana. With large communities from both countries living in New York, their representatives are seeking to quell any fears of a new source of terrorist threats. WNYC's Siddhartha Mitter is following the story.

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.

The companions are prestigious and the program seemingly eclectic, but the agenda that informs the album - and with it, the current phase in Allen's career - is personal, highly focused and deeply felt. Allen's perspective on jazz is both grounded and panoramic, constantly attuned to the connections between the music's development and the unfolding of American, and especially African-American, history.

Her concern with jazz as not just music but culture makes Allen an inspired choice for the residency she undertakes this weekend at Harvard. It features three public events: a music-illustrated discussion this afternoon, followed by a concert with her trio this evening, and tomorrow night she'll perform with the Harvard Jazz Bands in an evening devoted to the work of the trailblazing female pianist Mary Lou Williams.

The academic setting is a comfortable one for the 50-year-old Allen: She is an associate professor of jazz piano and improvisation at the University of Michigan, and she has a graduate degree in ethnomusicology. As she says on the phone from her home in Montclair, N.J., the focus on education runs in her family.

"It's a natural place for me to be," Allen says. "My grandmother was a one-room schoolteacher in Tennessee, and my father worked 35 years in the Detroit public school system."

Her Motor City upbringing also embedded Allen in a distinguished jazz tradition. Her fellow alumni of the music program at Cass Technical High School include legends Carter, Donald Byrd, Kenny Burrell, and many others, including several important female jazz artists, notably Alice Coltrane.

Like these illustrious forebears, Allen eventually moved to New York, emerging in the 1980s as a vivid new voice on the piano. But that was also a complicated period for jazz. Record labels were scaling back their investment in the music or shifting their focus from straight-ahead to fusion and "smooth" styles. Yet while recording budgets dried up, some of the great, long-running bands like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers continued to incubate new talent with irreplaceable on-the-job training.

"There was a sense of jazz being on the road all the time," Allen says. "The scene was in flux, but it was still rooted in the Art Blakeys, the Betty Carters."

Today, that picture is reversed. Jazz recordings are abundant, whether on major or independent labels, and jazz programs at music schools release hundreds of technically proficient graduates onto the scene each year. But many of the elders have passed away, and the great working-band tradition, with its attendant transmission of experience and lore, is moribund.

At risk, Allen believes, is the cultural grounding of the music and its continued ability not only to reflect American history, but to reconnect to the African-American community in a way relevant today.

"Jazz is a great art form, with a legacy attached to it that helps [us] understand who we are as a people," Allen says. "How do we access these communities of folk for whom the music is a direct reflection of their roots?"

That project resonates with Ingrid Monson, who holds the Quincy Jones chair in African-American music at Harvard. "One of the reasons we wanted to invite Geri Allen is that she places jazz in social context," Monson says. "There's always a dialogue between music and community."

Monson says her undergraduate class on jazz explores the links between jazz and often uncomfortable topics in American history, and asks questions like, "How did jazz come to symbolize freedom, individuality, self-expression?" Allen's approach, Monson says, makes her an ideal guest lecturer on these topics.

"In her musical practice, that's always been there," Monson says. "Not that every piece of music has to have a political connotation, but she has a feeling of responsibility to the larger world."

Allen says that responsibility is not a matter of ideology, but simply the way she is: "It's organic in the way that I work, in the way that I was raised as a musician."

So whether she is honoring the legacy of Williams, a major female jazz innovator who might otherwise be forgotten, or holding community events like her visit yesterday to the Roland Hayes music school in Roxbury, Geri Allen is simply giving back.

"Jazz is culture," she says. "It's a legacy art form. It continues to evolve as long as we continue to celebrate and support that legacy."

From the Philippines to Upstate

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.

Merge ahead

Boston Globe, March 14, 2007
What happens when 10 top musicians from the melodic side of the tracks -- luminaries of fusion and smooth jazz like pianists Jeff Lorber and George Duke, guitarist Lee Ritenour, saxmen Kirk Whalum, Boney James, and Gary Meek -- hang out for two days together in a Southern California studio?

Wait -- is this a trick question?

Not in the least. The answer is: They make a record, and a fine one at that, a funky, swinging affair with plenty of edge and the raw spontaneity of a classic blowing session among artists with chops, verve, and nothing to prove.

At least that is what happened when bassist Brian Bromberg, a noted transgressor of jazz boundaries with the temerity to frequent both smooth jazz and straight-ahead scenes, convened these musicians in his Los Angeles studio. With traditional instrumentation and production values and unapologetically groovy and melodic material, the album, "Downright Upright," should give zealots and separatists of both camps pause.

The results may be put to the test tomorrow, when Bromberg visits Scullers with slightly rejiggered but no less distinguished personnel, featuring Lorber, Meek, and also trumpeter Randy Brecker and drummer Dave Weckl.

On the phone from Los Angeles, Bromberg, who is 46 years old and made his first recording as a leader in 1986 after starting in Stan Getz's band, explains that the merger of musicians and styles on "Downright Upright" was, in his mind, a long time coming.

"It's kind of what I've wanted to make for a long time," he says. "I make a lot of different records, from crazy distorted fusion-y stuff to traditional trio jazz. I've been lucky to have some success in the smooth world and in the traditional jazz world."

On "Downright Upright," he says, "everybody just gets together and blows. It's all improvised. We rehearsed in two days. There's no rehearsal, no major arrangements."

Lorber agrees: "Brian and I go back almost 20 years, but of all the projects we've worked on together I think this is my favorite," he says. "The chemistry and vibe between the musicians was really special. The feeling in the studio was that something very unique was going on."

And it's true -- the feel of the 10-song program, half Bromberg compositions, is entirely spontaneous and organic. The sole exception is the guitar solos, which in fact are not guitar at all but Bromberg on the piccolo bass, overdubbed and mixed into the album. This good-natured sleight-of-hand may be a wink by Bromberg, who calls himself mainly a producer these days, to postmodern artifice and electronic possibility.

A producer's aesthetic informs the album in other ways, too. For one thing, although Bromberg is the leader and it's his name on the cover, his presence on the bass is very traditional and low-key, with few solos and no plucking fireworks or bow wizardry.

"I make records not as a bass player but as a producer, very balanced and well rounded," he explains. "We have so many independent strong voices, it could be anybody's record. My role as the bass player is to play the foundation so that everybody can build off me."

Bassist-bandleaders are by no means unknown -- Charles Mingus and Charlie Haden spring to mind -- yet they aren't exactly common either. Bromberg says that early in his career, he looked to these greats mainly for their musical technique. But as he matured as a musician, he came to appreciate the subtleties of leading from the bottom, so to speak.

"The bass's primary role has been supportive, in the background," he says; it took time for it to be accepted as a lead instrument. "That's mainly because of its role, and the fact that its pitch is so low. It's taken a long time for people to understand that a bass player can have a voice. Thank God, that's evolved, and people before me paved the way."

One factor in foregrounding the bass was the blossoming of funky, groovy approaches to jazz in the 1970s, linked to concurrent developments in rock and soul. Bands of the day such as Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, various Miles Davis lineups, or outfits from Tower of Power and Mandrill to Earth Wind & Fire and Steely Dan, made music that could belong just as easily to all or none of these categories.

From that time Bromberg draws inspiration, and material. On "Downright Upright" this manifests in the choice of songs, which include the Hancock classics "Cantaloupe Island" and "Chameleon," as well as in the themes of Bromberg's compositions for the occasion, which have titles like "Shag Carpet" and "Leisure Suit."

"The entire 1960s and 1970s funky nightclub scene was an incredible era in jazz," Bromberg says. " 'Chameleon' is one of the most classic funky jazz songs. How can you go wrong with Headhunters, or with Joe Zawinul's 'Mercy Mercy Mercy'? When you've got classic music, it's just so undeniably right."

"Downright Upright" isn't a nostalgic exercise -- its sound and energy are clearly of today. But in a low-key way, Bromberg is making a point by evoking a time when the constant urge of critics and audiences to categorize music came up against a wave of creative work that simply wouldn't comply. He says that "smooth" and "traditional" jazz advocates would do well to remember that time.

"There's too much judgment in life, in art, and in music," he says. "The two camps are getting further and further apart. I want to say: Slow down! Check it out! It's all good!"

Finding his place in the jazz lineage

Boston Globe, November 24, 2006
NEW YORK — To properly unpack the layers of musical and cultural meaning in ‘‘African Tarantella,’’ the latest album from the brilliant vibraphonist and bandleader Stefon Harris, it would require a longer article than these columns permit.

So here’s a summary. A tarantella is an Italian dance whose frenzied execution was once believed to cure a tarantula’s bite — hence, supposedly, the name. Indeed, the album’s cover photo shows Harris bent forward to display a hairy arachnid perched on his head. ‘‘African Tarantella’’ is Harris’s attempt to express the dual European and African paternity of jazz — and with it, in some ways, of American culture itself.

If that sounds abstract, have no fear. ‘‘African Tarantella,’’ which Harris brings this weekend to the Regattabar, is wholly accessible, a beautiful program of movements from suites by Duke Ellington and Harris himself, interpreted on the album by a thoughtfully constructed ensemble that includes, among other instruments, viola, cello, trombone, and flute.

For Harris, 33, who only found jazz in college but in just over a decade has become the top vibraphonist and one of the most original bandleaders of his generation, ‘‘Tarantella’’ is a triumph of lyricism that marks, to use a dreaded term, an arrival at a certain maturity.

Harris says as much, relaxing at the offices of Blue Note, his record label, on a recent afternoon. After several small-group albums afire with virtuosity and a challenging concept piece, ‘‘Grand Unification Theory,’’ he calls his recent efforts a ‘‘musical rebirth,’’ beginning with his research into Louis Armstrong.

‘‘A lot of people when we start, including myself, we want to start in the middle,’’ Harris says. ‘‘After Bird, you check out Trane, then Miles. But you end up learning to imitate and reiterate sounds. You memorize sounds and play them back as licks. But you don’t really understand how to make a melody. It wasn’t until I went back and started studying Louis Armstrong that I got a much greater understanding about how a line is put together. It’s really gotten me away from playing licks at all.’’

To Ellington, meanwhile, Harris attributes just as important a revelation — one about his place and responsibility, as a jazz artist, in a cultural legacy.

‘‘With this record I reached a cultural epiphany,’’ Harris says. ‘‘Music has always been an emotional outlet. It’s fascinating intellectually, an incredible challenge. But at this point I really see that I’m a part of a great cultural heritage, a lineage. My feeling about the music is very much solidified now.’’

For an artist who, having trained as a classical percussionist, came to jazz in music school, with its emphasis on technique, achieving this insight was by no means guaranteed.

‘‘In music school you’re learning the scales, chords, transcribing in an abstract form, and there’s no real cultural element. But after checking out people like Ellington, not only their music but reading about their life and their impact on American culture, it’s a certain type of pride that I have, and a certain type of obligation.

‘‘Sometimes the perception of African-Americans in this country is a tough thing to face. And I need to know that there are greater things than the way we’re necessarily being portrayed. I look back and I see Gordon Parks, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, these are heroes to me. My take on the art form is no longer it’s fun, or it’s a challenge. It’s that I’m a part of something much bigger than I can control.’’

Studying Ellington, whose career spanned six decades of jazz while consistently defying categorization, represented for Harris a deeply liberating experience.

‘‘He’s writing about his perception of love, compassion, fear, which is why it’s timeless,’’ Harris says. ‘‘His music was always about something deep within the human spirit. I look at someone like Ellington and it reminds me that I cannot allow myself to be defined by outside influences. That I’m young, that our people in this country are young, and I am yet to discover who I am. If I can dream it, I should try it.’’

Pianist Xavier Davis, a longtime collaborator who appears on ‘‘Tarantella,’’ detects that sense of freedom in his friend’s current state of mind.

‘‘It seems like he’s defining what his artistic vision is, and it’s broad but still very unique,’’ Davis says. ‘‘I don’t see him feeling limited by the trends of jazz today, but he’s also not afraid to incorporate those trends.’’

A key setting where Harris found this voice was Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he enjoyed a residency in January 2002, roaming the rooms after dark and playing when he pleased, including before unwitting museum visitors.

‘‘I had a lot of time just to reflect on things from the past,’’ he says of the Gardner stint. ‘‘The dichotomy of intellect and raw spirituality, the unique combination of the two that I noticed in a space like that, how essential it is to great music.’’

Out of that month came ‘‘The Gardner Meditations,’’ a suite that is featured on ‘‘African Tarantella.’’ At a concert here last month, the material blended well with the Ellington pieces, Harris’s composition perhaps ever so slightly more angular.

The Boston sets feature not the full ensemble but a more conventional quintet with alto sax, piano, bass, and drums. That is as conventional as a group can be when it includes the vibraphone and marimba, instruments that appear deceptively simple but produce a fabulous range of tones, as well as requiring near-athletic stamina. In any case, Harris says, the performance is different each time.

‘‘We took music which is very arranged and structured, and you put it in a setting where you have very creative musicians, and you allow them carte blanche,’’ he says. ‘‘We’ve gone so far from the original at times when we’re on the road. It keeps it spontaneous and exciting for us, because we really don’t know what’s going to happen.’’

Davis points out that no matter the group, the presence at its heart of Harris’s quartet brings looseness and invention to the performance.

‘‘With a large ensemble you can’t have as much freedom,’’ Davis says. ‘‘His vision for these larger groups is much more structured, but because the core of the group is the quartet, there’s still an underlying freedom.’’

All of which fits with the sense of musical renewal that shows as much in Harris’s contagious enthusiasm as it does in his recordings.

‘‘The greatest feeling right now is that I feel like I’m just getting started,’’ he says. ‘‘Yesterday I practiced seven hours. Not fancy licks; I went over simple chord structures. The more I do it, the deeper I get into the music and I realize I’m just a baby, man.’’

Taking jazz violin on a trip back in time

Boston Globe, January 21, 2007
For all the creativity on display in jazz, there hasn't been much room for the violin in the genre, at least not since the birth of be bop six decades ago. Violin, cello, and viola found themselves relegated to the occasional string section, and in the 1960s, while "out" musicians took up everything from cowbells to Eastern strings like the oud and sitar, the good old violin remained mainly untouched, as if reserved for classical European playing.

In that atmosphere, to take on a career in jazz violin had to be an act of stubbornness verging on temerity. So it's gratifying to see Regina Carter, who almost single-handedly has returned the violin to jazz prominence in a 15-year run of virtuosity, headlining a Celebrity Series concert at Sanders Theatre tomorrow. With full respect to other bow-wielders, the terms jazz violin and celebrity rarely figure in the same sentence.

The show also features singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, but this is Carter's project. The program, drawn from her latest album , "I'll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey," features pre-World War II classics from "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" to "Georgia on My Mind." It should well suit the dark, ornate confines of Sanders.

The project, Carter explains from her home in New York, is nostalgic for the very best of reasons. It honors her mother, who passed away in early 2005 after a difficult illness, and who was the driving force behind her daughter's musical education.

"We were extremely close," Carter says. "When she passed away I went through a whole lot. I wanted to honor and grieve for her. A lot of the tunes were her favorites. Others, I'm not sure if she knew, but they are from that time period."

It's also fitting that jazz of that era, much of it performed in big-band settings, made room for the violin and other instruments that later receded. It was a time when key ingredients were still being added to the jazz stew, including classical and Yiddish influences from new emigrés.

"I grew up watching the Lawrence Welk show," Carter says by way of example. "It's almost a nostalgic sound, with the clarinet and the accordion."

Paquito D'Rivera and Gil Goldstein, on the latter two instruments, guest on "I'll Be Seeing You" but are not on the tour; neither is singer Carla Cook. The rest of the group is the same, including Bridgewater, who sings on two tracks, Xavier Davis on piano, Matthew Parrish on bass, and Alvester Garnett on drums.

Carter looks back on making the album in something of a haze. It was a tough time. The passing of her mother hit her hard, and she was also, she says, embroiled in a legal fight over a professional matter that embittered her in regard to her craft.

"It was a very difficult project to do," she says. "I was still in this legal battle with no time to grieve. I was ready to leave the music business altogether." She doesn't go into detail, but it's clear from her tone that she's deadly serious.

It would have been a great loss. At 44, Carter, who grew up in Detroit in a middle-class African-American family before moving to New York, has assembled a remarkable body of work with seven albums as a leader or co-leader.

Her work can't be called avant-garde, like that of fellow violinist Billy Bang, who has worked out in brilliant but difficult jazz his experiences in the Vietnam War, but she is a boundary-pusher in her own right, in particular when it comes to having jazz violin taken seriously in the classical world.

In 2001, she took on the city fathers of Genoa, Italy, requesting to play the Nicolo Paganini violin, known as the "Cannon" for its bold tone, that the city keeps under armed guard and allows only stringently selected musicians to play. Placing this treasure in the hands of a black, female jazz player did not go over well with the Italian media -- until they heard Carter play. She went on to record an album on the Cannon, elegantly titled "Paganini: After a Dream."

So when Carter's friends rallied around her after her mother's death to help her "keep it together," as she puts it, they were doing the music world an important favor, a mitzvah. Little did she or they know that an amazing reward was on the way.

One morning last September, Carter answered the phone to learn that the MacArthur Foundation was giving her one of its so-called "genius grants" -- $500,000 over five years to support her creative work, no strings attached.

"It was completely out of the blue," she says. She didn't believe it at first: She took the person's information and went to look up the foundation. "And it was the same number. I called and they connected me . . . I said, 'What do you mean, no strings attached?' It still hasn't completely sunk in."

Carter has at least one plan for the money. "I already knew that I want to go back to school for music therapy," she says. "I've always had some involvement with that my whole life. My mother worked in child psychology and used music a lot."

"I had a friend who was close to death, I went in and played for her and the [hospital] staff. And when my mom was dying, there was a point where she couldn't communicate. I would play different music for her. So I know I want to help other people, whether it's children, the elderly, people in hospices . . ."

Down the line, Carter says, she'd like to start a program teaching other musicians to share their gift this way. But that's all for later. In the meantime, she promises not to disappear from the scene.

"That would be dangerous," she says. "I'm just figuring out what I'm doing next. Once I get school settled, I know that I'll do another project. Right now, I can only think about one thing at a time."

Duo connects with each other, and the audience

Boston Globe, May 11, 2007
There is an aura of difficulty that hangs over creative improvisation -- an art form at the confines of jazz, in which musicians expound together and in the moment, often with no predetermined structure or plan. It's difficult to perform: It demands that each musician combine self-assured technique with the capacity to intensely and closely listen to the others. And all too often, it's difficult to hear, offering the audience little in the way of signposts or emotional cues.

To all but the most cerebral and obsessive listeners, this hermetic quality is a major turn off. Fortunately, from time to time a creative improvisation project comes around that achieves its musical ends in a manner that is open, accessible, and sincere. The 19 concise and moving improvisations that make up "Heart Mountain," a new album by violist-violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch and pianist Myra Melford , draw us into the inner sanctum of the creative process without attitude or fear; they put us in the presence of music.

Kalmanovitch and Melford visit the Lily Pad in Cambridge on Wednesday; the galleryish setting is typical for this type of music, which gets lumped into the grab bag of "avant-garde" and never makes much money for anyone. Be that as it may, the intimate space offers lovers of classical music, in which both women trained, and jazz, the vernacular to which they are closest, the opportunity to be present at a creation: to witness a musical encounter and contribute to its energy.

Appropriately enough, the collaboration behind "Heart Mountain" stems from an act of improvisation. In 2003 the director of the Guelph Jazz Festival in Canada, where the two women were playing separately, asked them to perform together. Melford, an established pianist who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, had never heard of Kalmanovitch, a journeywoman with an unusual trajectory: She grew up in northern Alberta and trained at Juilliard, and though she is now based in New York, she was at the time living in Calgary supporting herself by playing fiddle in country and Irish bands.

In separate telephone interviews, both women describe the connection they felt almost from the outset of their accidental collaboration.

"It was really a delightful surprise," Melford says of working with Kalmanovitch. "I didn't know her music prior to meeting her. We just had a short time together, we played, and it was a very successful concert."

Kalmanovitch returns the favor: "I would imagine she'd be apprehensive," she says of Melford, "but she's extraordinarily open-minded. I sent her some recordings and I suggested that we just play free. And there was a great moment of mutual recognition about a minute or two into the performance."

In part, the connection reflects shared artistic interests and concerns. "We are both trained in classical music," Melford says. "We both have an interest in Indian music, she in the south and me in the north. And we have a shared background in jazz improvisation. All of these worlds came together in the project." Indian music, Melford says, supplied ideas about melody, tonal center techniques, and rhythm. Its influence is also manifest when Melford switches to harmonium , an instrument that Indian music uses as a drone but that Melford experiments with placing at the center.

But in creative improvisation the musical specifics are in a sense less important than the way that the artists interact in the moment with each other and their audience. No two performances are the same; each, Kalmanovitch says, is a unique, sacred space.

"It's sort of a model for the way one might hope to live," she says. "With an open mind, from the heart, accepting and adventurous. Improvisation makes manifest a way of being with other people. And it's also a way of inviting audiences into that moment. We can create a protected space. It takes a lot to get there, especially in the current economic climate for creative music -- a lot of time, energy, and resources. But that moment, the moment right before you play, is a moment pregnant with infinite possibilities."

She likens the feeling of a successful improvisation to "a really great conversation with strangers, on a train or a plane, which is also a protected space."

It's this attention to openness, in particular, that led Kalmanovitch and Melford to decide to play short pieces. This economy is rare and refreshing in the world of improvised music, which Kalmanovitch says is "sometimes reactionary" and deliberately opaque, with a machismo-tinged premium placed on the stamina of both musicians and audience members.

"It has very masculine values of power and authority," Kalmanovitch says. "You go to a concert and nobody speaks to you, you don't know if there's going to be a break, you desperately need a drink. . . . I'm not sure that the human attention span is meant to last through 60 minutes of uninterrupted aural assaults. So I found myself wanting to play shorter improvisations. I think of them as miniatures. I can explore each one thoroughly while maintaining a kind of compositional structure."

Kalmanovitch's remote Canadian frontier background keeps her feeling -- not unhappily -- something of an outsider in the New York arts scene. She credits these roots and her time as a working musician playing to get by in multiple settings -- alternative rock bands in college, Saturday-night country gigs in prairie towns, weddings and functions today -- with keeping her attuned to the audience even when playing complex and cerebral music.

"I try to play the way that I would want to hear," she says. "When I came back to playing jazz, I wanted to keep that connection with the audience. I still feel this tremendous sense of gratitude that anyone showed up at all."

Sounds like Africa -- and rock 'n' roll

Boston Globe, November 10, 2006
With its 21 strings, the long West African instrument called the kora delivers a sound rich in nuance and finesse. It also requires lengthy study. Together these factors have made it a vehicle for the preservation of traditional music by griots -- the praise-singing troubadours of Mali and Guinea -- rather than innovation and fusion with modern genres.

Then Ba Cissoko came along, with the band that bears his name. The Guinean combo, which visits the Somerville Theatre tonight on its maiden US tour, has jolted tradition by matching Cissoko's conventional kora with an electric version invented and played by his cousin Sékou Kouyaté . And they have taken their koras into unlikely terrain such as reggae, salsa, and rock without jettisoning traditional themes.

"Electric Griot Land," the band's second album, available as a European import, states the group's approach in its title. The Jimi Hendrix reference is no accident, but the interplay of acoustic and electric kora, backed by Kourou Kouyaté, another cousin, on bass and Ibrahima Bah on percussion, is more elegant, less dissonant than the comparison might imply. Contributions from French-African soul duo Les Nubians, Somali rapper K'Naan, and Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoly bolster the overall global-groovy feel.

Significantly, the critical plaudits for Cissoko on the world-music circuit have not come at the expense of local credibility. He spends as much time in Guinea as he does on the road, and his music has grown popular with the home audience despite his act of kora-goes-electric heresy.

"What works at home isn't always what works out in the world," Cissoko says on the phone from a tour stop in Florida. "I try to mix the traditional and the modern. There's a lot of traditional folk music in Guinea that's only consumed in Guinea. I thought, why not modernize it?

"At first it wasn't easy. A lot of old griots couldn't accept the idea of an electric kora. They said, you're turning it into a guitar. I said, it isn't a guitar. The kora is a complete instrument; it can do lots of things. It was a way of creating an opening for the kora."

Brad Powell, who runs the Boston-based online world-music store Calabash Music, says he was "blown away" the first time he saw the group play, in Marseille. "They will start off and launch into this very nice Afrobeat groove," Powell says. "However, [Sékou Kouyaté] has this whole bunch of effects racked up on his kora, and when he steps on the pedal, he lifts off into this other place. He sounds like Eric Clapton or Led Zeppelin."

Something of a late bloomer, the 39-year-old Cissoko developed only slowly his investment in the kora and its future. Though he was born into a family of griots, and therefore musicians, as a child growing up in northern Guinea his overriding interest was soccer -- until an uncle, kora player M'Bady Kouyaté, intervened and took him under his wing. By traveling the country and playing with his uncle, Cissoko gradually found his vocation.

Cissoko moved to Conakry, the capital, and began to play at hotels in order to save up the money to baptize his kora -- a ritual that signifies the end of apprenticeship and that involves expenses such as buying and slaughtering a sheep. When the time came, he says, he named his kora after his grandmother, Djéli Fatouma Kouyaté. He now owns several koras, but that one, which he keeps in Guinea, is the most precious to him.

The hotel gigs had another effect: forced exposure to different musical styles, which guests would request he play interspersed with the traditional music.

"At the hotel, people asked me if I could play other things, like Phil Collins, Bob Marley, or popular French songs," Cissoko says. "It isn't easy to play reggae on the kora." To illustrate, he sounds out a hard, syncopated reggae beat, quite different from the kora's subtle sonority.

He also met a French trumpet player, Gilles Poizat, who was doing a year of overseas work in lieu of military service. They became friends, and Poizat spent time with Cissoko's family learning kora basics. The idea of a kora-trumpet duo was outlandish enough to tempt them. The group they formed, Tamalalou, lasted several years in the 1990s and afforded Cissoko time in Marseille soaking up influences.

Ba Cissoko, the group, came together in 1998, first as a trio with the Kouyaté cousins and, Cissoko says, quickly adding percussionist Bah, whom they discovered at a music festival in Mali after traveling all night by bush taxi, lugging their instruments. The foursome finally released their first album, "Sabolan," in 2004. It earned them critical acclaim and touring opportunities in Europe and Japan.

All three of his bandmates are considerably younger than Cissoko, who therefore acts not only as a leader but also as an older brother, an important role in African society. But he hopes to go further and help a whole generation of musicians develop their careers.

"There are many young, talented musicians in Guinea," Cissoko says. Nor is there a lack of audience; what is missing, as in many other developing countries, are performance, recording, and other facilities. He has set up a cultural center in Conakry, he says, where musicians can rehearse and perform.

Cissoko also hopes to spur a greater dialogue between the kora and instruments of other traditions. For two years running, he has convened an international festival of kora and strings, which aims to bring to Conakry guitarists and masters of other string instruments such as the Middle Eastern oud or the Indian sitar.

Initiatives like these are part and parcel of a refreshing artistic philosophy. For Cissoko, traditional and modern sounds need not crowd each other out, and local and global ears can be satisfied at the same time. It's up to young artists to make it work.

"At first I played only traditional music, but at some point I wanted to modernize it," Cissoko says. "Our parents before us created new things. Why shouldn't we, the younger generation, create new things too?"

In pianist's hands, the jazz tradition evolves

Boston Globe, March 2, 2006 (Photo: Marc Cary/Motéma Records)
NEW YORK -- On the middle floor of a Harlem brownstone that once was home to Langston Hughes, the pianist Marc Cary holes up in a studio crowded with computers, keyboards, partly depleted bottles of red wine, and other flotsam of the creative process.

In the next room, his collaborator in business and music , Shon "Chance" Miller, a hip-hop artist and producer, lurks in similar fashion. Motema Music, the indie label on which Cary records, has its office in a space upstairs. And on the parlor floor, in the one fully renovated room, a concert piano stands proudly beneath a bank of stage lights.

Folks trundle up and down the narrow staircase and maneuver past drywall and over ripped-up carpet. Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, may have lived here, but the house is no elegant Harlem dowager. When the artists leased the building last year, they found it in a state unbecoming to the memory of its illustrious resident.

"It was in such disrepair and disrespect," Cary says. Now, he says, they're bringing the energy back, and he is starting to feel the presence of the luminaries who once met here. "Sometimes when you sit here -- quietly -- you can see something out of the corner of your eye. There's a certain joy in here that's come back to life."

At once idiosyncratic and in the tradition, the vibe in the house aptly encapsulates the spirit of Cary's music, an eclectic portfolio that is grounded in jazz but overflows into hip-hop, soul, house, Indian music, spoken poetry, and much else depending on which of his various projects and musical accomplices he's dealing with.

One of Cary's working groups for the last five years has been the Focus Trio, an acoustic, straight-ahead collaboration with two San Francisco-based musicians, bassist David Ewell and drummer and percussionist Sameer Gupta . On Tuesday Cary brings this group to Scullers, in somewhat belated support of last summer's "Focus," the trio's debut release.

"Focus" is one of those criminally under-the-radar jazz records. It finds Cary in a rarefied entente with Gupta and Ewell, who are steeped in both jazz and the music of their heritage, respectively Indian and Chinese. Gupta switches between drum set and tablas. Cary's compositions meld the influences in elegant, intuitive fashion, with the complex rhythms and patient development of raga, yet the unabashed lyricism of fine R&B.

"It's a very dynamic record rhythmically," Cary says. "I'm dealing with a lot of different odd-meter phrasings, I've got some songs in 7, in 5, and some different rhythms layered, a lot of polyrhythm. But the melodies are beautiful, man."

The boundary-pushing musician acclaimed by his peers yet little known to the public is a jazz archetype: It may be a tiresome cliche, but it's also a frustrating reality. Cary, who recently turned 40, fits the bill. His credentials include stints with Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, and Roy Hargrove, and with young bloods junior to him but also better known, such as vibraphonist Stefon Harris.

Cary takes this situation with self-esteem intact. "Even though I am a top-shelf item, I'm not acknowledged as that," he says. "But I don't necessarily like people talking about the fact that I'm not talked about. I don't want them to feel, 'Oh, poor Marc.' Because I'm doing what I gotta do."

Taking his lumps, in fact, is a Cary specialty. It's not exactly that life dealt him lemons -- he grew up in a musical family, with a great-grandmother, Mae York Smith, who played piano for silent movies and offered him guidance until she died at 103 -- but he is still the product of some remarkable tough-love experiences.

One of these came at age 15, when he was, as he puts it, "a wild kid" growing up in Washington, D.C., immersed in go-go, the local pop music, and behaving badly. His parents placed him in a 12-step program where he encountered people with daunting problems, but also remarkable abilities.

"There were people coming off the street with open abscesses on their arms, 20-year veterans of cocaine and heroin addiction, and they were brilliant people but they were killing themselves," he says. "And I realized, I came here to learn who I was."

One man, he said, became his mentor. He was a musician who could take apart a Fender Rhodes and reassemble it perfectly. Cary once witnessed the man listen to the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and write down the score as it was playing.

"He saw my talent and he encouraged me," Cary says. "I hung around him the whole year I was in the program. And I emerged from there with the ability to audition for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. It was full steam ahead from there. Things just emerged and people embraced me."

He credits Calvin Jones, a famed D.C. bandleader who drilled him like an obstreperous football coach; saxophonist Antoine Roney, who put him up when he came to New York, 21 and broke, and kicked him out of the house every morning; veteran drummer Art Taylor, who brought him into his band after an unexpected audition.

Now an uptown jazz lifer himself, Cary could have succumbed to nostalgia or neotraditionalism. Instead, he says, the opposite happened.

"Once I got so involved with the jazz scene to the extent that was the only thing I was doing, I started to feel funny," he says. "I realized that I write pop songs, I write R&B, that's where my head is. Those are the rhythms that I remember and that I feel. I started to incorporate that sound with what I learned by going head first into the jazz idiom. That gave me my identity."

In a sense, it also gave Cary his freedom -- to explore genres and work across creative boundaries, but also to continue to make jazz like "Focus," pure without purism, obviating jazz distinctions that are sclerotic and premature.

"Jazz is such a new music, and it's still in its development process," he says. "A lot of the development seems to have already happened in most people's minds, but I see so much more, so many more possibilities."