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Bad Bunny Leads 2022 Latin Grammy Nominations With 10
Rosalía has eight nods, while Jorge Drexler and Christina Aguilera have seven each for the awards, which will be held on Nov. 17 in Las Vegas.Bad Bunny, the chart-topping Puerto Rican star, dominates the nominations for the 23rd annual Latin Grammy Awards, leading stars from across the spectrum of Latin music, like Shakira, Rosalía, Carlos Vives and Jorge Drexler.Bad Bunny, whose “Un Verano Sin Ti” is an international blockbuster — and the biggest LP of the year in the United States — has a total of 10 nods in seven categories, including album of the year, according to an announcement on Tuesday by the Latin Recording Academy, which has been presenting the awards since 2000. The Mexican songwriter and producer Edgar Barrera has nine, and both Rosalía, the genre-blending Spanish performer, and the Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro follow with eight.Artists with seven nominations include Drexler, the doctor-turned-songwriter from Uruguay who first came to international attention in 2004 when he won an Academy Award for a song from the film “The Motorcycle Diaries,” and Christina Aguilera, the American pop diva behind hits like “Genie in a Bottle” and “Beautiful,” who released a Spanish-language album, “Aguilera,” this year.Camilo, a playful Colombian pop singer with a handlebar mustache, whose recent music has been documenting his domestic life, has six nods, as does Carlos Vives, a veteran singer-songwriter from Colombia with 15 Latin Grammys already.This year’s Latin Grammys will honor music released from June 1, 2021, to May 31, 2022. To be considered, songs must be new and contain lyrics in Spanish, Portuguese “or Indigenous dialects of our region, regardless of where such product was recorded or released,” according to a statement from the academy.In addition to album of the year, Bad Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — is nominated in the record of the year category for “Ojitos Lindos,” featuring the Colombian electronic duo Bomba Estéreo. “Un Verano” is also up for urban music album, and Bad Bunny’s other nods reflect his prolific work over the last year, solo and in collaboration.Bad Bunny competes against himself in the urban fusion/performance category (with “Tití Me Preguntó” from “Un Verano,” as well as “Volví,” a track with the New York bachata band Aventura); in reggaeton performance (two non-album tracks, “Lo Siento BB:/” with Tainy and Julieta Venegas, and “Yonaguni”); and in best urban song (“Tití Me Preguntó” and “Lo Siento”). Another non-album track, “De Museo,” is up for rap/hip-hop song.One surprise this year: a shutout for “Encanto,” the animated Disney film that came out in late 2021. Its songs, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer behind “Hamilton,” draw from Latin styles including salsa and Colombian folk music, and tracks like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” became ubiquitous hits. The soundtrack was eligible for awards, and was submitted for consideration, according to the academy, but it failed to get any nominations.In addition to “Un Verano,” the album of the year field includes “Aguilera”; Rosalía’s “Motomami”; Drexler’s “Tinta y Tiempo”; Bomba Estéreo’s “Deja”; Marc Anthony’s “Pa’lla Voy”; Alejandro Sanz’s “Sanz”; Fonseca’s “Viajante”; Sebastián Yatra’s “Dharma”; and Elsa y Elmar’s “Ya No Somos los Mismos.”Also up for record of the year are “Pa Mis Muchachas” by Aguilera, Becky G and Nicki Nicole, featuring Nathy Peluso; Rosalía’s “La Fama,” featuring the Weeknd; Anitta’s “Envolver”; Camilo’s “Pegao”; “Te Felicito” by Shakira and Alejandro; Pablo Alborán’s “Castillos de Arena”; Karol G’s “Provenza”; “Baloncito Viejo” by Vives and Camilo; Drexler’s “Tocarte,” with C. Tangana; Juan Luis Guerra’s “Vale la Pena”; and the title track of Anthony’s “Pa’lla Voy.”“Tocarte,” “Provenza,” “Pa Mis Muchachas” and “Baloncito Viejo” are also up for song of the year, a songwriter’s award. The other nominees in that category include Rosalía’s “Hentai”; “A Veces Bien y a Veces Mal,” as performed by Ricky Martin and Reik; “Agua,” performed by Daddy Yankee, Alejandro and Nile Rodgers; Mon Laferte’s “Algo Es Mejor”; Fonseca’s “Besos en la Frente”; Carla Morrison’s “Encontrarme”; Yatra’s “Tacones Rojos”; and “Índigo,” as performed by Camilo and Evaluna Montaner.The nominees for best new artist are Angela Álvarez, Sofía Campos, Cande y Paulo, Clarissa, Silvana Estrada, Pol Granch, Nabález, Tiare, Vale, Yahritza y Su Esencia and Nicole Zignago.Tainy, who worked on both Rosalía and Bad Bunny’s albums, is competing for producer of the year against Barrera (Camilo, Maluma), Eduardo Cabra (Elsa y Elmar, Mima), Nico Cotton (Conociendo Rusia, Elsa y Elmar) and Julio Reyes Copello (Fonseca, Cami & Art House).The awards are voted on by members of the Latin Recording Academy, which include artists, songwriters, producers and other music creators in all genres. The ceremony will be held on Nov. 17 in Las Vegas.A complete list of nominees in all 53 categories is here. More
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Romeo Santos and Justin Timberlake’s Team-Up, and 10 More New Songs
Hear tracks by Shygirl, Ava Max, Horse Lords and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Romeo Santos and Justin Timberlake, ‘Sin Fin’Ever the canny collaborator, Justin Timberlake joins Romeo Santos — formerly of the Dominican-rooted boy band Aventura, now a stadium act on his own — to pump up a typically imploring bachata. Both of them are sleek high tenors who can always sound like they’re eager for romance; both also know what it’s like to sing answered by ecstatic screams. “Sin Fin” (“Endless”) is a bilingual pop promise with a stalking undercurrent. Timberlake sings, “Can’t escape my love ’cause it’s yours/Even if you walk out the door it’ll chase you down.” It opens with cathedral-choir harmonies, then buttresses the bongos and syncopated guitar of bachata with pop’s synthesizers and hip-hop’s hype-man cheers. Melding bachata and power ballad, it still begs for love with high drama. JON PARELESAva Max, ‘Million Dollar Baby’Ava Max is partying like it’s 2000 and 2004 on the thumping “Million Dollar Baby,” a sleek, calisthenic pop song that name-checks Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture winner and interpolates “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” LeAnn Rimes’ once-inescapable “Coyote Ugly” theme song. (Who said Y2K nostalgia was dead!) While Max still hasn’t quite carved out a distinct persona in the pop sphere, she’s proven herself to be a satisfying practitioner of aughts-pop pastiche — there’s even a stuttering echo of “Bad Romance” on the bridge. “She broke out of her chains,” Max sings of her titular, diamond-encrusted heroine, “Turned the fire into rain.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex Lahey, ‘Congratulations’On the booming power-pop track “Congratulations,” the Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lahey attempts to process the news that an ex is getting married: “Congratulations,” she sings, dripping with sarcasm, “so happy for your perfect life.” There’s pathos in her voice during the verses — “If I don’t care then why do I still think about you all the time?” — but the chorus is volcanic and cathartic, as Lahey’s colossal guitar tones swell like a sudden surge of inner strength. ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Nike’“Peri-peri, too hot to handle,” the London-based Shygirl boasts with cool confidence on “Nike,” the latest single from her forthcoming debut album, “Nymph.” While the previous songs she’s released from the record have been glitchy and ethereal — think hyperpop crossed with “Visions”-era Grimes — “Nike” is all woozy low-end and spotlit swagger. “He tell me, ‘Nike, just do it,” Shygirl intones on the track (which was produced by the British electronic artist Mura Masa), her delivery full of winking, sensual charisma. ZOLADZHorse Lords, ‘Mess Mend’The instrumental “Mess Mend,” by the Baltimore band Horse Lords, starts out skewed — with chords from a slightly detuned piano hitting unevenly on offbeats — and gets nuttier from there, with a tricky 7/4 meter, a guitar melody that suggests a non-Euclidean hoedown and a gradual devolution into a funky electronic drone, not to mention a final twist. It’s a brainy lark. PARELESVDA, ‘Môgô Kélé’VDA — short for Voix des Anges — is a vocal duo from Ivory Coast that has become a consistent hitmaker in the Ivorian pop style called zouglou, which floats suavely sustained vocals over brisk polyrhythms and glossy synthesizers: airborne tracks that often hold sociopolitical messages. Above the speedy six-beat rhythms of “Môgô Kélé” — a hyperactive mesh of drums, marimbas, flutes and call-and-response vocals — VOA sings about easing tensions that have risen lately between Mali and Ivory Coast, citing their longstanding historical ties. The video shows jailed soldiers; it also gives the VDA a backdrop of both countries’ flags and words like “la paix,” “fraternité” and “union,” while the music sparkles and bounds ahead. PARELESDanielle Ponder, ‘Only the Lonely’“Love is lost and I must walk away,” Danielle Ponder sings, with mournful resolution, in “Only the Lonely,” a ballad that fights back any regrets with the certainty that “You don’t love me, you just lonely.” As the track rises from hollow keyboard tones to grand orchestral melancholy, Ponder’s voice opens up to reveal its bluesy power, with ghosts of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. By the end she finds herself, once again, nearly alone. PARELESCarm featuring Edie Brickell, ‘More and More’CJ Camerieri, who records as Carm, plays brass instruments in yMusic, a contemporary chamber ensemble he co-founded; he has also backed Bon Iver and Paul Simon. In his own music, he often multitracks his trumpet and French horn into a supportive brass choir, as he does in “More and More,” a collaboration with Edie Brickell as a topliner. She sings about love, almost diffidently, amid sustained swells of brasses and strings. an electronic drumbeat and some echoing trumpet calls raise tensions, only to dissolve them in the undulating warmth of Carm’s orchestrations. PARELESWild Pink featuring Julien Baker, ‘Hold My Hand’John Ross, who leads Wild Pink, went through extensive cancer treatment between the band’s 2021 debut album and its coming one, “ILYSM.” He has explained that “Hold My Hand” came from a moment of “lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under.” As he whisper-sings to ask, “Will you be there when I come around,” joined by Julien Baker sounding delicate and fond, the band rolls through four rising chords again and again, promising nothing but reassurance. PARELESDawn Richard and Spencer Zahn, ‘Vantablack’The ever-evolving, impossible-to-pigeonhole Dawn Richard once again introduces a new side of herself on the first movement of “Pigments,” an upcoming collaborative album she made with the experimentalist Spencer Zahn. Each track on the album is named for a specific hue: “Coral,” “Sandstone,” “Indigo,” and “Vantablack” make up “Movement 1,” which the pair released in full this week. The culmination “Vantablack” is a tranquil, abstract, and utterly gorgeous contemporary classical soundscape populated by lilting clarinet, Zahn’s airy bass playing, and above it all Richard’s fluttering vocals, which profess a deep and radical comfort in her own skin. ZOLADZSteve Lehman and Sélébéyone, ‘Poesie I’In the hip-hop-jazz-avant-electroacoustic group Sélébéyone — which means “intersection” in the West African language Wolof — the saxophonist, composer and producer Steve Lehman collaborates with rappers from New York City (HPrizm from the Antipop Consortium) and Dakar (Gaston Bandimic), a saxophonist from Paris (Maciek Lasserre) and a drummer based in Brooklyn (Damion Reid). The group’s second album, “Xaybu: the Unseen,” pushes its previous ambitions further. “Poesie I” knocks its rhythms around with piano clusters, drumming that keeps moving the downbeat, hopscotching saxophone lines and a rap from HPrizm that keeps switching up its flow: “These words don’t fit so I’m forcing ‘em in/smashing the edges,” he declares. PARELES More
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Romeo Santos Reveals Another Volume of Boundary-Crossing Bachata
“Fórmula Vol. 3” soars when it expands the scope of the genre and the singer’s own approaches to its trademarks, but falls flat when it relies on backward-looking tropes.Ever since he left the Bronx boy band Aventura a decade ago to go solo, the bachata luminary Romeo Santos has been teaching a graduate seminar in melodrama. He is a disciplined thespian, especially across his “Fórmula” series, a collection of albums driven by audacious, genre-crossing collaborations and intrepid experiments with pop, hip-hop and reggaeton.Santos, 41, has an unwavering devotion to bachata — a Dominican genre with Black and working-class origins known for its bedrock of amargue, a peerless brand of bleeding-heart bitterness. Still, he has never really been a traditionalist. (His 2019 album, “Utopía,” was a rare exception, an LP that genuflected to and recruited genre-defining forebears like Raulín Rodriguez and Anthony Santos.)Instead, he has consistently sought out new ways of refreshing bachata’s templates while developing some of his own trademarks — signature catchphrases, caustic disses and salacious onstage antics. He has brought in English lyrics and hints of R&B, and ventured into the world of reggaeton, most memorably alongside Don Omar (“Ella y Yo” from 2005) and Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam (“Bella y Sensual” from 2017). Years before the music industry became obsessed with Anglo pop artists singing in Spanish, he had A-list figures from the world of hip-hop and R&B appearing on his albums, including Usher, Nicki Minaj and Drake. At a moment when other high-profile stars are experimenting with bachata (see Rosalía and the Weeknd on “La Fama,” as well as the intro to Bad Bunny’s “Tití Me Preguntó), it feels even more urgent to recognize that Santos saw its potential for global popularity and creative reimagining all along.On “Fórmula Vol. 3,” the latest, 21-track installment of the series and his fifth solo album overall, Santos includes unexpected team-ups with Justin Timberlake and the regional Mexican star Christian Nodal. He also doubles down on the theatrics, submerging listeners further into his acerbic torch songs about cruel betrayal, bitter revenge and unrequited love, sometimes with mixed success.Of the collaborations, “El Pañuelo” with the Spanish star Rosalía is an immediate standout: Her melismatic vocal runs flutter into focus in the intro, and in the chorus, a call-and-response lament between the two singers recalls the 2002 hit “Te Quiero Igual Que Ayer” by Monchy y Alexandra. The misty-eyed merengue “15,550 Noches,” which unites the genre stalwarts Toño Rosario, Rubby Pérez and Fernandito Villalona, is nostalgic, doleful and explosive all at once. And on the booming Christian Nodal feature “Me Extraño,” a song about returning to yourself after being wronged by a paramour, Santos finds a perfect balance between the thematic commonalities of mariachi and bachata.His dramatic flourishes are most palpable when he makes full use of cohesive metaphors and potent storytelling as on “Ciudadana,” a diaspora tale about a romance separated by borders, complete with aerial sound effects, like a flight attendant announcing a landing. Santos’s yearning, crisp falsetto is most effective in these contexts: On the corrosive opener “Bebo,” an alcohol-soaked send-off to a duplicitous lover, his voice trembles with despair, and he feigns intoxication in a spoken outro. It’s a vocal performance that magnifies the best parts of bachata’s theatrical core.But Santos missteps when he falls into religious and gendered tropes. On “Nirvana,” a ballad written as a monologue to God, he attempts to reconcile the existence of social and political injustice with God’s assumed benevolence. It descends into low-level political signaling, with an exculpatory name-drop of the Dominican dembow star Tokischa and the Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA, who have been blamed for promoting crime and drug use.Both “La Última Vez” and “Suegra” reproduce antediluvian gender stereotypes. “Suegra” is the bigger disappointment, though it is expertly produced and arranged by Iván “MateTraxx” Chévere, Martires De León and Santos. The nylon-string guitar-picking complements his high-pitched tenor as Santos sings about the clichéd image of an overbearing mother-in-law. But then his lyrics turn violent, as he describes poisoning her coffee and pushing her body off the side of a cliff in a car (the song even ends with a car crashing sound effect). In a country that currently has the second highest rate of femicide in Latin America, the gag doesn’t land as a lighthearted farce; it just feels irresponsible and out-of-touch.“Sin Fin,” a collaboration with Timberlake, is perhaps the most paradigmatic song on an album rooted in both the past and future. Its syrupy celebration of endless love sometimes verges on sappy idolatry, but it also maximizes Timberlake and Santos’s talent for pop sentimentality. The track is a full-circle moment for Santos: On Aventura’s second album, the band transformed ’N Sync’s “Gone” into a bilingual bachata requiem. Here he once again finds common ground between two worlds once thought irreconcilable, demonstrating how bachata can stretch beyond both its real and imagined borders.Romeo Santos“Fórmula Vol. 3”(Sony Latin) More
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A Music Career Is a Risky Bet. In ‘Mija,’ the Stakes Are Even Higher.
A new documentary follows Doris Anahi Muñoz, the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, as she balances the needs of her family with artistic dreams.As a middle schooler with big dreams living in San Bernardino, Calif., Doris Anahi Muñoz made her bedroom walls a canvas. She painted her hands on the back of her door, with the words, “These are the hands of Doris Anahi Muñoz, and they’re going to touch the hearts of millions.”As the main subject of the Disney original documentary “Mija,” Muñoz, an artist manager-turned-musician, aims for her story to do just that: connect with children of immigrant families who are yearning to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, yet who may feel alone or guilty about their desires when their households face urgent daily struggles.The film’s director, Isabel Castro, follows Muñoz as she works to catapult the careers of Latin musicians including Cuco and Jacks Haupt while helping her undocumented Mexican family navigate the green-card system.“A lot of us, we carry the weight of our families, and I needed a film like this growing up,” Muñoz said in a recent video interview from Boyle Heights, Calif., where wooden bookshelves outlined with cascading foliage and porcelain vases filled the room. “So, I’m just glad that being in this seat as a protagonist allows other people to see themselves.”Muñoz, the only of her parents’ three children who was born in the United States, grew up playing saxophone and violin in a family of Evangelicals who hoped she would use her talents to become a worship leader. During the summer after her sophomore year of college, Ed Sheeran, with a nod, invited her onstage to sing along to his hit single “Lego House” at a radio event, reigniting her passion for music.She wrote songs and performed live for a while, but she realized that she was uncomfortable in the spotlight and would rather work behind the scenes. Her first major project on her own was managing Cuco, a bedroom-pop artist who broke out by staying true to his Mexican American heritage and making music for Latino kids who felt unseen.Muñoz and the musician Jacks Haupt in a scene from “Mija.”DisneyThe film traces Muñoz’s early work with Cuco as she orchestrates his sold-out concerts and helps him land a seven-figure record deal, a success that helped fund her parents’ application to become permanent residents of the U.S.When the pandemic hits and (spoiler alert!) Muñoz must cope with the pressure of splitting with Cuco, she rediscovers her purpose in Jacks Haupt, an indie singer-songwriter from Dallas who, like many young artists, has struggled to find a wider audience.Haupt, 22, grew up listening to Joe Bataan’s “Mujer Mía” and other Latin soul classics in her Chicano household, and also took inspiration from Amy Winehouse, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin. Haupt’s bilingual music has since pivoted to a more electronic, trip-hop sound, and she often sings about heartbreak and mental health.Haupt calls music her diary, and it has been a support system for her over the years. But at the beginning of her musical career, she said she lacked the support of her family. “Working in the arts as a photographer, videographer, immigrant, POC parents are more like, ‘This isn’t making money,’” Haupt said in a video interview from Dallas.Building a career in the arts can take money and time — resources that are in short supply for immigrant families facing challenges like navigating the path to citizenship and finding financial footing. The film documents Muñoz’s tight-knit bond with her family: expressing gratitude during a Thanksgiving meal, taking trips to visit her brother, who was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, and the ongoing battle for her parents’ green cards.“For those who feel alone in their process, I want this film to hold them,” Muñoz said. “I had big dreams about my family reuniting and coming together and hopefully telling their story one day as a kid.”Haupt called music her diary.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe “Mija” director Castro’s credits include the documentary shorts “USA v Scott,” about an American geographer facing prison time for aiding migrants in Arizona, and “Darlin,” a New York Times op-doc about a Honduran mother’s fight to reunite with her son after they were divided by the U.S. border detention policy. Castro said she was drawn to Muñoz and Haupt’s stories as an indie music lover who recognized a lack of representation for Latin artists in that world.“I just became really interested in the ways that Doris, Cuco and the entire community were really trying to figure out a place for themselves in this exact musical space that I had grown up listening to,” Castro said.The film shifts from Haupt’s dreamy onstage performances and Los Angeles recording sessions to a heated phone conversation with her mother about what is traditionally considered profitable work. Castro said the conversation was reminiscent of ones she had held with her own mother, in moments when she felt guilty for not living up to expectations.“My ambition and my career is rooted in a sense of responsibility for the sacrifices that my parents made for me,” she said.“I hope people, especially Latinx viewers and viewers of color, will come away from the film feeling a sense of hope,” Castro added, “feeling a sense of security that pursuing creative careers is a worthwhile ambition, and that it can pay off with hard work and tenacity.”In the time since “Mija” was filmed, Muñoz has closed her management company and has begun releasing her own music under her artist name, Doris Anahí. Last week, she performed at the film’s premiere in Central Park, as did Haupt. (The film opened in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Aug. 5, and will come to Disney+ on Sept. 16.)“Our parents come from a generation of survival,” Muñoz said, “and we are a lucky generation that gets to think about thriving rather than surviving.” More
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The Meridian Brothers’ Mastermind Is Electrifying Roots Salsa
Eblis Álvarez’s albums are “collaborations” with fictional bands. His latest, with the imaginary El Grupo Renacimiento, is a psychedelic fever dream and a critique of technology’s encroachment.One day Artemio Morelia, a singer and maracas player for an obscure Colombian salsa band called Grupo Renacimiento, awoke and found himself transformed into a robot. Haunted by visions of HAL 9000, he was suddenly acutely aware of the coldness and the distractions of a constantly plugged-in world. “Memory is dying,” he sings on his band’s new single, “Metamorfosis.” “They’ve already connected the internet to my lung/to my heart.”Or at least that’s what Eblis Álvarez, an academy-trained Colombian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, wants you to believe with the release of his new album, “Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento,” out Friday. Meridian Brothers is a moniker Álvarez uses on many of his albums — “collaborations” with fictional bands, in this case Grupo Renacimiento. Although he plays all the instruments and handles all the vocals on the album, he also performs live with a regular Meridian Brothers Band that features four of his friends from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá.For Álvarez, “Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento,” the first release on the renowned Ansonia Records in 30 years, is a Latin American novel disguised as a “B-salsa” album — his term for forgotten, B-list salsa performers, or salseros, like Orquesta Kool, who recorded under “precarious conditions.” It’s at once a psychedelic fever dream, a deep dive into salsa’s past, a critique of society’s surrender to technology, and a new musical encounter between Colombia’s sophisticated capital of Bogotá and its rustic Caribbean coast.“Grupo Renacimiento is like writing a book about the rebirth of a group of artists who fall into vice and re-emerge because of their Christian faith. It’s just a crónica about a classic salsa story, like the story of Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz,” Álvarez said in a video interview last month, referring to the classic 1970s New York salsa combo. “This is a record that tries to emulate the ’70s sound of the golden age of salsa dura,” or hardcore salsa.Invoking the crónica, a Latin American literary genre that combines journalism and fiction — and making a self-produced “mockumentary” that describes his encounter with Grupo Renacimiento in a Colombian church — Alvarez has injected the project with a playfully surreal flavor. According to the mockumentary, the group was formed in a small town called Las Tinas in the state of Magdalena, just a couple of hours down the road from Aracataca, which the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez reimagined as the fictional town of Macondo.Álvarez can come off like a pedantic ethnomusicologist until he veers off into theories about creating a 3-D space to rescue humans from a 2-D world of information technology, and his search for the salsa groove. Animatedly holding forth from his office in Bogotá, his long scraggly hair was part ’70s rocker and part medieval jester, and his singsong accent — emblematic of a uniquely Colombian charm — was both lilting and dead serious.Álvarez, 45, has released more than 25 albums since 2005, some as Meridian Brothers and others under other names, all of which have poked, investigated and tried to tease out a sense of authenticity in Colombian music. Some, like “Paz en la Tierra” in 2021, focus on the traditional vallenato genre, a storytelling folk music popularized by Carlos Vives in the 1990s, while others fall into the category Álvarez calls “neo-tropical,” excavating rhythms like champeta, a Colombia analog to Caribbean dembow.“I’m trying to describe a futuristic past,” Álvarez said. “It’s not a futurism that owes machines or technology, it’s an acoustic future.”Juan Jose Ortiz Arenas for The New York TimesHis effort is part of a decades-long Bogotá-based nation-building mission to mine the music of coastal areas, pioneered by artists like Ivan Benavides, once a Carlos Vives bandmember; Richard Blair, a British expatriate who founded his group Sidestepper with Bogotá-based musicians; and Bomba Estéreo, whose keyboardist and programmer Simón Mejía recently premiered “El Duende,” a short documentary about an African-descended family that makes marimbas and lives on Colombia’s Pacific Coast.“Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento” has a stripped-down aesthetic, which is the essence of salsa itself — an uptown, urban genre born after the decline and fall of the flashy big-band Palladium Mambo era, much like punk arose in the wake of grandiloquent British progressive arena rock. Álvarez focuses most of his attention on a dubby, echoing psychedelic electric guitar and tinny keyboards, supplemented by a synched-in rhythm section of timbales and congas. You can hear hints of West African highlife and Congo-derived soukous, a hybrid of Cuban rumba.With his skanking guitar marking time at the center of the riffs, Álvarez’s lyrics comment on police brutality (“La Policía”), the purity of roots salsa (“Poema del Salsero Resentido”) and concern over nuclear weapons (“Bomba Atómica”). “Descarga Profética,” which imagines a Bogotá salsa jam as an ancient Greek algorithm with African influences, dizzily riffs on the 1930s Cuban classic “El Manisero.”In the mockumentary, Artemio Morelia says that his bandmates’ interests ranged from vallenato to Italian ballads, but that he felt compelled to play the kind of lo-fi, roots salsa practiced by the ’60s Venezuelan group Federico y su Combo (who released a song called “Llegó la Salsa,” one of the first to mention the term, in 1967). He also cites Ray Pérez, the legendary Afro-Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Cortijo, and most importantly, Brooklyn’s Lebrón Brothers, a group central to the creation of salsa that evolved from early experiments with English-language, Cuban-derived boogaloo and hit its stride with “Salsa y Control” in 1969, yet saw little commercial success.“I identify with the rejection that the Lebrón Brothers experienced in their time,” Álvarez said. “I was attracted to their way of playing, the aggressiveness, but also their slowness, their introverted-ness.”The album’s final track is a cover of a Puerto Rican jíbaro classic, “La Mujer Sin Corazón,” by La Calandria, a.k.a. Ernestina Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico and died in the Bronx in 1994. Álvarez chose the track to honor Ansonia Records’s vast catalog, one that still resonates strongly for fans of Ramito (Florencio Morales Ramos, known as the king of jíbaro, or Puerto Rican country music); Johnny Rodríguez’s bolero trios; Mon Rivera’s bomba and plena recordings; and Dominican merengueros like Dioris Valladares and Joseíto Mateo.The label, founded by Ralph Pérez, who moved from Puerto Rico to New York in 1920, was a family-run business with Pérez’s daughter ultimately teaming up with the music entrepreneur Herman Glass, and later his son, Gerard. “I was just fascinated how these musicians, most of whom could not read music, would make music that would touch people so much and make them get up and dance,” said the younger Glass, who grew up listening to Ramito and hanging out at the Teatro Puerto Rico on 138th Street in the Bronx’s Mott Haven.In 2019, the Glass family sold Ansonia Records to the former KCRW D.J. and film music supervisor (“Y tu Mamá También”) Liza Richardson. “We’ve digitized 5,000 songs about two-thirds of the way through, and we’ve released probably 20 percent of that for streaming,” Richardson said in an interview. “Ansonia is a time capsule that is just going to get better with age. There is so much beauty in it. Hopefully we can do a lot more new releases, but right now we think we can afford to do one new release a year.” At the suggestion of her longtime friend Camilo Lara (who records electronic music as Mexican Institute of Sound), she agreed to acquire Álvarez’s new Meridian Brothers project for Ansonia’s rebirth.In the spirit of Ansonia, Álvarez is hoping not only to recapture the treasured moments of the past, but to slow down humanity’s rush to embrace the artificiality of digital life. “I’m trying to describe a futuristic past,” he said. “It’s not a futurism that owes machines or technology, it’s an acoustic future. When Elvis Presley, in his first recordings with Sam Phillips, tried to create reverb in the studio, they didn’t have corporate technology. They worked with the creativity of the mind and heart.”The Meridian Brothers will perform at SummerStage Staten Island on Aug. 6; cityparksfoundation.org/summerstage. More
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The Bolero Is Timeless. Miguel Zenón Is Giving It a Jazzy Tinge.
The saxophonist and his longtime collaborator Luis Perdomo reimagined some of their favorite Latin American ballads for an album that made deep connections during the pandemic.On New Year’s Eve 2020, the saxophonist Miguel Zenón and his longtime collaborator, the pianist Luis Perdomo, took the stage at the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan to perform a makeshift duet concert that would be recorded for a live album. The set list included a collection of classic Latin American boleros they were fond of, reimagined through a jazz lens, much as giants like John Coltrane and Miles Davis did with the American songbook in the mid-20th century.“It was a live show, but there wasn’t anyone there,” Zenón, 45, said on a recent video chat, describing one of the biggest challenges for musicians during coronavirus shutdowns. “It’s weird because playing this music live has a lot to do with the energy you get from the room.”Feelings of loss and nostalgia permeate the bolero, a kind of ballad that incorporates romantic European lyricism with Afro-Cuban percussive elements. Boleros originated in Eastern Cuba and eventually spread to Mexico and the rest of Latin America, becoming standard material for an array of star vocalists. Onstage, Zenón and Perdomo rearranged classics made famous by Beny Moré, La Lupe and Sylvia Rexach, bringing out their universal musical language of passion and rhythm.“In a world where everything is so complex, boleros kind of bring you back to things that make you feel good and help you process things like love and heartbreak,” said Adrian Quesada, the Black Pumas guitarist and singer-songwriter and a fan of boleros.Zenón and Perdomo’s album, “El Arte del Bolero,” broke through to pandemic-weary listeners as an astonishingly intimate and stirring performance and picked up Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations. And now, a year after the LP’s release, Zenón is finally back before live audiences; he’ll perform with his quartet at Columbia’s Miller Theater on Saturday.Zenón, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient in 2008, has long had a tendency to shift between his grounding in traditional jazz and his roots in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the home of salsa, reggaeton, and still, bolero. After attending his hometown’s Escuela Libre de Música — his classmates included the reggaeton superstar Daddy Yankee, who was there to play trombone — Zenón arrived at Berklee School of Music in Boston with visions of bebop dancing in his head.“My main thing was I just wanted to play like Charlie Parker and Coltrane and Cannonball,” Zenón said of Julian Adderley. “But I quickly came to understand that I really didn’t know my music, the music of Puerto Rico. If I wanted to play something slow, instead of playing standards from the Great American Songbook, I’d rather go into my world, you know?”Zenón began to think of his rediscovery of his Puerto Rican and Latin American roots — a task of nostalgia-inducing methodological research — as a bridge to reconnect him to the island, like the longing for a lost homeland that fueled the Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Hernández to write his famous bolero, “Silencio,” while he was living in New York in 1932. Zenón covered “Silencio,” revived in 2000 by Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club, for his 2011 release “Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook.”Perdomo, 51, is in many ways Zenón’s perfect musical partner. He grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, listening to pianists like Oscar Peterson at first, then going through a salsa phase that had him emulating Eddie Palmieri and the Sonora Ponceña’s Papo Lucca. Perdomo decided to come to New York in the 1990s, and while he was studying at Manhattan School of Music with another Zenón collaborator, the bassist Hans Glawischnig, he met Zenón and quickly realized how talented he was.“I thought: This guy is amazing! Rhythmically, he was perfect,” Perdomo said in an interview. With Glawischnig and the drummer Adam Cruz, they formed a quartet that played regularly at the old East Village club C Note, not far from Slug’s Saloon and the Five Spot, where Lee Morgan and Eric Dolphy once held sway in the 1960s.For the New Year’s Eve concert, Zenón and Perdomo reworked their performance of Beny Moré’s classic “Cómo Fue,” which had become a signature live tune, playing it in D flat rather than E flat “because I was listening to a lot of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn at the time,” Zenón said. They performed “Este Hastío” (“This Weariness”), a song written by the Cuban pianist Meme Solís for the jazz-inspired singer Elena Burke, then covered as “Piensa en Mi” (“Think of Me”) on Ray Barretto’s 1979 salsa masterpiece “Ricanstruction.” They treated “La Vida es Un Sueño” (“Life Is a Dream”), perhaps the Cuban orchestra leader Arsenio Rodríguez’s most famous song, with a kind of poignant reverence, drawing from a previous cover by the Cuban jazz-fusion group Irakere.One of the most affecting songs on the album is “Qué te Pedí” (“What Did I Ask of You”), made famous by the Cuban singer La Lupe, who spent much of her life in New York. Beginning with a long, swirling Zenón solo, the song evokes the bitter sadness of a failed relationship as longingly as Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache.”“We played this with La Lupe in mind,” Zenón recalled. “It’s a kind of gritty, greasy version of bolero,” he said, and it seems more emotional, sadder, like the blues.Perdomo, whose brief excursion into the Cuban guajira style closes “Que te Pedi,” said he has been struck by the intersections he discovers when playing Latin American boleros through a jazz lens. “Everything comes from African music, but there are some elements that go between different roots. It’s like how flamenco singers sing — it sounds like when B.B. King sings the blues.”Re-engaging the deep feelings invested in boleros can have the effect of transforming sad memories into a kind of newfound hope and passion.Steven Molina Contreras for The New York TimesAlthough bolero was created in Cuba — drawing from rhythms that migrated from Haiti following its revolution — it has deep resonance in Mexico and much of South America. Maybe it’s about processing the sadness of migration, or an unspoken story about the wounds of colonization. My uncle’s brother, Fernando Álvarez, was the founder of one of Puerto Rico’s most famous trio-bolero groups, Trio Vegabajeño, which like Cuba’s Trio Matamoros and Mexico’s Trio Los Panchos used three harmonizing singers to popularize the genre in Puerto Rico, making the first recorded version of “En mi Viejo San Juan” in 1943.Some Latinos grew up with scratchy-record boleros from their elders, or retooled salsa versions, while others remember the emotive excesses of singers like Juan Gabriel and José José. Those vocalists’ over-the-top emotion, a style some call “corta-venas” (literally cut your veins) may be linked to young Latin Americans’ ongoing attraction to emo music (and Mexican youth’s particular obsession with the woe-is-me rock balladry of Morrissey).Re-engaging the deep feelings invested in boleros can have the effect of transforming sad memories into a kind of newfound hope and passion. And the genre continues to appeal to new generations. In June, Quesada of Black Pumas is releasing “Boleros Psicodélicos,” a mix of covers and original songs that try to capture the moment in the 1960s and 1970s when young Latin American musicians fused the bolero with psychedelic guitars and atmospheric electric organs.“I was driving with my father, and I heard a song called ‘Esclavo y Amo’ by a group called Los Paseteles Verdes and became obsessed,” Quesada, 45, said from his home in Austin. Working with the Puerto Rican singer ILe, who turned him on to the Argentine idol Sandro, the eclectic indie singer Gabriel Garzón Montano, the guitarist Marc Ribot and others, Quesada seems to have tapped into an emerging mood in Latin music.This year has also seen the release of an album of satirical boleros by Puerto Rico’s Los Rivera Destino, who became YouTube stars by landing Bad Bunny on their original bolero “Flor.”Zenón remembered growing up listening to the Sunday morning bolero shows on San Juan radio and his mother’s obsession with Sylvia Rexach, whose “Alma Adentro” is a centerpiece of “El Arte del Bolero.”“Even though it was from before our time,” he said, “it’s still here, in our time.”Miguel Zenón will be playing with Luis Perdomo on piano, Hans Glawischnig on bass and Henry Cole on drums at Columbia’s Miller Theater on Saturday; millertheatre.com. More
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José Luis Cortés, Trailblazing Cuban Bandleader, Dies at 70
He was trained in the classics and jazz, but he helped popularize a new, danceable genre known as timba.José Luis Cortés, a Cuban musician who with his popular band, NG La Banda, helped establish the lively genre of music known as timba and spread the sound with well-regarded albums and rollicking shows that had concertgoers dancing in the arenas and afterward in the streets, died on April 18 in Havana. He was 70.The Instituto Cubano de la Música posted news of his death on its Facebook page and said the cause was “a hemorrhagic encephalic accident.” The post called him “one of the most important figures in contemporary Cuban music.”Mr. Cortés, a flutist who graduated from the National School of Art, was an admired figure in Cuban music for decades, although he had recently been the subject of abuse allegations by a former vocalist with his band. He brought a combination of serious musicianship and showmanship to the street music of Cuba when he founded NG La Banda in 1988. He had earlier played in Los Van Van, the famed dance band of Juan Formell, and Irakere, the pianist Chucho Valdés’s genre-straddling group of virtuoso players.He drew on those influences as the leader of NG La Banda, a large ensemble partial to danceable songs.“The best way to understand his style is that he brought to dance music the complexity of big-band jazz,” Raul A. Fernandez, emeritus professor of Chicano and Latin studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of books including “From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz” (2006), said by email.The “NG” stood for Nueva Generación, and the band aimed for a young audience, with driving percussion, streetwise lyrics and a brass section known as “los metales del terror.”“There’s raw power in those terrifying horns, and in the forceful, nasal singing, but sophistication in the arrangements and rhythmic adventurousness,” The Miami Herald wrote in 1992, assessing “En La Calle” (“On the Street”), an album that solidified the group’s reputation. “Dense, driving, dance party music.”NG La Banda’s 1992 album “En La Calle” (“On the Street”) solidified the group’s reputation.That album included “La Expresiva,” a song that, as Professor Fernandez put it, “paid homage to the barrios of Havana,” which is where the band’s music particularly resonated. That sound was first called salsa cubana but soon had its own name, timba. Professor Fernandez and Anita Casavantes Bradford described the music in an academic paper, “Cuba’s Second Golden Age of Popular Music, 1989-2005.”“Fast, loud, and characterized by its multiple overlapping rhythms and deep booming bass lines,” they wrote, “timba was also recognizable for its insistent percussion and dense, rushing-note horn patterns.”It is, they added, “a highly technical style of music, and holding one’s own in a timba orquesta, especially in the horns, or ‘metales,’ section, remains an accomplishment boasted by only the most rigorously trained and disciplined musicians.”The sound Mr. Cortés and his players perfected, the Spanish-language Florida newspaper El Nuevo Herald wrote in 1994, “has breathed new life into dance music, stimulating the listener’s senses while challenging those who venture onto the dance floor.”José Luis Cortés was born on Oct. 5, 1951, in Villa Clara, Cuba. His musical education, he said, emphasized classical and jazz.“You couldn’t play popular Cuban music in school,” he said in a 1998 interview with The Miami Herald.He spent the 1970s in Los Van Van, which was breaking new ground by incorporating elements of funk and rock into mainstream Cuban dance music. For much of the 1980s he was in Irakere, an influential group whose aim was, as Mr. Valdés once put it, “bringing together jazz and the ancestral forms.”Mr. Cortés’s nickname was El Tosco, “the Rough One.” Certainly the lyrics in NG La Banda’s songs could be rough, with vulgarity and what some listeners construed as misogyny. He defended those choices.“Popular music comes from the people,” he told The Observer of Britain in 1993. “I test my songs in the streets; if they like it, it’s a hit.”He also defended timba as a genre.“The intellectuals say that timba is crap,” he told The Miami Herald in 1998. “But this is a racist concept. Cuban popular music has always been the music of the people, of the poor barrios, where there are very few whites.”Some scholars linked the emergence of timba to the difficult economic times Cuba experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time often referred to as the “special period.” The genre’s energy and blunt lyrics, they suggested, spoke to a generation that came of age during the hardships of the 1990s.The group was popular enough that when it made its New York debut, in 1997, it played Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.“When the band did what it does best,” Peter Watrous wrote in a review in The New York Times, “playing long, structurally complicated tunes that mixed funk, stop-time parts, drum sections and Afro-Cuban dance music, all with wild choreography, the audience was up on its feet and screaming.”Mr. Cortés’s career, though, ended under a cloud. In 2019 Dianelys Alfonso, who had been a singer in the band and had had a romantic relationship with him for a time, said he had repeatedly assaulted her. That year The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cortés had not responded to the accusations, but that Ms. Alfonso had received both widespread support for coming forward and abusive messages from Mr. Cortés’s admirers.Information on Mr. Cortés’s survivors was not immediately available. More
