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      The Meridian Brothers’ Mastermind Is Electrifying Roots Salsa

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      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.

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      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

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      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

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      Tokischa, la nueva rebelde de la música latina

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      SANTO DOMINGO, República Dominicana — Era una tarde de mediados de marzo, aquí en la capital, y una multitud de cientos de asistentes al festival vestidos con alas de hada, pedrería y pintura facial de arcoíris comenzó a corear. “¡Po-po-la!”, gritaban, empleando la jerga local para referirse a la vagina. La escena parecía la invocación al líder de un culto, y la incendiaria dominicana Tokischa, una rapera conocida por sus letras impúdicas y sus colaboraciones de alto nivel, salió al escenario.Durante la siguiente hora, la artista de 26 años habló de su bisexualidad, de los placeres carnales y de las drogas, todo acompañado de un ritmo estridente de dembow y trap. Esa noche llovía en el festival de la Isla de la Luz, el tipo de diluvio caribeño que llega en un abrir y cerrar de ojos. “¡Ay, pero yo me quiero mojar con ustedes!”, gritó, al salir de debajo del toldo del escenario y adentrarse en la multitud. Se desabrochó la blusa color azul, dejando al descubierto un sujetador cónico de satén color rosa intenso, y el público se volvió loco.El suelo, antes cubierto de hierba, ahora era una pista de obstáculos con charcos de lodo. Al parecer a nadie le importaba. Los admiradores coreaban cada palabra, con voces roncas. Una mujer se subió a una valla metálica y perreó por encima de la multitud. Cuando terminó su actuación, Tokischa, radiante, se sacó la ropa interior de debajo de la minifalda y se la lanzó a una mujer del público.Este es un pequeño ejemplo de la provocación que define a Tokischa Altagracia Peralta. Sus audaces letras, que se deleitan con la rebelión lingüística del argot dominicano y abrazan la euforia del sexo son, en su mayoría, impublicables. En “Tukuntazo”, se jacta de acostarse con otras mujeres junto con su hombre. En su himno “Yo no me voy acostar”, proclama: “Tengo pila ‘e Molly en la cabeza/ Tengo una amiguita que me besa”.“No tener miedo de expresar mi sexualidad, mi pensamientos, es como algo bonito”, aseguró la cantante.Josefina Santos para The New York TimesTokischa colecciona escándalos como si fuesen recuerdos de vacaciones. El año pasado, se vio obligada a pagar una multa municipal y a pedir disculpas públicas después de publicar fotos subidas de tono delante de un mural de la Virgen de la Altagracia, la patrona de la República Dominicana. En otoño, se presentó a una entrega de premios con un disfraz de vagina de tamaño natural, vestida como un personaje al que llamó “Santa Popola”. En un artículo de opinión ahora borrado, un columnista del periódico dominicano La Información afirmó que sus letras explícitas “faltan el respeto de una población que lucha por conservar los valores de la familia”.Sin embargo, también hay toda una generación de jóvenes dominicanos que se ven reflejados en el alegre rechazo que Tokischa despliega contra la respetabilidad. Para ellos, es una rebelde queer que ve la sexualidad de manera positiva, el tipo de figura cultural cuyas actuaciones apuntan a la liberación de las políticas opresivas y retrógradas.En una calle apartada del Malecón, el paseo marítimo que rodea la costa de Santo Domingo, Tokischa reflexionó sobre su irreverente reputación. Días antes del festival, la rapera acababa de llegar a las oficinas de Paulus Music, la discográfica y el equipo creativo que está detrás de sus videos. Llevaba puestos unos pantalones para correr de color verde oliva y una camiseta a juego con una imagen conocida y que se ha usado incontablemente para memes: el GIF de Homero Simpson escondiéndose en un arbusto.“Dicen muchas cosas de mí”, comentó. “Ah, que no es artista, que ella es loca, que es una drogadicta”, continuó. “Yo no me ofendo, porque yo soy clara de qué es lo que pasa conmigo. Yo sé quién es Tokischa, yo sé qué es lo que Tokischa está haciendo”.Tokischa y Rosalía en el escenario durante una actuación en 2021. Tokischa participa en “La Combi Versace”, una canción del último álbum de la estrella del pop español.John Parra/Telemundo and NBCU Photo Bank, vía Getty ImagesTokischa Altagracia Peralta nació en Los Frailes, un barrio obrero de Santo Domingo Este, pero tuvo una juventud itinerante. Sus padres se separaron y ella vivió con su madre hasta los 3 años. Cuando su madre se trasladó a Estados Unidos, Tokischa se mudó muchas veces, viviendo con tías, padrinos u otros familiares. Su padre fue encarcelado cuando ella era joven.Tokischa es la primera en admitir que era revoltosa en la escuela. “Yo peleaba. Me encontraban chuleando. ¡Siempre alguien me encontraba chuleando!”, dijo riendo. Solía responderle a sus maestros, por lo que fue expulsada de varias escuelas y, con frecuencia, era castigada físicamente, agregó.“Siempre era creativa”, recordó. “Dibujaba, escribía. Me trancaba en la habitación a verme en el espejo y actuar en el espejo”. Creció rodeada de géneros dominicanos como el merengue, el dembow y la bachata, pero cuando tenía 14 años descubrió todo un nuevo universo musical en línea con bandas como Pink Floyd y artistas como Bob Marley, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna.“Vivía imaginando mi vida, imaginando lo que iba a ser”, relató. “No sabía en qué rama, pero sabía que sí iba ser gran artista”.El primer tema oficial de Tokischa fue “Pícala”, una canción de trap con Tivi Gunz que se lanzó en 2018.Josefina Santos para The New York TimesCuando cumplió 18 años, una amiga la introdujo al sitio de anuncios clasificados Craigslist, y dijo que se convirtió en una sugar baby, que es como se le llama a una persona joven que acepta salir por mutuo acuerdo y con condiciones predefinidas con personas mayores que pueden ser hombres o mujeres; Tokischa recibía regalos de turistas sexuales estadounidenses mayores y adinerados. Uno de ellos le compró unas Puma Fenty, su primer par de zapatos deportivos. “Un tíguere tenía fotos montado en un camello”, dijo pícaramente sobre un hombre. “Yo dije: ‘¡Este tipo tiene cuartos!’”, refiriéndose a la jerga para el dinero.Aunque se muestra juguetona cuando habla al respecto, a Tokischa no le gustaba ese trabajo, sobre todo cuando los clientes cruzaban las líneas del consentimiento. De ahí pasó a OnlyFans, la plataforma por suscripción en la que la gente puede cobrar por dar acceso a fotos y videos, y con el tiempo empezó a modelar y a incorporarse a la comunidad creativa de Santo Domingo. Aprendió a escribir y grabar música tras conocer a productores de la escena a través de su representante, Raymi Paulus. Rápidamente cultivó su estilo vocal, que ahora es su arma principal: un inconfundible gemido agudo y tímido que rezuma sexo y permite que sus endiablados y sensuales raps se pronuncien con precisión.Su primer sencillo oficial fue “Pícala”, una canción de trap con Tivi Gunz que lanzó en 2018. Luego vino una serie de sencillos del estilo dembow, igualmente picantes: “Desacato escolar”, con Yomel El Meloso; “El rey de la popola”, con Rochy RD; y “Yo no me voy a acostar”, del año pasado, entre muchos otros.Las grandes discográficas no tardaron en llegar: el verano pasado, lanzó “Perra” con la estrella colombiana del reguetón J Balvin. Luego vino “Linda” y, más recientemente, “La combi Versace”, ambos con la estrella española Rosalía. En marzo, terminó su primera gira por Estados Unidos, al agotar las entradas de la Terminal 5 de Nueva York en 30 minutos. A finales de mes publicará un sencillo con el productor de EDM Marshmello y tiene previsto grabar un álbum completo en los próximos dos años.“Ella es diferente de lo que la gente ve, o sea, ella es muy profesional, muy disciplinada”, dice LeoRD, el superproductor de dembow que ha colaborado con Tokischa en varias canciones. Durante una llamada telefónica, dijo que su ascenso no tiene precedentes en el mundo del dembow. “En tan poco tiempo, con tan pocas canciones, he visto la evolución de ella que ha ido a millón”.“Dicen muchas cosas de mí”, comentó. “Yo no me ofendo, porque yo soy clara de qué es lo que pasa conmigo. Yo sé quién es Tokischa, yo sé qué es lo que Tokischa está haciendo”.Josefina Santos para The New York TimesEl rápido ascenso de Tokischa ha sido polarizador. Para algunos, es una desviada sexual que pone en peligro a los niños, o una víctima del abandono y las circunstancias difíciles. Para otros, es una mujer que se cosifica a sí misma y que solo satisface las fantasías masculinas. Y para otros, es una feminista intrépida cuyo espíritu insurgente está abriendo camino. El verano pasado, actuó en Santo Domingo en el desfile del orgullo gay dominicano y presentó a mujeres trans como extras y bailarinas en el video de “Linda”, lo que atrajo elogios de toda la comunidad LGBTQ. El blog de belleza Byrdie escribió que ella se “aleja de manera activa de la mirada masculina y hacia la liberación femenina”, y lo hace en una industria de la música latina que a menudo favorece a los artistas blancos.Sin embargo, no todo ha sido color de rosa. En otoño pasado, las activistas feministas y el vicepresidente de Colombia condenaron la representación de las mujeres negras en el video de “Perra”, la canción de Tokischa y J Balvin, donde las mujeres negras estaban caracterizadas como perros, y Balvin, un colombiano blanco, caminaba con una actriz que andaba a cuatro patas con una cadena alrededor de su cuello.Después de que se eliminara el video de YouTube, Balvin emitió una disculpa. Luego, Tokischa le dijo a Rolling Stone que realmente lamentaba “que la gente se haya sentido ofendida”, pero que la puesta en escena era conceptual y estaba destinada a ilustrar las metáforas de la canción. “Estábamos en RD [República Dominicana]; allá toditos somos morenos”, dijo sobre las críticas del video en una entrevista para un pódcast en diciembre. “No fue que nosotros fuimos a África, ni a los Estados Unidos para buscar esas mujeres”. Como era de esperarse, el comentario suscitó críticas de algunos fanáticos en Twitter que creían que estaba desestimando las preocupaciones válidas sobre la representación de las mujeres negras como animales.La reacción muestra cómo los fanáticos demandan cada vez más que las estrellas pop sean progresistas, en especial las figuras vanguardistas como Tokischa. “Desde el primer día que empecé hacer musica, yo dije: ‘Voy a hablar mi verdad’”, dijo. En una entrevista de radio que concedió el año pasado, lo dijo de una manera diferente: “Yo solo hablo de mí. De mi vivencia. Yo no me siento responsable de arreglar la sociedad”.Tokischa sigue siendo una agitadora, y resulta necesaria. “No tener miedo de expresar mi sexualidad, mi pensamientos, es como algo bonito”, aseguró. “Hay mucha gente que tiene miedo de decir lo que son, porque los botan de su casa, los botan del trabajo, pierden amistades. Pero tú no estás mal. Tú estás haciendo lo que tu corazón te dice”.“Yo tengo mucho más mensajes que dar”, continuó. “Pero es el momento de este mensaje, y yo me lo disfruto”.Isabelia Herrera es crítica de arte del programa de becarios del Times. Da cobertura a la cultura popular, con especial atención a la música latinoamericana y estadounidense. Antes fue editora colaboradora en Pitchfork y ha escrito para Rolling Stone, Billboard, GQ, NPR y más. @jabladoraaa More

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      Tokischa, Latin Music’s Newest Rebel, Isn’t Holding Back

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      SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — On a mid-March evening here in the capital, a crowd of hundreds of festivalgoers wearing fairy wings, rhinestones and rainbow face paint began to chant. “Po-po-la!” they shouted, deploying the local slang for vagina. The scene resembled the summoning of a cult leader, and the Dominican firebrand Tokischa, a rapper known for her prurient lyrics and high-profile collaborations, emerged onstage.For the next hour, the 26-year-old performer rapped about her bisexuality, carnal pleasures and doing drugs, all over speaker-frying dembow and trap beats. It was raining at the Isle of Light festival that night, the kind of Caribbean deluge that arrives in a flash. “I want to get wet with you guys!” she shrieked, walking out from under the stage awning and into the crowd. She unbuttoned her periwinkle blouse, revealing a hot-pink conical satin bra underneath, and the audience squealed.The ground, once covered in grass, was now an obstacle course of mud puddles. No one seemed to care. Fans belted every word, their voices audibly hoarse. One woman climbed a metal fence, twerking above the crowd. When her set ended, Tokischa, beaming, pulled her panties off from under her miniskirt and tossed them to a woman in the audience.Consider this a minor example of the provocation that defines Tokischa Altagracia Peralta. Her audacious lyrics, which revel in the linguistic rebellion of Dominican slang and embrace the euphoria of sex, are mostly unprintable. In “Tukuntazo,” she brags about sleeping with other women alongside her man. In her anthem “Yo No Me Voy Acostar,” she proclaims, “I’ve got a bunch of molly in my head/I have a girlfriend who kisses me.”“Not being afraid to express my sexuality, my way of thinking — it’s a beautiful thing,” Tokischa said.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesTokischa collects scandals like vacation souvenirs. Last year, she was forced to pay a municipal fine and issue a public apology after she posted risqué photos in front of a mural of the Virgin of Altagracia, the patron saint of the Dominican Republic. In the fall, she showed up to an awards show in a full-size vagina costume, dressed as a character she called “Santa Popola.” In a now deleted op-ed, a columnist for the Dominican newspaper La Información claimed her explicit lyrics “disrespect people who fight to conserve family values.”But there is also an entire generation of young Dominicans who see themselves in Tokischa’s gleeful refusal of respectability. To them, she is a sex-positive queer rebel, the kind of cultural figure whose performances gesture toward liberation from oppressive, retrograde politics.On a tucked-away street off the Malecón, the seafront esplanade that lines the coast of Santo Domingo, Tokischa reflected on her irreverent reputation. It was a few days before the festival, and the rapper had just arrived at the offices of Paulus Music, the label and creative team behind her videos. She wore olive green joggers and a matching T-shirt with a familiar, eternally memed image: the GIF of Homer Simpson retreating into a bush.“They say a lot of things about me,” she said. “‘Oh, she’s not an artist, she’s crazy, she’s a drug addict,’” she continued. “It doesn’t offend me, because I’m sure of who I am. I know who Tokischa is. I know what Tokischa’s doing.”Tokischa and Rosalía onstage in 2021. Tokischa appears on “La Combi Versace” from the Spanish pop phenom’s latest album.John Parra/Telemundo and NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesTokischa Altagracia Peralta was born in Los Frailes, a working-class neighborhood in Santo Domingo Este, but had an itinerant youth. Her parents separated, and she lived with her mother until she was 3 years old. When her mother relocated to the United States, Tokischa moved around often, living with aunts, godparents or other relatives. Her father was incarcerated when she was young.Tokischa is the first to admit that she was rowdy in school. “I would fight. They’d find me making out — someone always found me making out!” she said with a laugh. She talked back to her teachers and was expelled from schools — and was often punished physically, she added.“Aside from that, I was always creative,” she recalled. “I’d draw, I’d write. I’d lock myself in my room and act in front of the mirror.” She grew up surrounded by Dominican genres like merengue, dembow and bachata, but when she was around 14, she discovered a whole new musical universe online: Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna.“I lived dreaming up my life, imagining what I’d become,” she said. “I didn’t know in what field, but I did know I was going to be a big artist.”Tokischa’s first official single was “Pícala,” a trap song featuring Tivi Gunz that arrived in 2018. Josefina Santos for The New York TimesWhen she turned 18, a friend introduced her to Craigslist, and she said she became a sugar baby, receiving gifts from older, wealthy American sex tourists. One bought her Fenty Pumas, her first pair of sneakers. “This one guy had photos of himself on a camel,” she said impishly. “I was like, ‘He’s got money!’”Even though she’s playful as she talks about it, Tokischa didn’t like the work, especially when clients crossed the lines of consent. She transitioned to OnlyFans, the subscription-based platform where people can charge for access to photos and videos, and eventually started modeling and incorporating herself into the creative community in Santo Domingo. She learned how to write and record music after meeting producers in the scene through her manager, Raymi Paulus. She swiftly cultivated her vocal style, now her central weapon: an unmistakable, high-pitched, coy moan that oozes sex and allows her devilish, sensual raps to land with precision.Her first official single was “Pícala,” a trap song featuring Tivi Gunz that dropped in 2018. Then came a torrent of equally racy dembow singles: “Desacato Escolar,” with Yomel El Meloso; “El Rey de la Popola,” with Rochy RD; and last year’s “Yo No Me Voy Acostar,” among many others.The major labels soon came running: Last summer, she released “Perra” with the Colombian reggaeton star J Balvin. Then came “Linda,” and more recently “La Combi Versace,” both with the Spanish experimentalist Rosalía. In March, she completed her first U.S. tour, selling out Terminal 5 in New York in 30 minutes. She has a single with the EDM producer Marshmello arriving at the end of the month, and plans to record a full album over the next two years.“She’s different than people imagine. She’s very professional, very disciplined,” said LeoRD, the superstar dembow producer who’s collaborated with Tokischa on several tracks. In a phone call, he said that her climb has been unprecedented in the world of dembow. “In so little time, with just a few songs, I’ve seen her evolution go from zero to 100.”“They say a lot of things about me,” she said. “It doesn’t offend me, because I’m sure of who I am. I know who Tokischa is. I know what Tokischa’s doing.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesTokischa’s rapid rise has been divisive. For some, she is a sexual deviant endangering children, or a victim of neglect and difficult circumstances. To others, she’s a self-objectifying woman who’s just satisfying male fantasies. And to still others, she is a fearless feminist whose insurgent spirit is breaking ground. Last summer, she performed in Santo Domingo at the Dominican Pride parade, and featured trans women as extras and dancers in the video for “Linda,” which drew praise from across the L.G.B.T.Q. community. The beauty blog Byrdie wrote that she’s “actively moving the needle away from the male gaze and towards female liberation,” and doing so in a Latin music industry that often favors white artists.It hasn’t all been rosy, though. Last fall, feminist activists and Colombia’s vice president condemned the portrayal of Black women in Tokischa and J Balvin’s video for “Perra,” in which Black women wear prosthetics that depict them as dogs, and Balvin, a white Colombian, walks one actress, who is on all fours with a chain around her neck.After the video was removed from YouTube, Balvin issued an apology. Tokischa later told Rolling Stone that she was “truly sorry people felt offended,” but that the visual was conceptual, intended to illustrate the song’s metaphors. “We were in the Dominican Republic; over there, we’re all Black,” she said of the backlash in a December podcast interview. “It wasn’t like we went to Africa or the United States to find those women.” Unsurprisingly, the comment drew criticism from some fans on Twitter for dismissing valid concerns about the animalistic depiction of Black women.The reaction illustrated how fans increasingly demand progressivism from pop stars, especially disrupters like Tokischa. “Since the first day I started making music, I said, ‘I’m going to speak my truth,’” she said. In a radio interview last year, she made the point a different way: “I only talk about me, my life,” she said. “I don’t feel like I’m responsible for fixing society.”Tokischa is still an agitator, and a necessary one. “Not being afraid to express my sexuality, my way of thinking — it’s a beautiful thing,” she said. “There’s a lot of people who are scared to say who they are, because they’re kicked out of their houses, they’re fired from their jobs, they lose friends. But you’re not bad — you’re doing what your heart is telling you.”“I have a lot of other messages to offer,” she continued. “But now is the moment for this message, and I’m loving it.” More

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      Selena’s Family Announces New Album, 27 Years After Her Death

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      A record featuring the singer’s digitally altered voice is expected to be released by next month, her father said.Nearly three decades after the singer Selena was killed, a new album featuring recordings by the Grammy Award-winning Tejano music star is expected to be released, her family has announced.In a video interview with Latin Groove News last week, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., the singer’s father, described the forthcoming album, expected to be available by next month, as a family effort. It will feature 13 songs, with new arrangements by her brother A.B., and artwork by her sister, Suzette, Mr. Quintanilla said.Three songs are new versions of previously released tracks, and at least one song will feature Selena’s upbeat soprano voice, recorded when she was 13 years old and digitally modified, Mr. Quintanilla said.“What’s unique about it is, not only is the music completely new arrangements, my son worked on Selena’s voice with computers and if you listen to it she sounds on this recording like she did right before she passed away,” Mr. Quintanilla said. “It sounds incredible.”In an interview last year with Tino Cochino Radio, A.B. said he remixed all of Selena’s vinyls and “detuned her voice,” rendering it deeper and closer to how she sounded in her 20s.Further details about the album are unavailable, including how much of it features Selena’s voice. A spokesman for Warner Music Group, which Mr. Quintanilla said is releasing the album, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and professor at Berklee College of Music, said that digitally aging a voice was a simple process that could potentially require just an isolated recording of the singer and the appropriate digital software.Born Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in Lake Jackson, Texas, on April 16, 1971, the Mexican-American singer became a leading star of Tejano music — a blend of corrido, mariachi and polka music — with hits including “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom,” “Como La Flor” and “Amor Prohibido.” During her abbreviated career, she dominated the Billboard Latin music rankings.Before she was fatally shot on March 31, 1995, at age 23 by the president of her fan club, Selena was aiming for more mainstream success by recording a crossover album.Since her death, Selena’s popularity has grown. Fans continue to celebrate her music and emulate her signature style of red lipstick and wispy, curled bangs. Jennifer Lopez portrayed her in a 1997 movie, and a Netflix show about Selena’s rise to fame, titled “Selena: The Series,” was released last year.Her family has cultivated the public’s fascination with the singer, from collaborating on the Netflix show, to releasing an unfinished song of hers in 2015. Mr. Quintanilla told Latin Groove News said that soon after his daughter’s death, he committed to keeping her memory alive with her music.“I think that we have done that,” he said. “The public still remembers Selena. They haven’t let her go, and so they are waiting for a project like this to come out and I know that it will be well received by the public.” More

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      Romeo Santos’s Melodramatic Return, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jack Harlow, Flock of Dimes, Tame Impala 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, ‘Sus Huellas’“Sus Huellas,” the first single from Romeo Santos’s forthcoming fifth solo album, “Formula, Vol. 3,” finds him reprising the bleeding-heart theatrics he’s known for, recalling the kind of cortavenas (roughly, “wrist cutting”) torment of bachata classics. This time, the genre’s white-pants-wearing, antics-obsessed lover boy is trying to recover from the despair of a lost love, and the melodrama is in overdrive: “Come, pull out my veins/Because the plasma inside of me has the poison of her love,” he sings. “And take this lighter, I want you to burn my lips/Eliminate the taste of her tongue, which did me harm.” It’s not all tradition though; Santos drops in an EDM interlude that will have uptown clubs losing it. ISABELIA HERRERAJack Harlow, ‘Nail Tech’Last year Jack Harlow went to No. 1 as the guest on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby,” and he’s learned something from that experience. “Nail Tech” has echoes of that song’s horns, and Harlow approaches the beat similarly, with imagistic rapping — “You ain’t one of my dogs, why do you hound us?” — and a confidence that makes this song sound like a victory lap. JON CARAMANICAC. Tangana, Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and Canelita, ‘La Culpa’The Spanish singer-rapper C. Tangana gets top billing on “La Culpa” (“The Blame”), a song added to the deluxe version of his 2021 Latin Grammy-winning album “El Madrileño.” But except for a brief, vulnerable bridge, he spends most of the song merged in harmony with three other singers who are more robust and closer to flamenco — Omar Montes, Daviles de Novelda and the especially gutsy Canelita — while rock drums and electric guitars join flamenco handclaps to pace the song. While the lyrics profess guilt and regret, they’re delivered with jolly camaraderie, suggesting that male bonding can easily overcome pangs of conscience. JON PARELESTame Impala, ‘The Boat I Row’Kevin Parker, a.k.a. the one-man studio band Tame Impala, took so long to release his 2020 album, “The Slow Rush,” that of course he had outtakes. “The Boat I Row” is from his collection “The Slow Rush B-Sides and Remixes.” It shares the album’s stately, logy, time-warped sound — psychedelically phased drums playing a hip-hop beat, multitracked vocal harmonies suggesting both the Beatles and ELO — and its thoughts about dogged persistence. “Even if it takes a hundred thousand goes/The way’s in front of me ’cause that’s the one I chose,” Parker sings, at once diffident and determined. PARELESFlock of Dimes, ‘Pure Love’Jenn Wasner, who records as Flock of Dimes, ponders unsatisfied desire — material and emotional — in “Pure Love,” recorded with the producer Nick Sanborn from Sylvan Esso: “I keep dreaming of a better moment,” she sings. She’s surrounded by looped voices and instruments, with ricocheting programmed beats that hit like 1980s drums; she sounds like she’ll persist. PARELESAsa, ‘Ocean’The songwriter Asa has forged a long career in Nigeria, singing about adversity and conflict as well as romance. But “Ocean” is pure affection. Asa is about to release her fifth studio album, “V,” and “Ocean” distills the ways Nigerian Afrobeats exalts Minimalism. The percussion is just a few syncopated taps, the bass lines are only two or three notes and Asa’s breathy voice floats with professions of pure devotion: “Boy, you are the ocean,” she coos, and everything about the song promises bliss. PARELESYeat featuring Young Thug, ‘Outsidë’Two generations of surrealists in one liquid pool of syllables. Yeat is still swooning over abstraction, and Young Thug, several years older, has learned how to form word-like shapes while still seeming to melt in real time. CARAMANICASigurd Hole, ‘The Presentation Dance’Like so many, the Norwegian bassist Sigurd Hole — a nimble-fingered player and a composer of sonically expansive, thoughtfully paced music — has been overcome with dismay at the fast-worsening climate crisis. Like too few, in the face of it he’s sought out wisdom and theory from non-industrialized societies. “The Presentation Dance” comes from his newest album, “Roraima,” which he made after reading “The Falling Sky,” a book by the Yanomami shaman and mouthpiece Davi Kopenawa. The rain-like pitter-patter of a marimba interacts with a small corps of strings, playing fluid and intertwined melodies that sometimes fall into a pizzicato repartee with the marimba’s mallets. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOEd Sheeran featuring Bring Me the Horizon, ‘Bad Habits’Last week Ed Sheeran released a new version of his song “The Joker and the Queen,” accompanied by Taylor Swift. Pfft. Predictably pretty. Plain. This is more like it. “Bad Habits” is maybe Sheeran’s most anodyne pop hit, and this version, which is theatrically stomped all over by the British metalcore band Bring Me the Horizon, rescues it, recalling the essential and overlooked “Punk Goes Pop” compilation series. CARAMANICAFrontperson, ‘Parade’Frontperson is the indie-rock duo of Kathryn Calder, from the New Pornographers, and Mark Hamilton, from Woodpigeon. Blooping, calliope-like keyboard arpeggios and layers of nonsense-syllable vocals give “Parade” a blithe, circusy tone as Calder and Hamilton sing about anticipation, connection and disconnection, accepting it all: “Sometimes you’re left/Sometimes you leave.” PARELESAmbar Lucid, ‘Dead Leaves’Ambar Lucid’s music bottles youthful longing. The 21-year-old, whose debut album, “Garden of Lucid,” collected stories about escape and radical self-acceptance, seems to know exactly how to stir the soul. “Should I even bother letting anybody know how I feel?” she wonders on “Dead Leaves.” It’s soft winter balladry that contains all the pain and promise of the change of seasons. HERRERAHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Jupiter’s Dance’“Jupiter’s Dance” is from the newly released “Life on Earth,” the seventh album Alynda Segarra has made as Hurray for the Riff Raff. The new songs contemplate the natural world and humanity’s toll on it. “Jupiter’s Dance” is a quasi-mystical reassurance — “Celestial children coming through/You never know who you’ll become” — with a glimmering bell tones and an undercurrent of Puerto Rican bomba, a brief benediction. PARELESJavon Jackson featuring Nikki Giovanni, ‘Night Song’The poet Nikki Giovanni selected the repertoire for “The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni,” a new album by the strapping tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson that explores the lineage of Black American spirituals and hymns. But her voice appears on only one track, and it’s the one that’s not a church melody: “Night Song.” Rather that recite her own poetry, Giovanni sings this ode to unbelonging — a favorite of her old friend Nina Simone — with wistful conviction, picking up where Jackson’s gentle treatment of the melody leaves off. Her voice crinkles up on the high notes but loses none of its gravitas or tenderness as she sings: “Music, by the lonely sung/When you can’t help wondering:/Where do I belong?” RUSSONELLOChris Dingman, ‘Silently Beneath the Waves’For the vibraphonist Chris Dingman, solo playing was becoming central to his practice even before the pandemic hit. Since then, it’s been his primary mode, and he’s increasingly sought to use the big, chiming instrument as a vehicle for transcendence. That pursuit has guided him into a close study of a far tinier instrument: the mbira, a thumb piano with spiritual applications across southern Africa. On “Silently Beneath the Waves” — the opener to a new album of solo performances, “Journeys Vol. 1” — you can hear evidence of that research, as he repeats fetching, hypnotizing patterns that pull you into their force field before gradually giving way to a different shape. RUSSONELLO More

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      Tito Matos, Virtuoso of a Puerto Rican Sound, Dies at 53

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      A lifelong champion of the plena genre, he helped rejuvenate it for a new generation both in Puerto Rico and in New York.Tito Matos, a master percussionist, revered educator and lifelong champion of the Puerto Rican style of music known as plena, died on Jan. 18 in San Juan, P.R. He was 53.His wife, Mariana Reyes Angleró, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Matos was a virtuoso of the requinto, the smallest and highest-pitched hand-held drum, or pandereta, used in plena. Rooted in African song traditions, plena emerged in the early 20th century on the southern coast of Puerto Rico and came to be known as “el periódico cantado,” or “the sung newspaper.” In street-corner style, it narrated stories, some gossipy, about love and the concerns of everyday working-class and Black Puerto Ricans. In its early years, wealthy elites maligned the genre.Mr. Matos was a member of multiple plena groups but first gained wide recognition with the band Viento de Agua, founded in New York in 1996. It reimagined plena and bomba, another Afro-Puerto Rican style of music and dance, by infusing them with jazz textures, exuberant horn sections and Cuban batá rhythms.For Mr. Matos, the band’s first album, “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” (1998), opened the door to a dynamic career that transformed him into one of the foremost plena practitioners of his generation.Héctor René Matos Otero was born on June 15, 1968, in the Río Piedras district of San Juan, one of three children of Héctor Matos Gámbaro and Hilda I. Otero Maldonado. His father was an accountant and a salsa enthusiast; his mother is a homemaker.Raised in Villa Palmeras, a barrio of the Santurce section that is considered a nexus of bomba and plena, Héctor embraced plena as an 8-year-old when his grandfather gave him his first pandereta, for the Three Kings Day holiday. Héctor had no formal musical training and could not read sheet music, but his love for plena was planted.He moved to New York in 1994 and eventually completed a degree in landscape architecture at City College. He entered a new diasporic community of musicians, joining Los Pleneros de la 21, an intergenerational East Harlem ensemble, and learning from plena masters who had migrated to New York in the 1940s and ’50s.Mr. Matos, third from left, playing the pandereta in 2014. “He got a lot of young people to just pick up a pandereta,” a friend said, “who were not necessarily interested in plena.”Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn New York, he met Ricardo Pons and Alberto Toro, two saxophonist-arrangers. “Tito was addicted to plena,” Mr. Pons said in a phone interview. “Un fiebrú,” he added, laughing, “like he had a fever.”Historically, only certain families were custodians of plena, charged with keeping its traditions and rhythms alive. “It was a problem, because they were very restrictive,” Mr. Matos said in an interview in 2010.Instead, Viento de Agua sought innovation. “It was not about conserving plena or bomba,” Mr. Pons said; “it was about doing whatever we wanted with it.”The group’s album “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” was infused with an irreverent, imaginative spirit. Writing in The New York Times, Peter Watrous praised it as “exuberant and raucous.”The group performed in Mexico, Cuba and across the United States, sometimes accompanied by a full jazz band.“Tito was super, super gregarious and charismatic,” Ed Morales, a journalist, author and friend of Mr. Matos, said in a phone interview. Mr. Matos, he added, had a special ability to reach Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the diaspora and instill in them a sense of communion — particularly when he performed at a biennial concert at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.“You really got to feel the connection between people in Puerto Rico and people in New York more than almost any other place,” Mr. Morales said.In the early 2000s Mr. Matos returned to Puerto Rico, where he became an educator and cultural advocate. He co-founded Plenazos Callejeros, a monthly initiative that gathered musicians across Puerto Rico for spontaneous plena performances on street corners.“He got a lot of young people to just pick up a pandereta,” Mr. Morales said — “people who were not necessarily interested in plena, because maybe they thought it sounded corny or something, or it wasn’t like salsa or hip-hop or reggaeton.”Today, plena is undergoing a cultural renaissance; in recent years it has played a central role in progressive political gatherings and protests in Puerto Rico, including those in the summer of 2019 that led to the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.Subsequent projects led Mr. Matos to collaborate with stars like Eddie Palmieri, Ricky Martin and the jazz saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón. Mr. Matos later founded the band La Máquina Insular, which focused on returning plena back to its roots.In 2015, he and his wife founded La Junta, a bar and performance space in Santurce, where they hosted live music and plena workshops. Hurricane Maria destroyed the space in 2017, but its spirit was revived in “La Casa de la Plena,” a historical exhibition, curated by the couple, that opened in May 2021 at the Taller Comunidad La Goyco, a community center they established in an abandoned Santurce school building they had renovated.In addition to his mother and his wife, whom he married in 2013, Mr. Matos is survived by their son, Marcelo; two children from previous marriages that ended in divorce, Celiana and Héctor; a brother, Yan Matos Otero; and a sister, Glennis Matos Otero.A procession this month honoring Mr. Matos in San Juan drew hundreds.Taller Comunidad – La GoycoOn Jan. 21, Mr. Matos was honored with an immense procession in Santurce. Friends, family members and dozens of fans walked the streets, drumming on panderetas and singing words of gratitude. “Muchas gracias, te amamos,” they chanted — “Thank you very much. We love you.” More