Latin Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Astrud Gilberto: 6 Essential Songs

      by

      The Brazilian singer radiated quiet poise and subtle undercurrents.Astrud Gilberto, who died on Monday at 83, brought the first, alluring taste of Brazilian bossa nova to countless listeners worldwide. Her collaborations — with Stan Getz, Gil Evans, Stanley Turrentine and others — also helped cement the connections of bossa nova and jazz.Her voice was disarmingly modest, sometimes hitting notes a little flat and often barely above a whisper; the effect was intimate and seemingly weightless. When she sang in English, her Brazilian accent gave her an endearing hint of awkwardness and approachability, even as her phrasing stayed supple, while the translated lyrics invited a wider audience to hear great Brazilian songwriters like Antonio Carlos Jobim. Her early recordings are her most radiant ones, steeped in the pensive, nostalgic longing that Brazilians call saudade.Here are six indelible Astrud Gilberto performances.Stan Getz featuring Astrud Gilberto: “The Girl From Ipanema” (1963)This was the bossa nova that seduced the world: a purposeful crossover collaboration by the American saxophonist Stan Getz, Jobim, Astrud Gilberto and her then-husband, the definitive bossa nova guitarist and singer João Gilberto. Its full version opened with João Gilberto singing the Portuguese lyrics, but the world-conquering single cuts quickly to Astrud Gilberto’s breathy voice in English, with Jobim on piano trickling just a few perfect notes to answer her.The New Stan Getz Quartet featuring Astrud Gilberto: “It Might as Well Be Spring” (1964)Gilberto doesn’t exactly sound “as jumpy as a puppet on a string” in this live performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard with the Stan Getz Quartet. Instead, she’s poised and sure-footed, musing about the possibility of romance as Getz’s saxophone scurries and spirals around her.“Água de Beber” (1965)Jobim rejoined Gilberto as a collaborator on her luminous solo debut, “The Astrud Gilberto Album.” His voice shadows hers on their nonchalantly elegant version of his bossa nova standard “Água de Beber” (“Water to Drink”); as she sings about a love as essential as water, the song glows with mutual fondness.“The Shadow of Your Smile” (1965)A studio orchestra offers a hint of fanfare, then falls into an admiring hush behind Gilberto’s voice in this Oscar- and Grammy-winning song from the movie “The Sandpiper.” Written by Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster, with strong bossa nova influences, the song’s arrangement ripples around Gilberto with little instrumental flourishes — strings, flutes, piano, vibraphone — but Gilberto’s voice maintains its serene wistfulness.“Berimbau” (1966)A berimbau, the one-stringed percussion instrument prized in Bahia, Brazil, twangs its way through this song by Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes. The brassy, slightly ominous arrangement by Gil Evans highlights the pinpoint syncopations of Gilberto’s vocal.“Maria Quiet” (1966)Gilberto sang most often about love as it arrives and disappears. But every so often she turned to other thoughts — like the feminist resentment in “Maria Quiet,” a brisk samba with lyrics (de Moraes translated by Norman Gimbel) about women’s endless work. Gilberto’s delivery is pointed, and quietly seething. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Juan Carlos Formell, Buoyant Heir of Cuban Musical Legacy, Dies at 59

      by

      The son of Juan Formell, a giant of Cuban music, he found his own voice as a singer-songwriter. He died during a performance in New York.Juan Carlos Formell, an acclaimed singer-songwriter who settled in New York after defecting from Cuba and eventually took over as bassist for his famous father, Juan Formell, in Los Van Van, one of the most influential bands of post-Revolutionary Cuba, died on Saturday during a performance in New York City. He was 59.His death, from a heart attack he suffered onstage at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx, was confirmed by his romantic and musical partner, Danae Blanco. Mr. Formell, she said, had hypertension and arteriosclerosis.Since fleeing Cuba for New York City in 1993, Mr. Formell had charted his own musical course, releasing five solo albums and earning a Grammy nomination in 2000 for best traditional tropical Latin performance for his debut album, “Songs from a Little Blue House.”When his father died in 2014, Mr. Formell agreed to carry on his legacy as the bassist for Los Van Van, the Afro-Cuban dance band co-founded by his father. The band’s current lineup also includes his brother Samuel on drums and his sister Vanessa Formell Medina on vocals.The band was just a few numbers into an energetic set at the Lehman Center when Mr. Formell wandered away from his upright bass, doubled over as if to catch his breath, then lumbered toward the rear of the stage. As the band played on, Abdel Rasalps Sotolongo, the Van Van singer known as Lele, and Javier León Peña, a sound engineer, were helping him offstage when he collapsed near the curtain.After a brief announcement that Mr. Formell was having a health problem, the band took a break of more than a half hour, then returned to finish the set, playing for nearly an hour in an apparent tribute to Mr. Formell, a friend, the musician Ned Sublette, who was present, said in a phone interview.Mr. Formell’s debut album, “Songs from a Little Blue House,” was nominated for a Grammy in 2000 for best traditional tropical Latin performance.Mr. Formell was a fourth-generation member of one of Cuba’s most famous musical families. His great-grandfather, Juan Francisco, was a popular bandleader. His grandfather, Francisco Formell, was a conductor of the Havana Philharmonic and the arranger for the Lecuona Cuban Boys, a popular big band starting in the 1930s.His father, Juan Formell, along with fellow giants of Cuban music, César Pedroso, known as Pupy, and José Luis Quintana, known as Changuito, founded Los Van Van in 1969, fusing traditional Afro-Cuban genres like son cubano with elements of rock, soul and disco.With the blessing of the Cuban government, the band toured the world for decades, developing a global following. It won a Grammy Award in 2000 for best salsa performance for their album “Llego…Van Van/Van Van is Here.”)Despite his family name, Mr. Formell’s path to musical success was not easy.Juan Carlos Formell was born in Havana on Feb. 18, 1964, the eldest of three children of Juan Formell and the cabaret singer Natalia Alfonso.When he was three weeks old, his parents sent him to live on the outskirts of Havana with his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, the conductor, had been ostracized by the Castro government for being part of the old guard. Mr. Formell told The Los Angeles Times in 2000 that he had been teased by other children for having holes in his shoes.Even so, he set his course toward music, studying at the Alejandro García Caturla and Amadeo Roldán conservatories in Havana, and later at Cuba’s National Art School.Influenced by Afrocubanismo, the Cuban artistic movement focused on Black identity, as well as the negrista movement in poetry, particularly the work of Nicolás Guillén, Mr. Formell was already composing by his teens and studying bass with Andres Escalona of the Havana Symphony Orchestra. He went on to play bass with the jazz pianist Emiliano Salvador.He was also a talented guitarist and hoped to carve out a career as a singer-songwriter, but felt unable to express himself freely under the restrictions of the government-controlled Cuban music industry, his former wife, Dita Sullivan, said in a phone interview.“While still in my 20s, at a time when most musicians are full of hope,” he once said, “I was resigned to a future of marginalization.”In 1993, while on tour with the dance band Rumbavana in Mexico, he defected, crossing the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas, and eventually settling in New York City. The transition was not easy.Los Van Van performing in New York in 2010. Mr. Formell joined the band in 2014, after his father, the band’s bassist and co-founder, died.Brian Harkin for The New York Times“When you leave Cuba, you don’t exist,” Mr. Formell said in a 2005 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. “You come here, you’re invisible. You come here and no one cares. If you want to defect, you’d better have a support system.”Even so, he built a career performing solo and with various ensembles at New York jazz clubs like the Blue Note and Birdland before releasing his Grammy-nominated debut. Mr. Formell followed with “Las Calles del Paraíso” (“The Streets of Paradise”) in 2002 and “Cemeteries of Desire,” a 2005 rumination on the Latin musical flavorings of New Orleans, along with “Son Radical” (2006) and “Johnny’s Dream Club” (2008), which a Village Voice review said wove “an unforgettable spell.”His music, rooted in filin, a romantic, jazz-inflected genre of Cuban popular music, as well as son cubano, a traditional style mixing Spanish and African influences, celebrated the natural beauty of his homeland as well as its complicated history, including of slavery and revolution.“Although my songs don’t specifically talk about politics,” he said in a 1996 interview, “they reflect the reality of Cuba from my perspective and not from the perspective of the system.”In addition to Samuel and Vanessa, his survivors include his other sisters, Elisa Formell Alfonso and Paloma Formell Delgado, and another brother, Lorenzo Formell González. He and Ms. Sullivan separated in 2012 and divorced in 2021.In a Facebook post announcing his death, Los Van Van said it would continue its tour of the United States, “paying tribute to Juan Carlos in every performance, every musical note, in every Vanvanero choice as Juanca would have wanted.” More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Dolly Parton Goes Arena Rock, and 9 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Jorja Smith, Rhiannon Giddens, Shakira and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Dolly Parton, ‘World on Fire’Dolly Parton has announced an album due Nov. 17, “Rockstar,” that will be full of remakes of hits, often joined by the original performers. But she also brought some songs of her own including this one, her worried, indignant assessment of a “World on Fire” that’s full of lies and conflict. It’s Dolly gone arena-rock goth, with power-chord blasts and martial drums. A gospelly bridge asks, “Can’t we rise above/Can’t we show some love?,” but then it’s back to minor chords as Parton belts her best intentions — “Let’s heal the hurt/let kindness work” — against a grim, stomping, “We Will Rock You”-style chant: “Whatcha gonna do when it all burns down?” Parton concludes by posing that same question. JON PARELESJoni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now (Live at the Newport Folk Festival 2022)’Joni Mitchell’s surprise appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, bolstered and surrounded by dedicated admirers like Brandi Carlile, was a demonstration not only of gumption, support and resilience, but of enduring musicianship and control. “Both Sides Now” previews an official live album, “At Newport,” due July 28. As a piano ripples and strings swell behind her, with Carlile and Lucius adding vocal harmonies, Mitchell makes each phrase purposeful, reflective and improvisatory, and her lowered, roughened but precise voice makes every word a life lesson. PARELESRhiannon Giddens, ‘You’re the One’Fresh off winning the Pulitzer Prize for music for her opera, “Omar,” Rhiannon Giddens releases “You’re the One,” the title song of her first full album of her own songs (though she has written, adapted and collaborated widely). As she sings about finding a love that turns “shades of gray” into “a new Technicolor world,” the song explodes out of her string-band foundations — banjo and fiddle — into full-tilt rock choruses, bursting with euphoria. PARELESJorja Smith, ‘Little Things’A jazzy piano lick and frenetic beat drive the English R&B artist Jorja Smith’s new single “Little Things,” which captures the atmosphere of a vibey, intimate house party with a densely populated dance floor. “Just a little thing for you and I,” Smith intones before shrugging with a cool nonchalance. “And if it’s meant to be than that’s all right.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFatoumata Diawara and Roberto Fonseca, ‘Blues’Fatoumata Diawara, from Mali, rides a galloping six-beat modal groove topped by the Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca in “Blues,” which is by far the rawest song on her new album of international fusions, “London Ko.” She produced it with Damon Albarn of Gorillaz. The lyrics, in Bambara and English, are about gratitude to her family; the spirit is centered and fierce. PARELESShakira, ‘Acróstico’Acróstico means acrostic, and the first letters of the five-line verses for Shakira’s new song spell out the names of her sons, Milan and Sasha. It’s the latest missive following her breakup with the soccer player Gerard Piqué, and it’s a declaration of unswerving maternal devotion through her own pain. “Even if life treats me this way/I will be strong for you alone,” she sings over steadfast piano chords. “All I want is your happiness/And to be with you.” There’s a hint of U2’s “Every Breaking Wave” in the chorus as it climbs to a tremulous peak: wounded but resolutely compassionate. PARELESChristine and the Queens, ‘Tears Can Be So Soft’Hélöise Letissier, a.k.a. Chris, the songwriter and voice of Christine and the Queens, plunges into separation and consolation in “Tears Can Be So Soft.” It’s built on a sample of the string arrangement from Marvin Gaye’s “Feel All My Love Inside”: an octave-leaping, tremulous swoop that changes from major to minor. Chris sings about missing family, friends and a lover and crying while driving on the freeway, with only the warmth and release of tears for comfort; a string section pays witness. PARELESRob Moose featuring Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Wasted’Rob Moose’s violin mirrors Phoebe Bridgers’s nocturnal anxiety on “Wasted,” a song from Moose’s upcoming EP, “Inflorescence.” Plucked notes echo her tense nerves while a groaning bed of strings brings an added pathos to the lyrics, which were written by Bridgers’s collaborator Marshall Vore. “I used to have the energy to get mad, used to know how to say sorry,” Bridgers sings with wry self-judgment and an escalating intensity. “But now I’m back with none of that.” ZOLADZNatural Wonder Beauty Concept, ‘Sword’A keyboard loop that hints at harpsichord or koto, pitch-shifted vocals, sporadic drum thuds, bits of static and the sound of a sword being unsheathed run through “Sword,” a stubbornly fragile track by the singer Ana Roxanne and the producer DJ Python. They have collaborated as Natural Wonder Beauty Concept for an album due July 14. “Sword” is at once transparent and elusive, with barely intelligible lyrics — “Everyone passes through,” Roxanne coos — and a willingness to tweak everything; the last section lowers and slows down every element but remains enigmatic. PARELESBen Chasny & Rick Tomlinson, ‘Waking of Insects’Ben Chasny records as Six Organs of Admittance; Rick Tomlinson records as, among other names, Voice of the Seven Woods. Both love minimalist repetition and gradual unfoldings, and in 2017 they made an album of duets. “Waking of Insects” was recorded live, just two acoustic guitars. They share interlocking fingerpicked patterns and, with moments of dissonance, nudge one another toward new ones, very gradually making their way from quick, fluttering interplay to tolling repose. PARELES More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Chris Strachwitz, Who Dug Up the Roots of American Music, Dies at 91

      by

      Traveling the nation to discover little-known performers for the Arhoolie label, which he founded in 1960, he earned a nickname: El Fanático.Chris Strachwitz, who traveled in search of the roots of American music with the eagerness of a pilgrim, discovered traditional musicians with the skill of a detective, promoted their careers with the zeal of an ideologue and guarded their work with the care of a historian, died on Friday at an assisted living facility in San Rafael, Calif. He was 91.The cause was congestive heart failure, his brother, Hubert, said.Mr. Strachwitz (pronounced STRACK-wits) specialized in music passed down over generations — cotton-field music, orange-orchard music, mountain music, bayou music, barroom music, porch music. The songs came not only from before the era of the music industry but even from before the existence of mass culture itself.Like other leading musical folklorists of the modern recording era — among them Moses Asch, Alan Lomax and Harry Smith — Mr. Strachwitz rescued parts of that history before they vanished.But the extent of his devotion and the idiosyncrasy of his passions defy comparison.Mr. Strachwitz was the founder of Arhoolie Records (the name comes from a term for field hollers). In addition to recruiting his own artists, he did his own field recordings, music editing, production, liner notes, advertising and sales. In the company’s early years, he affixed the labels to the records and mailed them himself.He was a lifelong bachelor who said that having a family would have thwarted his career. On his journeys around the country to record new music, he had for company a manually operated orange juicer and 20-pound bags of oranges. The targets of his search included a highway grass cutter, a gravedigger and a janitor, all of whose musical talents were at the time basically unknown.He emigrated from Germany after growing up as a teenage count under Nazi rule and went on to explore the fullest reaches of American pluralism. He took an interest not just in the standard roots repertory of folk and blues, but also in norteño, Cajun, zydeco, klezmer, Hawaiian steel guitar, Ukrainian fiddle, Czech polka and Irish dance music, among countless other genres.To account for what united his passions, Mr. Strachwitz said he liked music that was “pure,” “hard-core” and “old-timey,” particularly if one of the musicians had a “spark.” His language grew more colorful when he defined his type of music negatively.“It ain’t wimpy, that’s for sure,” he said in a 2014 documentary about him. The movie took its title from Mr. Strachwitz’s ultimate insult, which he used to refer to anything that he considered commercial, artificial and soulless: “This Ain’t No Mouse Music!”The first Arhoolie album, released in 1960, was “Texas Sharecropper and Songster,” by the blues singer Mance Lipscomb. It vaulted Mr. Lipscomb into prominence during the 1960s folk revival.The first Arhoolie record, released in 1960, was “Texas Sharecropper and Songster,” by the blues singer Mance Lipscomb. Mr. Lipscomb’s music had never been recorded, and the new release vaulted him into prominence during the 1960s folk revival. Mr. Strachwitz went on to help revive the careers of other blues singers, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Mama Thornton.As both a record executive and a record collector, he made a particularly profound historical contribution to norteño, music from the Texas-Mexico border. The Smithsonian Institution last year called his archive of Mexican and Mexican American music “the largest collection of commercially produced vernacular recordings of its kind in existence,” noting that it contained many records that are “irreplaceable.”It was the result of about 60 years of collecting — yet Mr. Strachwitz never learned to speak Spanish. Norteño musicians nicknamed him El Fanático.Mr. Strachwitz might have been considered a preservationist, but he also shaped the worlds that he documented. That was particularly true of his recordings of Cajun musicians In 2000, the rock historian Ed Ward wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Strachwitz “helped prod the culture into what is now a full-blown renaissance.”Perhaps his most notable discovery in Louisiana was Clifton Chenier, who became known as the leading exponent of the mix of rhythm and blues, soul and Cajun music known as zydeco. During a visit to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival as an older man, Mr. Chenier discussed his frustrations with the record industry.“They wanted you to do what they wanted you to do, and I didn’t like that,” Mr. Chenier said. “Then I met Chris.”Mr. Strachwitz with Clifton Chenier, who was known as the king of zydeco. Other record companies “wanted you to do what they wanted you to do, and I didn’t like that,” Mr. Chenier said. “Then I met Chris.”via Arhoolie FoundationMainstream musicians also saw something exceptional in Mr. Strachwitz. In a 2010 profile of Mr. Strachwitz in The Times, the guitarist Ry Cooder said that Arhoolie’s second release, “Tough Times,” an LP by the blues musician Big Joe Williams, “started me on a path of living, the path I am still on.”Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz was born on July 1, 1931, in Berlin. He grew up on a country estate called Gross Reichenau, located in what was then the Lower Silesia region of Germany (it is now a village called Bogaczow in southwest Poland). His father, Alexander Graf Strachwitz, and his mother, Friederike (von Bredow) Strachwitz, ran a vegetable and grain farm of about a couple hundred acres. The men of the family had the royal title of count.The family lived in a manor originally built during the time of Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia. The Nazis appointed Chris’s father a local game warden, and during World War II he joined the military and attained the rank of captain, though Hubert Strachwitz said his service was limited to escorting troop transports bound for Italy. On the family’s bucolic ancestral property, the war seemed far away to young Chris.That changed in February 1945. The family fled as the Russians invaded the estate. Chris and two of his sisters had left shortly beforehand on a train; his father escaped in a horse and buggy; Hubert, Chris’s other two sisters and his mother left on a tractor-trailer. Thanks to a wealthy relative in the United States, the family was able to reunite in Reno, Nev., by 1947.Chris served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956. Soon after being honorably discharged, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He taught high school German in the suburbs of San Jose for several years.In his free time, Mr. Strachwitz collected records, and he developed a particular interest in Lightnin’ Hopkins, whom he struggled to learn more about. There was no public information about whether Mr. Hopkins was even still alive.Mr. Strachwitz going through the Arhoolie archives in El Cerrito, Calif., in 2010.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesIn 1959, a fellow music enthusiast told Mr. Strachwitz that he had found the bluesman in Houston. When the school year ended, Mr. Strachwitz went on a road trip.He later recalled that he found Mr. Hopkins playing in “a little beer joint” — improvising songs in a conversational style, telling a woman in the crowd to quiet down, wondering in song about the man from California who had traveled all the way to Texas “to hear poor Lightnin’ sing.”Mr. Strachwitz believed that nobody had ever recorded a scene like that live. Following a tip from one of Mr. Hopkins’s songs, he returned to Texas the next year and found Mr. Lipscomb. This time, he brought a recorder.Meeting musicians where they lived and recording them where they liked to play, rather than in a studio, became Mr. Strachwitz’s signature style.He found unexpected commercial success when Country Joe and the Fish performed their “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” at Woodstock in 1969. Joe McDonald, the band’s lead singer and principal songwriter, had used Mr. Strachwitz’s equipment to record the song back in 1965 and given him publishing rights in exchange. With his share of the royalties, Mr. Strachwitz put a down payment on a building in El Cerrito, Calif., near Berkeley, that became the home of Arhoolie and a record outlet he called the Down Home Music Store.Aside from recording music, he drew attention to the artists he loved by collaborating with the filmmaker Les Blank on several music documentaries.As the record industry declined, Mr. Strachwitz focused on a nonprofit arm of Arhoolie that digitizes and exhibits his singular record collection. In 2016, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the nonprofit label of the Smithsonian Institution, acquired the Arhoolie catalog.In addition to his brother, Mr. Strachwitz is survived by three sisters, Rosy Schlueter, Barbara Steward and Frances Strachwitz.There was one word Mr. Strachwitz often used to describe success in his field. When he found an aged master of traditional music playing a song at a resonant time and place, he called it, as if he were hunting butterflies, a “catch.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      The Bassist Carlos Henriquez Covers All the Latin and Jazz Bases

      by

      The longtime Jazz at Lincoln Center musician leads a tribute this weekend to his mambo ancestors Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez.As he worked his way through a rice bowl at a Japanese restaurant near Columbus Circle in Manhattan on a recent afternoon, the bassist, composer and arranger Carlos Henriquez reflected on the long history of Latino musicians in the jazz world.“In the 1920s, there was a bassist and tuba player called Ralph Escudero who used to play with W.C. Handy and Fletcher Henderson,” he said, arching his manicured eyebrows for emphasis. “We’ve always been part of this. So, I’m going to say, Hey, I’m from the South Bronx, I’m Puerto Rican and I love jazz.”Henriquez, who will lead an all-star band on May 5-6 in a centennial tribute to the mambo kings Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez at Jazz at Lincoln Center, was about to join a rehearsal for the institution’s annual gala. Dressed down in a gray plaid flannel shirt and dark bluejeans, he took his place at his pivotally placed bassist’s chair as the orchestra practiced standards — the theme this year was “American Anthems” — including Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”“I’ve always visualized the bass as the catcher of a baseball team — we see everything, the whole game,” he said. “That catcher is dealing with everything that’s coming in and calling the plays. We, the bass players, can really determine where the music is going to, where the concept is going.”Over about 25 years as a professional musician, Henriquez has developed a reputation as a grounded but wildly imaginative composer and player. “Carlos has become a master of his instrument and writing arrangements,” said the timbalero José Madera in a phone interview from his home in Colorado. “He’s grown, he’s left the planet, he’s in outer space somewhere.”Henriquez’s path from the streets of 1980s Mott Haven in the Bronx to the Jazz at Lincoln Center stage was sparked in part by an encounter as a teenager with the organization’s director, Wynton Marsalis. “When I was a kid, the Jazzmobile used to come to St. Mary’s Park across the street from the Betances Houses, where I grew up,” Henriquez said, referring to the portable stage that brings jazz to New York neighborhoods. “I remember Clark Terry and David Murray played, and also Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow.”Henriquez said his father, who worked at a V.A. hospital, was given cassettes by his African American friends. “One day he gave me a tape with Bill Evans, Eddie Gomez and Paul Chambers, and I was freaking out — I was like, man, this is killing.”At first, Henriquez played the piano, and then switched to classical guitar, which landed him in the Juilliard School’s music advancement program while he attended the performing arts high school LaGuardia. He switched to bass in his second year‌ at Juilliard, and won first place in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington competition for high school bands. At 19, he joined the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.“I started going to Wynton’s house religiously, and we exchanged information about Latin music, something we do to this day,” Henriquez said. “And vice versa. If I need help with classical music or something, he’ll help me out.”Henriquez onstage with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, featuring its leader, Wynton Marsalis (at right).Tina Fineberg for The New York TimesDuring a question-and-answer session at Essentially Ellington in 2019, Marsalis praised his protégé: “Every night this man is coming to swing,” he said, addressing a roomful of jazz hopefuls. “He gave me a another whole way of understanding music,” Marsalis added. Describing a moment when Henriquez offered a critique on a piece Marsalis had written, the trumpeter recalled the bassist saying, “It’s all on the wrong beat.’”For Henriquez, the key to fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz is finding a way to get the feeling of swing to conform to the five-beat clave rhythm. “It’s not just imagining ‘The Peanut Vendor’ as played by John Coltrane,” he said. Henríquez credits Manny Oquendo’s Conjunto Libre and the Fort Apache Band, which was headed by the Bronx brothers Andy and Jerry González, as “spiritual leaders.”As a session bassist, Henriquez has played with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Lenny Kravitz, Natalie Merchant, the bachata group Aventura and the Cuban jazz pianists Chucho Valdés and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. He has even toured with Nuyorican Soul, the dance-music project led by the D.J.s Little Louie Vega and Kenny (Dope) Gonzalez. “We had DJ Jazzy Jeff spinning records onstage while we were playing Latin grooves,” he said.Since 2010, when Henriquez served that year as musical director of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s cultural exchange with the Cuban Institute of Music, he has been integrally involved in the group’s Latin jazz programming. In the past decade, he’s been at the helm for a show featuring Rubén Blades singing jazz and salsa standards, a Latin spin on the work of Dizzy Gillespie, and last year’s scintillating “Monk con Clave” tribute to Thelonious Monk.“I was telling them, look, there’s a bigger picture to this,” Henriquez said of his message to the orchestra’s leadership. Musicians from earlier eras who are meaningful to the New York scene are “not getting credit,” or opportunities to perform. “We need to hire these people so that we could at least let them know that we didn’t forget about them.”“We, the bass players can really determine where the music is going to, where the concept is going,” Henriquez said.Dana Golan for The New York TimesFor this week’s Puente and Rodríguez tribute, Henriquez, who played with the Tito Puente orchestra when he was in his late teens, enlisted longtime Puente collaborators like the bongo player Johnny (Dandy) Rodríguez Jr. and Madera, and crafted a set list that combines both well-known and somewhat obscure tracks from the two luminaries.One of Henriquez’s charms is his ability to ad-lib nuggets of Latin music and jazz history between songs, in quips that land somewhere between stand-up comedy and a TED Talk. Asked over lunch about the rumored rivalry between Puente and Rodríguez, who vied for top billing at shows at the Palladium and other venues, he coolly demurred in deadpan comic tone. The song “El Que Se Fue” (“The One Who Left”)? “Rodríguez was trashing a guy,” Henriquez said, “but it wasn’t Tito Puente.”The Puente centennial has also occasioned a tribute and art exhibit at Hostos Community College in the Bronx; a vinyl reissue on Craft Recordings of “Mambo Diablo,” Puente’s 1985 jazz album, which featured “Lush Life” and other jazz standards; and an event at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts on May 20. Yet as much as the mambo era burns brightly in the spirit of Latin New York, Henriquez, whose 2021 solo album “The South Bronx Story” mined 1970s lore of widespread arson and street gang truces, continues to dig deeper into other neglected histories.“I’m working on my next album and I realize, we’re right in the middle of this neighborhood that used to be called San Juan Hill,” he said, referring to the area that was demolished to build Lincoln Center. “And then I find out, we used to live here, with African Americans, and Benny Carter wrote a suite called Echoes of San Juan Hill, and Thelonious Monk used to play here. I came to realize how valuable this neighborhood was, and I found this out because I was yearning to find my connection to jazz.“It’s the spirits of our ancestors, and they’re calling, you know?” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Foo Fighters Begin a New Chapter, and 8 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Muna, Nathy Peluso, Salami Rose Joe Louis and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Foo Fighters, ‘Rescued’“Rescued” is the first new song Foo Fighters have released since the sudden death of the band’s beloved drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, and its lyrics seem to address that tragedy and the remaining members’ grief. “It happened so fast, and then it was over,” Dave Grohl sings before unleashing one of those signature screams that manages to be throat-lacerating and melodic: “Is this happening now?” Hawkins’s absence is a gaping void in “Rescued,” the first track from a June album, “But Here We Are.” But perhaps because of it, the Foos sound more focused than they have in a while, driven by a fresh sense of pathos and urgency. LINDSAY ZOLADZMuna, ‘One That Got Away’Katie Gavin lets a missed connection know exactly what they’re missing on the bold and sassy “One That Got Away,” a new single the pop group Muna debuted last weekend at Coachella. “If you never put it on the line, how am I gonna sign for it?” Gavin sings on the synth-driven track, as the booming, echoing production serves to effectively amplify her feelings. ZOLADZSalami Rose Joe Louis, ‘Dimcola Reprise’“I know that everything is feeling like it’s falling apart all the time,” sings Lindsey Olsen, who records as Salami Rose Joe Louis, in “Dimcola Reprise” from her coming album, “Akousmatikous” (which means “sound where there is no identifiable source” in Greek). Most of the track is a busily looping, pattering, burbling electronic backdrop for her whispery voice, which eventually advises, “It’s gonna be OK/Just make it through the day.” But before it ends, the song pivots completely, turning to slow chromatic chords and suspended vocal harmonies — a brief moment of respite. JON PARELESSbtrkt featuring Sampha and George Riley, ‘L.F.O.’Aaron Jerome, the English electronic music producer who calls himself Sbtrkt and performs behind a mask, has been working over “L.F.O.” since 2018, apparently making it stranger with each iteration. It’s an ever-evolving succession of thick, harmonically ambiguous synthesizer chords, coalescing into a rhythm and pushing it aside, accelerating and falling apart and reconverging. The lyrics, delivered in Sampha’s eerie falsetto and George Riley’s confessional breathiness, offer paradoxes and self-questioning: “I’m changing, moving, losing, higher,” Riley sings. The song will be on Sbtrkt’s new album, “The Rat Road,” in May. Whatever the context, it’s likely to be destabilizing. PARELESNathy Peluso, ‘Tonta’The Argentine singer Nathy Peluso enlisted the hitmaking producer Illangelo (the Weeknd, Post Malone) for the furious kiss-off “Tonta” (“Foolish”). A thumping, clattering beat propels her indictment of her ex from seething to sneering to a well-placed scream. She also shows some gleeful scorn as she overdubs her voice into a mocking horn section, trumpeting “tararatata” as she demolishes any hopes of reconciliation. PARELESGrupo Frontera x Bad Bunny, ‘Un x100to’Bad Bunny, proudly from Puerto Rico, is determined to expand his music into a pan-Latin coalition. With “Un x100to” (“One Percent”), he joins Grupo Frontera, a Mexican-rooted norteño band from Texas, for a song about using the last 1 percent of his cellphone power to call an ex and confess that he misses her. Grupo Frontera’s section of the song is a traditional-flavored, accordion-backed cumbia. Bad Bunny arrives with a different, rap-informed melody over arena-scale electronic chords. But with Grupo Frontera working, he returns to the clip-clop beat and chorus of the cumbia — another strategic alliance certified. JON PARELESFlorence + the Machine, ‘Mermaids’“I thought that I was hungry for love,” Florence Welch sings at the beginning of a menacing new song, “Mermaids,” adding, “Maybe I was just hungry for blood.” The dark, brooding track sounds of a piece with “Dance Fever,” the group’s 2022 album that often found Welch threading her personal recollections and musings into a more mythical tapestry. That contrast emerges in the second movement of “Mermaids,” when Welch sings memorably about long nights of London debauchery and “hugging girls that smelt like Britney Spears and coconuts.” ZOLADZChristine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake, ‘True Love’At Coachella and now online, Chris of Christine and the Queens has gone primal and musically skeletal. “I need you to love me,” he sings in “True Love,” over a blipping, tapping two-chord track, joined by 070 Shake, who sees “your dark eyes staring at me.” The song is measured and quantized, but thoroughly obsessional. PARELESBéla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain featuring Rakesh Chaurasia, ‘Motion’The latest cross-cultural foray by the banjoist Béla Fleck is a collaboration with the bassist Edgar Meyer and two Indian musicians: Zakir Hussain on tabla and Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri (bamboo flute). For most of “Motion,” Fleck takes a supporting role behind rising, inquisitive melodies from the bass and bansuri as Hussain’s tabla stirs up a fluttering momentum. When banjo and bansuri share a melody in unison, the eerie timbre is an acoustic discovery. PARELES More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      10 Tito Puente Essentials for the Mambo King’s Centennial

      by

      A Harlem-born New York original, the percussionist, composer and bandleader helped define Latin jazz and lay the groundwork for 1970s salsa.Ernest Anthony Puente, known as Tito, was born in Harlem on April 20, 1923, and went on to create an enormous body of work (over 100 albums) while earning a reputation as a tireless performer. His irresistible swirl of energy helped make his main instrument, the timbales, emblematic of Latin music in the mid-20th century.In a career that stretched over six decades, Puente was a clever innovator and a prized collaborator. He got his start playing with Machito and his Afro-Cubans, the band led by Frank (Machito) Grillo that pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz fusion. He then went on to headline, becoming one of the stars of the glitzy Palladium mambo era — named for the club on West 52nd Street in Manhattan that attracted diverse crowds to dance to mambo orchestras with elaborate horn and percussion sections. When stripped-down salsa bands of a new generation began to steal his thunder, he persisted by hiring both La Lupe and Celia Cruz — two brilliant and beloved Cuban singers — as his lead vocalists. In the 1980s, he found new ways to evolve Latin jazz by spotlighting the work of unheralded instrumentalists, and at the end of the century, he teamed with younger singers like La India and Marc Anthony.Growing up in New York, decades before the “Great Migration” in the 1950s of Puerto Ricans to the United States, Puente was a prototypical Nuyorican. He was just as comfortable speaking in English as in Spanish, and he idolized big-band jazz icons like Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa while studying piano with Victoria Hernández, a sister of the famed Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Hernández. Like Krupa, Puente moved his percussion kit to the front of the band, a move that centered the rhythm as the driver of the dance beat and came to define the mambo sound — big-band jazz fused with Afro-Cuban rhythms and featuring extended improvisational breaks that fueled dancers’ energy — much in the way Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón would later feature trombones to define salsa.When Puente died in June 2000 at 77, it was a great blow not only to fans of mambo, cha-cha-cha, bugalú, salsa and Latin jazz, but also to New York itself. Yet his sound lives on and concerts celebrating his era resonate in the city he called home and beyond. (Jazz at Lincoln Center will present its “Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez Centennial Celebration” on May 5 and 6 at the Rose Theater.)Here are 10 examples of how Puente became known as the King of Latin music.“Abaniquito” (1949)The song that started Puente’s ascent was released as a 78-r.p.m. single with a hyperactive piano vamp and frenetic rhythm section that showcased the unrestrained dance floor energy of what was then an emergent Palladium scene. Featuring the beloved vocalist Vicentico Valdés as well as Graciela Pérez, Machito’s sister, on the chorus, the track exemplifies the strong influence of the Machito band on Puente’s jazz-mambo fusion.“Babarabatiri” (1951)Arriving at the dawn of the mambo era, this song is a riveting immersion in Puente’s rapidly coalescing sound. It’s flush with jazz swing, irresistible syncopation and a call-and-response between a repetitive vocal chorus, the horn section and percussion. Seizing on the momentum created by an earlier version — by the Cuban vocalist Beny Moré fronting Pérez Prado’s orchestra — the Puente rendition, with the vocalist Santos Colón, comes off as a cooler jazz reinterpretation.“Mamborama” (1955)By the mid-1950s, Puente had emerged as one of the dominant performers on the Palladium scene, engaged in his famous rivalry with the bandleader and vocalist Tito Rodríguez, who responded to the “Mamborama” album with his 1956 release “Mambo Madness.” Puente’s LP features the loping yet propulsive rhythmic figures of “Ran Kan Kan,” another classic, but the anthemic “Mambo Inn” makes perhaps the album’s strongest statement with its triumphant melodic theme, bruising horn section and the powder-keg pummeling of Puente’s timbale-conga attack.Tito Puente & His Orchestra, “Top Percussion” (1957)Taking a short break from Palladium mambo, Puente dug deep into the African roots of Cuban dance music on this album, bringing together the percussionists Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo with the vocalist Merceditas Valdés to re-create the feeling of rumba and ritual toque de santo, a practice designed to communicate with the pantheon of Yoruban deities. The album closes with the seven-minute “Night Ritual,” an Afro-Cuban jazz suite featuring Johnny Carson’s bandleader, the trumpeter Doc Severinsen. Puente revisited the concept in 1960 with “Tambó,” which repeated the deep percussion theme while using more mambo orchestra instruments.“Dance Mania” (1958)Perhaps Puente’s most famous and most listened to album, “Dance Mania” began the shift from mambo to what would become known as salsa by including some tracks identified by their Cuban-derived genres. While the track list is populated with standard mambos, “Cuando te Vea,” is listed as a guaguancó, a Cuban groove quintessential to the future evolution of the salsa sound, with Santos Colón doing an early take on the soneo, or lead vocal improvisation. The album also includes an early appearance from Ray Barretto, who would become one of salsa’s most renowned congueros and bandleaders.“Oye Como Va” (1962)At once tracing the roots and routes of Latin music in the 20th century, the song “Oye Como Va,” while not exactly a Puente masterpiece, tells the story of how Afro-Cuban music found its way into the American mainstream. Its opening riffs are based on the Cuban bassist Israel “Cachao” López’s classic “Chanchullo,” and the track is formally a cha-cha-cha that celebrates dance floor flirting. It was famously covered in 1970 by Santana, and the band’s leader, Carlos Santana, was said to have been convinced to do the song by the rock promoter Bill Graham, who had spent much of his youth in the 1950s dancing to mambo at Puente’s Palladium.La Lupe and Tito Puente, “Tito Puente Swings/The Exciting Lupe Sings” (1965)While an argument can be made that “El Rey y Yo (The King and I)” from 1967 is the peak of Puente and La Lupe’s collaboration, their album “Tito Puente Swings/The Exciting Lupe Sings” seems more spontaneous while capturing Puente’s peak cha-cha-cha grooves. It also marks Puente’s attempts to reconcile the end of the Palladium era with the emergence of the Cuban/African American R&B hybrid of bugalú.Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, “Cuba y Puerto Rico” (1966)As Puente’s working relationship with La Lupe became more contentious, he began to turn to Celia Cruz, another Cuban vocalist who had made her mark as the lead singer of the legendary Sonora Matancera orchestra. Cruz seized the opportunity to become a solo star in her own right, ultimately becoming la Reina de la Salsa (the Queen of Salsa), largely as a result of her magisterial performances with Puente. “La Guarachera,” from the album “Cuba y Puerto Rico,” became one of her signature tracks.Tito Puente, India and the Count Basie Orchestra, “Jazzin’” (1996)Toward the end of his career, Puente became a prominent member of the promoter Ralph Mercado’s stable of salsa and merengue acts that proliferated in New York’s Latin club scene. He became El Rey (the King) for young people who were trying to reconnect with their parents’ music by learning to dance at clubs like the 14th Street Palladium and S.O.B.’s. This era included his team-up with La India, a salsa vocalist who began her career singing house music, on “Jazzin’” (which also featured the Count Basie Orchestra); and a collaboration with Marc Anthony that began on ‌a 1991 album Anthony recorded with the Paradise Garage D.J. Little Louie Vega (“When the Night Is Over”), making Puente’s sound a rediscovered staple of the ’90s downtown Latin scene.Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, “Masterpiece” (2000)Going back to “Puente Goes Jazz” (1956), an underrecognized tour de force that also features Ray Barretto, and “Herman’s Heat & Puente’s Beat,” a 1958 collaboration with Woody Herman, Puente excelled at making records that strongly connected with his first love: jazz. Beginning with “On Broadway” in 1982, Puente embarked on a nine-album relationship with the jazz label Concord Records, doing covers of John Coltrane’s “Afro Blue,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” and Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco,” among an avalanche of original material that redefined Latin jazz as a genre, particularly through the spirit of underrecognized collaborators like the Dominican saxophonist Mario Rivera. His jazz period reached its peak with his 2000 collaboration with Eddie Palmieri, “Masterpiece.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      In Her New Show, Rita Indiana Confronts All Kinds of Ghosts

      by

      “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts Friday in New York, is a spiritual multimedia performance from the 45-year-old novelist and musician.“In the time you dropped a chorus, I wrote five novels.”It’s the kind of shot that only Rita Indiana could fire off in a song. The lyrics — which appear in “Como un dragón,” the lead single from the musician and writer’s last album, “Mandinga Times” in 2020 — encapsulate the interdisciplinary abundance she has cultivated over the last 20 years. They also show off a slick-talking, Caribbean kind of realness, which lives in the characters that populate her world.On a recent Friday afternoon, Indiana was running around at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, posing for photos and working on set decorations with an assistant. She and her wife, the Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero Herencia, were putting the final touches on a multimedia performance called “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts on Friday at the Clemente’s Flamboyán Theater.Indiana, who sports a huge tattoo of an American buffalo on her right hand, sighed as she paused to rest on a bench. Tufts of gray sprouted from her shaggy pixie cut. “I’m a punk abuela,” she said, laughing. Not quite your average grandma.Over the last two decades, the 45-year-old Dominican artist has transformed into one of the Caribbean’s foremost cultural agitators. Indiana’s repertoire unsettles deeply entrenched cultural norms — she’s not afraid to write queer sex scenes in her award-winning books, or condemn corrupt politicians in her genre-shattering songs. In 2010, she and her band Los Misterios released the blistering “El juidero,” a record about diasporic longing and Dominican identity that shredded up merengue, rock and Afro-Dominican folk styles.Indiana’s early works were almost documentarian, exploring the everyday joys and contradictions of Caribbean life. In recent years, she has journeyed into freakier, more fantastical universes. For “Mandinga Times,” which was nominated for a Latin Grammy, she developed a demonic nonbinary alter ego, meant to symbolize all kinds of marginalized bodies.Her 2015 novel “La mucama de Ominculé,” a dystopian tale set in Santo Domingo, follows a transgender protagonist who travels back in time via a divine sea anemone to save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Scholars praise Indiana’s constellatory style, particularly the way she integrates tropical futurism, queer poetics and the buoyancy of Dominican speech to imagine the liberatory possibilities of the present. The acclaim has made her a literary superstar; she is currently serving as the acting director of New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish M.F.A.At the Clemente, Quintero Herencia, who designed the sets for “Tu nombre verdadero,” whittled disembodied clay fingers while Indiana traced the creative process behind the show. It features her first new music since “Mandinga Times,” the LP that ended a 10-year hiatus during which she focused on writing. It’s also Indiana’s first piece as a New York resident. (The couple spent 14 years in Puerto Rico.)The show’s nonlinear story immerses the audience in experiences of death and illness, particularly as they relate to artists. Indiana said it explores the weight that an artist’s name has when they die. She cited the photographer, painter and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz; the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca as some of the figures that shaped the spirit of the performance. Indiana herself goes by a shortened version of her birth name (Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez), and said she chose it not to Anglicize her identity, but because she felt Indiana was more interesting.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya, where she studied alongside the visionary actors Claudio Rivera and Viena González. Quintero Herencia has worked as a director, prop designer and set builder in most of Indiana’s films and music videos, and said the piece will feature dreamlike visual projections. “Tu nombre verdadero” is the “inevitable fate of our practices,” Indiana added.While conceptualizing the show, commissioned by the Americas Society, the couple navigated a wave of death, both personal and collective. They mourned the millions lost in the pandemic, as well as close friends, relatives and beloved musicians, like Quintero Herencia’s mother, the Dominican painter Jorge Pineda and the merengue icon Johnny Ventura. In part, the performance is a way to guide “our ghosts” to a better place and process our memories of them, Indiana said.The couple’s longstanding fascination with death and ancestral energies has surfaced in their previous work. “I never separate my art from my spiritual world and the world of my ancestors,” Quintero Herencia said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, a documentary or a drawing. There’s always a channel that I open, that I know is connected to the ancestral world.” Indiana, whose father died violently when she was around 12, explained that death has intrigued her for as long as she can remember. She often wonders how a body “that we love with, fight with, work with, understand with, cry with” suddenly becomes nothing.It’s a subject that has also emerged from Caribbean colonial wounds. The island of Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the first New World colony settled by Spain in 1493. Indiana said the region is still confronting its sordid past — the massacre of native Taínos, the cruel violence of the Atlantic slave trade — and all the cultural knowledge and traditions that were annihilated in the process. “Colonialism is a machine of death,” she said. “We are a part of that — of all that pain and that whole factory of bones.”Indiana tapped a small crew of musicians for the show, including the composer and frequent collaborator Luis Amed Irizarry, who arranged the songbook for piano and drums. Efraín Martínez, a drummer who has toured with the merengue idol Olga Tañón and recorded with the reggae group Cultura Profética, also joined the lineup.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesIndiana described the compositions as “bare bones,” far removed from the conventional structures of popular music. “It’s a more poetic language, more absurd,” she said. “The references are from my childhood, the music I heard when I was very small.” She recalled the influence of her great-aunt Ivonne Haza, a decorated soprano, who was a vocal coach for some of the Dominican Republic’s most renowned singers, including Fernandito Villalona and Sonia Silvestre. Haza would give lessons at Indiana’s grandparents’ house, where Indiana lived until she was 7.“That was like the soundtrack to my homework — four hours, five hours of that,” she explained, chuckling.The songbook is impressionistic, sculpting Dominican gagá, Spanish copla, Cuban son and other genres into abstract shapes. There is even an experimental merengue, inspired by Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton scores, and an English-language satirical country number that addresses the brutality of Latin American dictatorships. Indiana burst into the chorus of the song, adopting a Southern twang: “He’s our strong man, he’s our puppet, he’s our pawn/You should see how he trips/Over our banana splits/When we choose his killers from among his own.”Indiana’s fearlessness helped inspire the Dominican artist La Marimba to fuse and tinker with disparate genres — to not be afraid to “have your own identity and show it.” She called Indiana a key figure in a movement of Dominican musicians who adapted the country’s folk traditions for the contemporary moment.A generation of young Dominican writers also identifies Indiana as a lodestar. Johan Mijail, who appeared in a 2018 anthology of contemporary Dominican literature that Indiana edited, said that Indiana’s novels permitted Mijail’s own writing to “offer a view of Santo Domingo and its outskirts where music, popular culture and the urban could be taken as possible horizons for sexual diversity to bloom.”With “Tu nombre verdadero” almost behind her, Indiana is working on her own books, too. “I wrote a novel last year that’s in a drawer right now,” she said, describing it as a “gender horror novel” she will revisit later. Another book, set in Puerto Rico and related to the Vietnam War, is coming later this year.No matter the medium, Indiana’s work is nourished by endless interrogation. She noted that the commitment to scrutiny — both of self and community — is grounded in her lived reality. “As a queer person, I’m questioning my identity until I’m dead,” she said. “In this perpetual transitional state,” she added, “what is my real name?” More