Bad Night With a Familiar Haunt

With his big protruding ears, thin face, brushy caterpillar moustache beneath a long nose and no chin, he would have been called a jarhead sixty years ago. Over blue jean shorts and docksiders with no socks, he’s wearing what appears to be a high school letterman’s jacket embroidered with a Middle Eastern airline logo. On his neck is a tattoo of a large rodent – a muskrat? A possum, maybe? having sex with a pig. He’s talking to his two twentysomething companions in a loud, nasal, petulant voice, as if to make himself heard over background noise. Except that there’s none to speak of.

As the lights in the room dim, he and his pals – a woman in a gingham dress with curlers in her hair and wire-frame granny glasses, and a young man sporting the shorts/docksiders/no-socks look –  take a few steps back. The mustachioed boy sits down on the floor beside the Man in the Long Black Coat, who’s leaning against the back wall. If the boy was taller, his nose would be rubbing up against the man’s crotch rather than his leg.

See, the Man in the Long Black Coat is sometimes invisible.

He’s especially invisible tonight. Even the waitress doesn’t see him, and he and the waitress are friendly. In fact, he’s so invisible this particular night that for the first time, he was able to make another person invisible. It was a friend’s nine-year-old daughter. Good thing she didn’t realize it, he muses. It would have scared the bejeezus out of her.

Even before the days of the Long Black Coat, he’s had this mysterious power. He could never control it then. These days he can sometimes, but only in certain places – if he’s sober. Tonight he’s full of wine from a party earlier in the day. It was Make Music NY afternoon in Fort Greene: Rose Thomas Bannister played a short, psychedelic set of allusively vengeful Macbeth-inspired songs; an old guy with a thick Russian accent sang funny ditties about science education and Donald Trump. To think I blew off Inti and the Moon for this shit, the Man in the Long Black Coat chastises himself. He could use another drink, he thinks, but he doesn’t want to disturb the waitress.

He didn’t leave the party to see the guy with the guitar who’s just taken the stage, but he is curious about a red-dressed woman who is scheduled to play. The guy with the guitar jokes with audience members – they all seem to know him – and his speaking voice doesn’t allude to anything out of the ordinary. But he sings in a wittoo tiny cowtoonish Elmer Fudd voice. Then he drops the affectation for between-song banter.

Hesitantly and cautiously, he introduces a topical number, but one that doesn’t namecheck Trump or reference anything specific about these “uncertain” times, as he calls them. He’s all gassed about finally having a new vinyl album out. Trying to look modest, he carries on and on about how big his face is on the album cover – and he’s right, it’s larger than lifesize.

Finally the woman in the red dress sits down at the piano. She’s a competent player and can carry a tune, but the love song she plays is prosaic, a diary entry set to an innocuously forgettable pop melody. Then she picks up her guitar and duets with the guy, who still uses the Elmer Fudd voice when he sings harmonies. The crowd is enthusiastic: lots of video is being sent home to family back in Minnesota.

The Man in the Long Black Coat has had enough. As cautiously as the guy with the guitar, he edges his way through the throng of kids fixated on their phones. By the time he’s outside, he can see his reflection in the windows of the cars along the curb. I could REALLY use a drink right about now, he thinks.

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Le Trio Joubran Salute Their Late Collaborator Mahmoud Darwish With an Unforgettable, Intense Performance at the Lincoln Center Festival

There were innumerable long passages in Palestinian oud-playing brothers Le Trio Joubran’s multimedia performance last night at the Lincoln Center Festival that were absolutely shattering. Time stood still. When did Wish You Were Here, the stark, haunted dirge that the trio began with, end? After five minutes of hushed, bereaved minimalism, or closer to thirty? Realistically, it was on the shorter side, but it left a vast impact.

Yet moments like those were balanced by others that were ridiculously funny. Which ultimately came as no surprise, considering that the show was a homage to the group’’s late collaborator and countryman, poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Darwish saw himself as an exile. His childhood village was one of the hundreds bulldozed to make room for Israeli settlers in the wake of the 1948 war. In a country the size of South Carolina, that makes an awful lot of refugees. He returned as an adult, eventually joining the Palestinian government’s inner circle but then withdrawing, disillusioned: he had no tolerance for the hypocrisy of politics. Widely considered to be the voice of the Palestinian people, his richly ironic, fiercely proud, relentlessly defiant work speaks to anyone estranged from their home, physically or otherwise.

Darwish died in 2008: for the last twelve years of his life, Le Trio Joubran were his backing band and musical sparring partners. To play along with his recorded voice must have been a considerable emotional challenge for them, but this time they didn’t let on. Darwish was ailing when he made those recordings, but his voice was virile, supremely confident and as nuanced as his words, simultaneously projected in Arabic and English translation above the stage.

One of the group’s signature tropes is to play in unison with a flurrying, precise, tremoloing strum, a sepulchrally fluttering low-string section with an ancient resonance deeper than any western orchestra could achieve. They did that a lot, especially in the most somber passages. But the three oudists also lept, and bounded, and exchanged jaunty riffs, sometimes with an Andalucian flair, most notably in response to an innuendo-packed erotic poem ripe with surrealistic, irresistibly hilarious Freudian imagery.

The rest of the music was a dynamically shifting mirror for the poetry: Darwish zings you with a one-liner, then delivers a gutpunch. Fate and luck are fickle, at best, indelibly illustrated via excerpts from his epic The Dice Player. One of his characters misses his flight because he’s not a morning person, a good thing because it would have crashed with him onboard. In Darwish’s world, two things that make life worth living are invaders’ fear of memories, and tyrants’ fear of songs.

Samir Joubran played a slightly larger model than the instruments in the hands of his two younger brothers, Wissam and Adnan, taking the lowest descents of the night. Drummer Youssef Hbeisch began with a somber, boomy beat on daf frame drum and then moved behind a full kit, which he played with hands, maintaining a muted, subtly colored pulse – at least until a solo where the three brothers encircled him and added their own playful beats. They’d revisit that on the encores – after a warmly rousing singalong, Samir and Wissam played basslines on Adnan’s oud in perfect unison with their brother’s briskly chromatic, dancing lines. It’s impossible to imagine a concert by a single band in New York in 2017 any more riveting or thrilling than this.

This year’s Lincoln Center Festival is a wrap, but Lincoln Center Out of Doors – this city’s most consistently surprising and eclectic free concert series – is in full swing. Angelique Kidjo makes an appearance (but not singing her own material) on August 2; on August 3 at7:30 there’s a Bollywood music-and-dance extravaganza out back in Damrosch Park that looks enticing. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Rev. Vince Anderson: Brooklyn’s Wildest, Most Relevant Monday Night Institution

The 2016 Presidential election really lit a fire under Rev. Vince Anderson. That was a dreaded wakeup call for just about everyone, but it really pushed the bushy-bearded, wild-haired keyboardist and jamband leader to new levels of intensity. “Get off that magic rectangle,” he admonished the crowd more than once a couple of weeks ago at his ongoing Monday night residency at Union Pool. “Just turn around, look at your neighbor and introduce yourself,” he cajoled.

That moment turned out to be infinitely less awkward that it would have been in a house of worship. A vacationing Georgia couple were wide-eyed; they admitted not having the slightest idea of what they’d just wandered into. “He’s a New York institution,” explained the tired but obviously reinvigorated black-clad man next to them.

In the years since Anderson first started playing his first weekly residency at the old Avenue B Social Club in the East Village, he’s switched out any kind of overtly Christian message for a community-centered, populist philosophy that he’s really concretized and brought to the stage since last year’s November surprise. And while gospel music is still the foundation of what he plays with his raucous, semi-rotating backing band the Love Choir, these days his sound is more funk and soul-oriented. The songs go on for ten minutes or more, with all kinds of dynamics, ferocious and stampeding, then hushed.

There was a time when he’d always open the show with Get Out of My Way, the pummeling first cut on his 2002 album The 13th Apostle: the studio version is a mashup of Gogol Bordello, Tom Waits and oldschool gospel. These days, Anderson plays the song closer to lickety-split Billy Preston funk…but he also likes to bring it down to a lusciously glimmering classical piano interlude. This guy can literally play anything.

Over the past couple of months, he’s also opened with a rapt, quiet take of the gospel standard Precious Lord, Take My Hand, and with Ready for the Light, a relatively new number that’s sort of symphonic James Brown. His best song lately, which he’s been playing at pretty much every show, is a new version of his slow but mighty gospel anthem I Don’t Think Jesus Would Have Done It That Way. Anderson wrote that one in response to the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, but the new version is even more incendiary. Anderson takes potshots at Trump and the swamp cabinet and Steve Bannon in particular: it ends with everybody that Trump hates – immigrants, gays, women and, hell, pretty much all of us – having a barbecue on the White House lawn.

Watching the audience react is fascinating – and sad. Much as this is one of the rare Williamsburg events that draws both a local black and latino crowd as well as the young Republicans hell-bent on taking over the neighborhood, the former contingent here is a lot smaller than it used to be. And the song doesn’t get the enthusiastic reaction you might think it would: there’s a lot of polite silence, and a little clapping, mostly from the women – there are always a handful of Hillary supporters. Obviously, the young Republicans come here to to dance, not to be confronted by any reality that would threaten their rich parents’ dominance in the political sphere, never mind their real estate bubble profits.

But the crowd be damned – the music is fantastic. The first couple of shows in May were on the lacklustre side since the band had a sub guitarist who obviously didn’t really get the music. On the third and next-to-last Mondays in May, regular axeman Jaleel Bunton was back with his psychedelic bluesmetal/funk attack and the energy suddenly went back through the roof.

The second Monday in June, Bunton was absent again, but in his place was the brilliant Binky Griptite, the late, great Sharon Jones’ lead guitarist, who brought his elegant, virtuosic, low-key Hendrix-inspired lines to the mix and as usual elevated everybody in the band. The week after that was Moist Paula Henderson’s birthday, so Anderson gave her a feature in an old audience favorite, the nocturnal waltz New Orleans, 4 AM. His longtime baritone saxophonist, musical sparring partner and “ex-wife,” as he’s called her for the better part of two decades, responded with her usual blend of irony, humor and irrepressible fun. The group had a great drummer that night, too – it was the bartender!

They had their usual guy behind the kit, Torbitt Schwartz, back the week after, for a little extra slink alongside most of the regular band, which also comprises bassist Jeremy Willms and trombonist Dave Smith.

Rev. Vince Anderson’s Union Pool residency continues this Monday, July 31 at around 10:30 PM. And Henderson’s weekly residency with Binky Griptite continues on Wednesdays in  August at around 8 at Threes Brewing, 113 Franklin St. at Kent Ave in Greenpoint.

It’s a Great Summer for Middle Eastern Music in New York

While much of the New York City parks system is on the highway to privatized hell – both Central Park Summerstage and the Prospect Park Bandshell series are selling ticketed seats to free concerts now – we haven’t yet reached the point where free summer concerts here have been whitewashed and yuppified to the point of irrelevance. Meanwhile, serendipitously, there have been some new publicly accessible concert series popping up, keeping the hallowed tradition of free summer concerts here alive.

One public space that’s been flying more or less under the radar until recently is Bryant Park. It wouldn’t be fair to let the month go by without mentioning the transcendent performance by slinky Middle Eastern ensemble the Bil Afrah Project, who opened the final night of this year’s Accordions Around the World festival there. Obviously, it would have been fun to stick around for the whole night, which ended with a wall-to-wall sea of revelers celebrating Colombian Independence Day.

The park’s overseers had the good sense to put the festival in the hands of tireless, intrepid impresario Ariana Hellerman (publisher of the irreplaceable Ariana’s List of free summer events). Over the course of the month, she drew from her roster of two hundred of New York’s finest accordionists (yes, there are that many) for a series of performances that reinforced the instrument’s portability across cultures, a powerful if compact vehicle for musical cross-pollination. 

In barely a half hour onstage, the Bil Afrah Project – who dedicate themselves to recreating Ziad Rahbani’s iconic 1975 Bil Afrah suite of reinvented Lebanese and Egyptian love and love-gone-wrong ballads- raised the bar for the rest of the evening dauntingly high. Rahbani has since gone on to be called the Lebanese Bob Dylan, although many others, none of whom sound anything like the American Nobel Laureate, have been given that label. Rahbani – son of famous chanteuse Fairouz and songwriter Assi Rahbani – was nineteen when he pulled a band together to record it. The suite doesn’t have much of the acerbically fearless political sensibility that characterizes his later work: its populist message is much subtler, grounded in its achingly wistful, sometimes melancholic, sometimes bucolic themes.

Group members, notably oudist Brian Prunka, accordionist Simon Moushabeck, ney flutist Bridget Robbins and violinist Sami Abu Shumays took turns playing plaintive taqsims as segues between songs. The most incisive, intense of these was from buzuq player Josh Farrar, who remained very prominent in the mix. John Murchison, a connoisseur of Middle Eastern bass, made his debut concert on kanun a memorable one as well. And riq tambourinist Michel Merhej Baklouk, who played on the original album, was present and added an almost defiantly crescendoing solo toward the end of the suite as the edgy chromatics, uneasy microtonal modes and graceful sweep of the music rose and fell over the pulse of Sprocket Royer’s bass and Jeremy Smith’s darbouka. Then emcee Rachelle Garniez took the stage and treated the crowd to some similarly incisive banter and her own noir-tinged material.

The performances on the festival’s next-to-last night fit in perfectly with its eclectic sensibility as well. Over the course of the early part of the evening, Erica Mancini played jaunty oldtimey swing, then made noir mambo out of the old standard St. Louis Blues. Shoko Nagai began with airy, austere Japanese folk themes and then went deep into the dark, kinetic chromatics of the klezmer music she loves so much.

Will Holshouser, best known for his exhilarating speed and high-voltage solos, flipped the script with his own thoughtful, methodically shifting originals, occasionally alluding to Indian modes: as a pioneer of the pastoral jazz revival, he deserves far more credit than he’s been given. And a beautiful blue-eyed blonde in the crowd called out Eduardo de Carvalho for the masculinity of his playing. That’s not to say that the other performances weren’t strong, but there was plenty of muscle in his confident, impassioned, unselfconsciously soulful, rustic runs through a mini-set of forro and tango.

Circling back to the Middle Eastern theme, there are a couple of upcoming shows that shouldn’t be missed. On July 29 at 8 at the Lynch Theatre at 524 W 59th St., haunting Lebanese oud-playing brothers the Trio Joubran  perform a homage to their late collaborator, the incendiary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish as part of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival; $30 tix are still available. And on August 10 at 10 PM, legendary, ageless Armenian-American jazz reedman Souren Baronian leads his amazing band at Barbes.

A Historic Rickie Lee Jones Performance Opens This Year’s Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival

Iconic beatnik rock songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Rickie Lee Jones opened this year’s Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival last night playing her cult favorite 1981 Pirates album cover to cove for the first time ever. There are other must-see outdoor festivals in this city – the ongoing slate of shows at Prospect Park Bandshell is particularly enticing – but year after year, this series has plenty of sonic treats for both the cognoscenti and the merely curious. And Damrosch Park grows more and more hospitable as other parts of town go in the opposite direction.

“Pirates is forty-four minutes long,” Jones explained. “We stretched the integrity of the grooves.” What she meant by that was that there’s only so much music you can fit on a side of a vinyl album. Cram the grooves too close together and not is the sound compromised: a bad needle can do twice as much damage. “That was a long time ago,” Jones shrugged.

Her voice is more weathered now, but she still hits the high notes, arguably with more authenticity than she had when she made the record – although by that time she’d already established herself among the indomitable, resolute outsiders who populate her street scenes and wee-hours narratives. What’s most striking about the album is how surprisingly well it holds together despite Jones’ stylistic leapfrogging, from allusive latin grooves, to oldschool 60s soul, hints of gospel and the occasional detour down toward glimmering neoromanticism..

So it made sense that it was basically Steely Dan who backed her on the record. This time out, the seven-piece group behind her punched in when required, otherwise providing a low-key backdrop for Jones’ incisive, emphatic piano. Guitarist Tony Scherr took all of one solo all night on his Gibson SG, an understatedly moody, bluesy couple of bars. Likewise, trumpeter Steven Bernstein, tenor saxophonist Michael Blake, and the group’s multi-reedman, multi-percussionist, bassist and drummer rose together when a chorus or a turnaround would hit a peak.

Jones has switched out her signature coy chirp from forty years ago for a gracefully melismatic approach that shows off how much low-register power she’s gained over the years. She’s aged magnificently well: it would be fair to say that she’s grown into herself. In that context, her late-night cat-and-mouse flirtation scenarios and character studies of the down-but-hardly-out have gained poignancy. The tales on this album include but are hardly limited to a death by police shooting, a pregnancy, lots of moving around, endings and new beginnings and enough banter for two, maybe three Bo Diddley records. At the end, Jones finally emerged from behind the piano, sauntered around the stage, picked up her acoustic guitar and led the band through a tightly dancing, understatedly triumphant take of Traces of the Western Slopes.

Lincoln Center Out of Doors continues tonight at 7 PM at Damrosch Park with a four-act extravaganza from across the latin music spectrum: fiery, dramatic belter Xenia Rubinos,  trippy downtempo guy Helado Negro,  our own Alynda Segarra aka Hurray For the Riff Raff, and finally fearlessly populist LA folk-punks Las Cafeteras,

Maria Pomianowska Brings Moody Medieval Polish Themes and Instruments Into the 21st Century at Lincoln Center

Early in her set last night at Lincoln Center’s Kaplan Penthouse, Maria Pomianowska held up her handmade fiddle, called a suka in her native Poland. “It doesn’t translate well,” she grinned. Since the 1990s, when she singlehandedly rescued this once-ubiquitous folk instrument from obscurity – basing her initial design on a rare depiction in an 18th century painting – it’s enjoyed a resurgence. Its rich, starkly resonant sound explains why.

Pomianowska took care to remind that her goal isn’t merely to lead a period-instrument ensemble playing ancient repertoire: she wants to take the instrument into the here and now. What stood out most in her quartet’s performance was how hard this band jams. That made sense in context: watching her stretch the limits of her alternately stately and joyous compositions, along with several medieval themes, evoked images of rolling hills, windswept fields and circles of line dancers being pushed further toward ecstasy.

Pomianowska played a five-string Biłgoraj suka – named for the city in northeastern Poland where it originated – for most of the show. With a body carved from a single block of wood, its range is similar to a viola, but with a low string that Pomianowska employed to anchor the melodies, or for a drone effect. That was bolstered on the low end by Iwona Rapacz, who switched between elegantly plucked basslines and austere washes on her four-string bass suka.

Playing the regular proto-violin suka, Aleksandra Kauf often doubled Pomianowska’s lines as well as her poignantly rustic, ambered high harmonies on the vocal numbers. Some of this was akin to Bulgarian folk music, but stripped to its brooding minor-key essentials. Percussionist Patrycja Napierała provided an often Middle Eastern-tinged groove on daf frame drum, at other times using her brushes on a similarly boomy hand drum for a spot-on impersonation of a tabla. That final ingredient proved to be one of the main keys to Pomianowska’s cross-cultural, cross-centuries style.

The group began austerely and carefully in the fourteenth century, moved forward more kinetically to the sixteenth and then took a leap into this one. While Pomianowska took the lead on the folk jams – a handful of dances and a hypnotic dirge – the rest of the band contributed subtly, and not so subtly when Kauf suddenly took one of the slower numbers warpspeed. Pomianowska’s own pieces were, predictably, the most cinematically shapeshifting, from a slowly mutating Nordic fjord tableau, to a couple of jauntily circling interludes with a Celtic-tinged flair, to a suspensefully crescendoing nocturne based on an Indian raga that proved to be the night’s most rapturous work. The group’s response to a rousing ovation was an encore that went straight to pastoral Chopin plaintiveness.

The most auspicious of all the upcoming Lincoln Center Festival shows is this Saturday night, July 29 at 8 at John Jay College’s Lynch Theatre, 524 W 59th St., where haunting Lebanese oud-playing brothers the Trio Joubran perform a homage to their late collaborator, the incendiary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. $30 tix are still available.

Austin’s Best Band Comes to Brooklyn’s Best Venue This Saturday Night

Is Money Chicha’s album Echo en Mexico the heaviest cumbia ever made? Decide for yourself – it’s streaming at Soundcloud.  Just listen, for example, to the string-torturing axe-murderer guitar solo at the end of their version of Juaneco Y Su Combo’s classic, wordless elegy for a plane crash,  Lamento En La Selva, which opens the album. If psychedelic music, the magically trebly, trippy sounds of 1970s Peru, or the idea of dancing your ass off are your thing, get that ass down to Barbes this Saturday night, July 30 at 10 PM where this Austin band – a Grupo Fantasma spinoff – are headlining. A near-capacity crowd crammed into the place last night to see Locobeach – another spinoff of a famous band, in this case cumbia icons Chicha Libre – and they were playing mostly covers. So you’d better get there early.

What’s coolest about this band is how they cycle through just about every kind of psychedelic cumbia ever made: the brisk vamps of Juaneco’s cumbia selvetica; the allusive menace of Lima bands like Los Mirlos; the eclectic sparkle of Los Destellos and the outside-the-box surrealism of Chicha Libre, probably the band they ultimately resemble the most.

The album’s  second track, Level One Sound’s Quieren Efectos, has everything you could want from a classic cumbia jam: catchy minor-key tune, woozy wah guitar, a slinky groove, bright rat-tail organ riffs, trippy dub echoes and a suspenseful timbale beat that threatens to break completely loose but never does.

The title cut shuffles along briskly toward the graveyard, awash in reverb, haunted roller-rink organ and evil flangey guitar. The majestic, metallic guitar solo midway through reminds that the core of this band also play in Black Sabbath reinventors Brownout. Then they completely flip the script with the playful, cartoonish Animalitos: tiny elephants made from sweet crunchy dough = gourmet stoner munchies, no?

Cosa Verde, built around a simple, emphatic riff, looks back to the harder-rocking, classic Lima bands of the late 60s and early 70s like Los Diablo Rojos: the warpy tremoloing guitars really nail that era’s tinny studio sonics, beefed up with fat current-era low end and an unexpectedly dark bridge.

Cumbia Familiar is a very thinly disguised remake of a famous island tv theme first surfed out by the Ventures; this one has all kinds of spacy dub touches wafting through the mix. The album’s best track, Chicha Negra is also is darkest, simmering and swooshing with evil chromatics, serpentine organ and warptone guitar. Its mirror image is the Chicha Libre classic Papageno Electrico, a picture that completes itself when the organ joins the guitar duel at the end.

Yo No Soy Turku is a mashup of the blippy Mediterranean psychedelia of bands like Annabouboula and the macabre Turkish surf rock of Beninghove’s Hangmen. Likewise, the tricky, constantly shifting metrics and horror movie organ of 3 Balls continue the sinister tangent through a strange, dubby outro.

Cumbia Del Tamborcito is the album’s most dubwise and epic track, veering from a staggering intro, back and forth through gritty guitar-fueled intensity and lushly enveloping, nebulously smoky sonics. The final cut is La Cordillera, a deliciously doomy flamenco-metal song in cumbia disguise. Is the coolest album of the last several months or what?

Acerbic, Catchy LA Folk-Punks Las Cafeteras Headline This Thursday at Lincoln Center Out of Doors

Sometimes Las Cafeteras come across as sort of the Mexican Pogues – with an infinitely better singer. Other times they could be a more rock-oriented version of New York son jarocho folk-punks Radio Jarocho. The bilingual Los Angeles band’s punchy acoustic sound has a fearless political relevance to go along with a spiky catchiness. Their latest album, Tastes Like LA is streaming at Bandcamp, and they’re headlining an excellent pan-latin bill at Lincoln Center Out of Doors this Thursday, July 27 at around 10. Fiery, dramatic belter Xenia Rubinos opens the night at 7, followed by trippy downtempo guy Helado Negro and then our own fearlessly lyrical Hurray For the Riff Raff. It won’t hurt to get to Damrosch Park as early as you can; gates open at 6.

The album opens with the catchy Tiempos De Amor, its bouncy, anthemic tune in contrast to frontwoman Leah Rose Gallegos’ biting delivery, an anthem for anyone who would dare create a better world in a time when it’s never been more imperiled, for immigrants or anyone else. The band revisits that theme with the snide lyrical volleys of Señor Presidente a little later on.

Vamos to the Beach – how’s that for Spanglish? – is more carefree, with its shuffling acoustic textures (that’s Hector Paul Flores on jarana tercera, Daniel Joel Jesus French on jarana segunda and Jorge Mijangos on requinto), tinkling glockenspiel and peppy brass. Paletero, a salute to refreshing treats from the guy with the cart full of ices, has a bittersweet, reggae-tinged groove and a chirpy vocal. At one point, if the band switched out the thicket of acoustic instrumentation and keening organ for a more electric arrangement, it would be a dead ringer for a big Cure hit from the early 80s.

Las Cafeteras’ remake of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land is definitely the wildest anybody’s ever done with this song, an apt direction to take in this era of deportations and Boris Yeltsin-like demagoguery about border walls. The optimistic anthem Apache is a Mexican take on late 90s trip-hop, while the harmonies of La Morena, a shout-out to a Mexican earth mother archetype, bring to mind New York’s all-female Mariachi Flor de Toloache.

If I Was President features defiantly optimistic rap cameos, matching Gallegos’  resolutely assertive vocals. Likewise, the loping Feo Mas Bello is a joyous look forward to as-yet-unrealized romantic bliss…and possibly a long-overdue reunion with a loved one from south of the border. The album winds up with the unexpectedly C&W flavored Two More Days, tackling that same theme much less opaquely. Crank this up and let’s party for our right to fight.

Maria Pomianowska Brings Her Magically Shapeshifting Polish String Sounds to the Lincoln Center Festival

Maria Pomianowska‘s axe is the Biłgoraj suka, a medieval Polish forerunner of today’s violin, which she’s responsible for literally reconstructing and rescuing from obscurity. Leading her chamber ensemble, she’s playing her own hauntingly eclectic, classical and folk-influenced repertoire for the instrument this Tuesday, July 25 at 8 PM at the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center as part of this year’s the Lincoln Center Festival. Tix are steep – $35 – but this is a rare chance to see this magical Polish artist.

Pomianowska’s’s latest album – streaming at Bandcamp – is The Voice of Suka, an aptly titled series of pastoral themes. It’s sort of a wider-angle, more panoramic take on what Vivaldi did with the Four Seasons, although there’s surprisingly less wintriness here than in the chilly coda to the Italian composer’s suite. Maybe it’s natural for a Polish composer to wish for summer, and for an Italian to crave a little frost.

Pomianowska’s  Biłgoraj suka (named for its city of origin) has a ripe resonance enhanced by the natural reverb of the room where the album was recorded. The core of her period-instrument ensemble comprises Aleksandra Kauf on vocals, Bilgoraj suka and mielec suka; Iwona Rapacz on bass suka, and Patrycja Napierała on percussion. The album’s title track, Step has a steady pulse that also proves true to its title, a deceptively simple series of echo phrases from the strings over syncopated clip-clop percussion, with a windswept Nordic flavor. Wind, a breezy, lilting, baroque-tinged dance, is grounded by long, sustained, drony bass suka lines.

Rainbow begins as a lush. graceful waltz and then Pomianowska picks up the pace; it ends cold. By contrast, Ocean has a dancing bass suka vamp holding down a deeper, darker pulse, a bouncy one-chord groove with Pomianowska’s bouncy eighth notes and rustic melismas overhead. Valley is even darker, a melancholy, starkly memorable Slavic pavane for choir and strings, Pomianowska deftly building it to a baroque swirl. She echoes that later on in River, with its stern choral arrangement.

The album’s most intense, shapeshifting track, Island, bridges the gap between Middle Eastern and Celtic modes, from a steady Nordic pulse to a brooding waltz out. Pomianowska goes in the opposite direction with Fjord. its hazy summer ambience punctuated by incisively flickering suka lines, up to a somber stroll in the same vein as her earlier valley theme. Forest is more shady and shadowy than verdant as the ensemble waltzes resolutely with uneasy Balkan tinges.

Desert, the most mysterious track here, has an enigmatically catchy, Balkan-tinged melody and variations anchored by a dark, distantly boomy Middle Eastern daf drumbeat, up to a breathtaking trick ending. It makes a good good segue, and an even better parallel, with the slowly crescendoing, epic Monsoon, slowly rising with Indian tabla rhythm and similarly uneasy modal variations. The album closers somberly with a wistful song without words, Sluzytem Ja Tobie (I Brought This to You). This music will resonate with a lot of people: fans of classical and Hardanger fiddle music and also the moody folk sounds of the Balkans and further east.

Innov Gnawa and Amadou & Mariam at the Peak of Their Psychedelic Powers at Prospect Park

“It’s hot all over,” guitarist/singer Amadou Bagayoko remarked to the Prospect Park Bandshell crowd last night in his heavy-lidded, Malian French drawl. On the hottest night of the year so far, one of the other things he noticed that was all over the place was weed. See, Amadou is blind. His other senses are working overtime.

But it hardly took a sensitive nose to pick up on what was wafting from the slope out back: this was a show for the smokers. And the place was packed: from personal experience and a survey of random concertgoers who’ve seen multiple shows here recently, the only act who’s drawn as much of a crowd as Amadou & Mariam was Jamaican dancehall star Chronixx. Psychedelic music has never been so popular as it is in 2017.

Which is no surprise. Amadou & Mariam are arguably the world’s most individualistic psychedelic rock band. Over the years, they’ve inched further and further from their original mashup of sprawling two-chord Malian desert rock jams and bouncy central African pop, to a much more western sound rooted in the 1960s. And they’ve never sounded so interesting, or eclectic as they are now.

Mariam Doumbia – Amadou’s wife and childhood sweetheart – sang in her enigmatic, uneasily bronzed, sometimes gritty delivery in both French and Bambara, often harmonizing with Amadou’s balmy croon, going through a couple of costume changes in the process. Behind them, their drummer alternated between stomp, slink and funk while their bassist played tasteful, serpentine riffs and countermelodies, their keyboardist adding lushness and lustre on organ and several synth patches.

They opened with Bofou Safou, their driving, biting new single, sending a message that this show was going to rock pretty hard. From there they made their way methodically through a couple of leaping dance-funk numbers that brought to mind mid-80s Talking Heads, a starry nightscape with majestic Pink Floyd echoes, several similarly mighty blues-based anthems and a deliciously creepy detour into late 60s Laurel Canyon psychedelia.

It was on that allusively menacing number that Amadou took his longest, wildest, solo of the night. While his playing sometimes brings to mind the feral icepicking of Albert Collins, the twangy sparkle of Mark Knopfler and the machinegunning hammer-ons of Vieux Farka Toure, he doesn’t seem to be influenced by any of them, and with the exception of his countryman and younger colleague Toure, may not have even heard those guys. Winding up and down and around, he brought his long trails of sixteenth notes home to a final comet tail and wild applause. The band have a new album due out next month: if this concert is any indication, it’s going to be amazing.

Brooklyn’s own Innov Gnawa, whose career has taken a meteoric rise recently, opened and got a full hour onstage, a rarity at this venue. The sea of fans they’d brought to the show might explain why. Fresh off a Coachella appearance and a marathon series of New York club gigs, it’s hard to imagine a hotter band in town right now.

The only gnawa band in the world west of Morocco, they play the original drum-and-bass music. With roots in sub-Saharan, pre-Muslim central Africa, transplanted to the north, many of their hypnotic, pulsing, crackling themes date from over a thousand years ago. It’s party music, for sure, but it has even more cultural resonance for healing and spiritual purposes. With limited time (for them – this band can jam for hours) and a big stage to work with, they clanked and boomed and snapped their way through a dynamic mix of straight-ahead dance jams and trickier, turn-on-a-dime rhythms, winding up with frontman/sintir lute player Hassan Ben Jaafer running his basslines faster and faster as his chanting choir of bandmates whirled their cast-iron castnets, encircling him and bringing the show to a peak that would have been daunting to most headliners other than Amadou & Mariam.

Amadou & Mariam continue on US tour; their next show is on July 24 at 6:30 PM at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park in Chicago; admission is free. Innov Gnawa are uptown at Ginny’s Supper Club on July 27, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30  PM; your best deal is standing room at the bar for $15.

The next show at Prospect Park Bandshell is tomorrow night, July 22 at 7:30 PM and opens auspiciously with Innov Gnawa percussionist Amino Belyamani’s similarly innovative, mesmerizingly rhythmic dancefloor minimalist trio, Dawn of Midi. Jury’s out on the headliner: are Mashrou ‘Leila the Lebanese Cure, or just another lame corporate dance-rock act?