'Latin Alternative' on KCSN gives Latino music a new accent

  Latino and Latin American music audiences in L.A. have no trouble finding chart-topping artists such as Shakira, Pitbull or Mana on their radio dial. But there are far fewer places to tune in to the likes of more alternative acts such as Café Tacuba, Zoe, Ximena Sarinana, Ozomatli and Aterciopelados.

Now there's at least one more: "The Latin Alternative," the 2-week-old program of cutting-edge Spanish-accented music, from neo-funk to cumbia-laced electronica, airing on Cal State Northridge's radio station KCSN-FM (88.5) on Thursday nights from 9 to 10 p.m. The station bills the new program as the first nationally syndicated public radio show that focuses on Latin alternative music but is hosted in English.

The show, which now airs on 16 public radio stations across the country, is co-hosted by Josh Norek, a co-founder of the Latin Alternative Music Conference and frontman of the group Hip Hop Hoodíos, and Ernesto Lechner, author of the book "Rock en Español: The Latin Alternative Rock Explosion," and a journalist who contributes to the Los Angeles Times.

In some ways, the program's arrival is long overdue. Los Angeles is home to the largest Latino population in the United States, and several Spanish-language stations here are among the region's top rated in any format. Southern California also is home to a cosmopolitan cadre of English-speaking listeners who are devotees of progressive Latin music.

But the majority of big local commercial stations hew to playlists that are heavy on pop superstars or else traditional regional ranchera and musica norteña. 

"We've always believed there's a bigger market" for stations that specialize in contemporary Latin sub-genres, says Norek, who grew up in Albany, N.Y. (where "The Latin Alternative" also airs). "It was not easy being the one Latin alternative fan in upstate New York," says Norek, who now makes his home in Northern California and periodically commutes to L.A. to tape his show with Lechner.

Norek says that part of their program's purpose is to provide context to the music they play for listeners whose first language may not be Spanish. That might mean explaining a song's lyrical wordplay or decoding its references to current events. "Music there is far more politically conscious than most music you’ll hear here," he says.

Sky Daniels, KCSN's program director, says the new program complements other shows recently added at the station, including one hosted by Nic Harcourt, who formerly helmed the mike for KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic."

"We incorporate a lot of new music because as a noncommercial station I certainly don't have the musical pressures that my brethren have," says Daniels, adding that he hopes to gradually incorporate even more Latin music in the station's other programming.

Norek describes his and Lechner's musical tastes as broadly compatible. "When I first met him it was just like a brother from another mother," he says. "We still have differences of opinion at times, but it’s a polite debate."

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Photo: "Latin Alternative" co-hosts Ernesto Lechner (left), Josh Norek. Credit: Josh Norek.

Salvador pop heroes will relive Buenas Epocas at Hollywood Park

 

For a generation of Salvadoran Americans who remember the golden age of Salvadoran pop music before the country's brutal civil war of the 1980s and early '90s, the buenas epocas (good times) may roll again this Saturday night. That's when more than half a dozen star frontmen of some of El Salvador's top pop bands of the '60s and '70s will reunite for an 8 p.m. concert at Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood.

Like the early Chicano bands of East L.A., Salvadoran pop and rock musicians were heavily influenced by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Motown and James Brown and began imitating them. At first, most Salvadoran bands cranked out Spanish-language cover versions of hits like "Louie, Louie." Many Salvadorans still regard those versions -- not their English-language counterparts -- as the originals.

Later, swayed by the era's experimental vibes, Salvadoran groups began writing their own songs, combining British Invasion-style pop hooks with salsa and cumbia beats and swoony bolero sentiments. It was Salvador's version of a global pop music boom that was paralleled in places like Brazil, where the Tropicalia movement similarly fused native bossa nova with Anglo-American rock and psychedelic pop.

David Wax Museum brings Mexican masters' lessons to Wiltern

 David Wax, of the indie-folk-American band David Wax Museum -- which performs at the Wiltern Wednesday night with the Old '97s and Josh Ritter -- finished up his undergraduate career at Harvard University several years ago. But his quest for musical knowledge from both the U.S. and Mexico seems limitless.

A composer, guitarist and jazz pianist, with an obviously deep mental storehouse of native U.S. musical forms from bluegrass to rock, Wax also is a student of Mexican regional music. During and after his Ivy League years, he spent several months in rural Mexico, mastering three of that country's most venerable and challenging folk strains -- son jarocho, son huasteco and son calentano -- as well as instruments like the jarana, an eight-string guitar.

"They’re instruments that you could devote a lifetime of study to," he said in an interview, "but I reached a level of competency with them where I felt comfortable playing the music and felt I could play with other musicians."

Many of those rhythms and instrumental arrangements eventually made their way into David Wax Museum's aptly titled bilingual second album, "Everything Is Saved."

Los Amigos Invisibles, at Hollywood Bowl, has a friend in Dudamel

Los Amigos Invisibles, which is playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl Friday and Saturday, has at least one friend who's very visible these days: Gustavo Dudamel, the Phil's music director.

Like the band, renowned for its dance-happy fusions of funk, merengue and disco, Dudamel is a Venezuela native who's well-versed in multiple musical genres. As anyone who has seen him and his wife, Eloisa, salsa dancing can attest, Dudamel -- whose father played in bands -- is as at home on a dance floor as he is conducting the Phil at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

In a phone interview from his New York home this week, Jose Luis "Cheo" Pardo, the Amigos' DJ, producer and chief songwriter, said that he and his bandmates have known Dudamel and his wife, a journalist and dancer-choreographer, for many years.

"Eloisa used to go to Los Amigos shows back in Caracas," Cheo said, adding that he met Dudamel later through a common friend. "He’s like a national icon back in Venezuela, so whenever we can get together and sit down and have a drink we do it."

It was Dudamel who helped arrange for Los Amigos to make their Bowl debut this weekend with the Phil, along with Rodrigo y Gabriela, the Mexico City "thrash metallurgists" whose dueling guitars combine a classical melodic verve with the  percussive urgency of a steam drill.

Cheo said he and his bandmates have performed with a symphony orchestra once before, and are eager to see what sort of orchestral arrangements the Phil and the program's conductor, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, have in mind.

"For us, like any music idea, we’re totally open to it. We want to take our songs to a different level," he said. "To listen to our songs with an orchestral arrangement is definitely going to blow our minds up."

Besides their Bowl gig, Los Amigos also will be performing Sept. 8 at the House of Blues in Anaheim and Sept. 9 at the Music Box in Los Angeles on a bill with Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux and Tijuana techno-wizards Nortec Collective.

Update: Dudamel will conduct Phil with Amigos Invisibles

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Photo: Los Amigos Invisibles. Credit: Nacional Records

Cuba's Los Van Van postpones Conga Room gig

The legendary Cuban band Los Van Van has postponed Thursday night's gig at the Conga Room in downtown L.A., citing last-minute problems for band members in obtaining U.S. travel visas.

The band had to cancel a concert at the Conga Room in December for the same reason.

A Conga Room spokesperson said the concert is being rescheduled for sometime in September. No further details were available.

Led by frontman-founder Juan Formell, Los Van Van is one of the most respected and influential Latin bands of the rock-pop era. But its stateside appearances in the past occasionally have sparked controversy, due to the band's longtime support of Fidel Castro's communist government.

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Photo: The band as it appeared for the release of 1999's "Llego Van Van: Van Van Is Here." Credit: Reuters

Live review: A Beatles influence at 'Big in Japan'

Yellow Magic Orchestra headlines the Hollywood Bowl's ‘Big in Japan' concert, which included Yoko Ono, Cibo Matto, Buffalo Daughter and DJ Towa Tei.

From Pokémon to whimsical techno-pop, Japanese culture has a genius for breeding mutant art forms.
Sunday night's Hollywood Bowl program, “Big in Japan,” served up a kind of sonic bento box of musical mutations that illustrate how resilient and flexible pop can be when it samples freely and reinvents boldly without fretting too much about “keeping it real.” Sometimes keeping it synthetic works just as well.

The evening's main course, Yellow Magic Orchestra, was making its first L.A. appearance since the group's pioneering use of samplers, sequencers, drum machines and looping earned them an international following as a cyber-punk, Japanese response to the Beatles.

Although YMO's music is as tightly assembled as that of '70s electronic progenitors such as Kraftwerk, it's also more playful and funky, less imbued with chilly techno-festishism, and its inventiveness places it far beyond the computer-game ambient noise that it superficially resembles.

YMO came to the Bowl with its core membership intact — Haruomi Hosono (bass and keyboards), Yukihiro Takahashi (drums and lead vocals) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (keyboards and vocals) — reinforced by a handful of supporting players adding Stax-style brass and pedal-steel textures.

Leading off with its best-known hit, “Firecracker,” the band whirled through a polished 12-song set weighted with older favorites like “Rydeen” and the disco-cosmological “Behind the Mask.” On songs like “Tokyo Town Pages,” the band's beat-driven industrial quality yields to a gentler impressionism built around processed horn squawks and sounds like glass shards cascading through softly rippling keyboard notes — Claude Debussy by way of Giorgio Moroder. Surfer guitar and psychedelia augment YMO's aural toolkit.

Cuba's Los Van Van still waiting for U.S. visas; Conga Room gig tonight canceled

 
Looks as though that temporary thaw in U.S.-Cuban cultural relations has reverted to the Big Chill, at least temporarily.

Instead of being en route to play the Conga Room in downtown L.A. tonight, at least three members of the seminal Cuban band Los Van Van, including founder-leader Juan Formell, are stuck in Havana.

The reason? According to the Conga Room's owner, Brad Gluckstein, the U.S. State Department has declined to issue visas to Formell and two other band members.

In an e-mail to Pop & Hiss, Gluckstein said he had received word this morning that the visas had not been issued. The group's planned show tonight has been canceled and Friday's show is in jeopardy as well. Gluckstein said he is planning a Dec. 14 makeup date for tonight's show, if the visa is issued later.

Los Van Van, which has outspokenly supported the Castro government for decades, has been as politically divisive across the Americas as it has been artistically influential. At a Miami concert in the late 1990s, Los Van Van fans were pelted with rocks and eggs by anti-Castro Cuban Americans. But in recent months, it had appeared that cultural exchanges between the two countries were accelerating.

Perhaps this will be quickly resolved. After all, the State Department has a lot bigger fish to fry this week.

Update: Tonight's show has been canceled. Here's the official statement from the Conga Room:

Mexican rock group Camila has a big night at the Latin Grammy Awards

Reed Johnson reports on the Latin Grammys from Las Vegas for Awards Tracker:

Camila, the Mexican soft rock group, captured the award for song and record of the year with "Mientes" at the 11th annual Latin Grammy Awards on Thursday night. The ceremony, at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, had the feeling of a kind of coronation party for the group, which has surged to hemispheric popularity over the last five years.

Camila also won best pop album for "Dejarte de Amar," the record that yielded "Mientes."

Toward the other end of the generational spectrum, the veteran 53-year-old artist Juan Luis Guerra from the Dominican Republic took home the album of the year trophy for his contemplative, socially conscious "A Son De Guerra."

As per its custom, the Latin academy tilted toward familiar names at this year's event, bestowing awards on such venerable perennial winners as Tropicalia godfather Gilberto Gil, Spanish singer-songwriter Alejandro Sanz and Guerra.

In perhaps the ceremony's most moving gesture, the academy demonstrated its support, and possibly also its sympathy, for Gustavo Cerati, the former frontman for the seminal Argentine rock band Soda Stereo during the 1990s, who went on to launch a highly successful solo career.

The singer-songwriter, who has been hospitalized in Buenos Aires in a coma since early this year after suffering a stroke, won the best rock album award for “Fuerza Natural” (“Force of Nature”) as well as best rock song for “Déjà Vu."

READ MORE ON AWARDS TRACKER

-- Reed Johnson

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Photo: Camila accepting its award for record of the year. Credit: Associated Press

 

Live review: Seu Jorge and his band Almaz at Club Nokia

A charismatic pop chameleon and his band subtly but decisively transform cover tunes.

For Brazilian musicians, imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery but sometimes of creativity as well.

Tropicália founders Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Tom Zé gladly acknowledged the Beatles' influence on their own '60s samba-flower power fusion movement. Contemporary Brazilian talents such as the smoky-voiced chanteuse Céu, never tire of citing the impact of American jazz and rhythm and blues greats (as well as of Brazilian masters Tom Jobim and João Gilberto) on their artistry. The point with music-making, after all, isn't where you find it but where you take it.

So when the charismatic pop chameleon Seu Jorge turned up with his band Almaz at Club Nokia on Saturday night to play a set mainly consisting of exquisitely chilled cover tunes from his latest album, he wasn't indulging in nostalgic reveries. He was demonstrating how songs forever locked in our mental jukeboxes can be subtly but decisively transformed by a suggestive bass line, a spooky dub makeover, a shotgun blast of anguished emotion.

At Nokia, Jorge and Almaz, whose members include the smolderingly inventive guitarist Lucio Maia, drummer Pupillo (one name, like a soccer star) and Antonio Pinto on bass, were wrapping up a multi-city North American tour highlighting the project's new self-titled album. Stripping down songs like Michael Jackson's “Rock With You” to their rhythmic and melodic components, then thoughtfully reassembling them, the band leans toward a do-it-yourself, scrapyard aesthetic that Jorge perhaps gleaned from his rough upbringing in a favela in Rio de Janeiro state.

Rethinking raves in aftermath of Electric Daisy Carnival

After teen's death at the Electric Daisy festival, artists and L.A. promoters seek to distance events like the upcoming Hard L.A. fest from the stigma attached to such massive dance party shows.

In the troubled aftermath of last week's mega electronic music festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, artists and local promoters are confronting a dauntingly familiar question: what to do about the "R" word and the "E" word.

"R" stands for "rave," as techno dance parties have been commonly known since they were birthed in the suburbs of post-industrial Detroit and the underground clubs of Thatcherite Britain in the late 1980s and early '90s. The "E" word, as dance music aficionados know, is Ecstasy, the controversial, euphoria-inducing drug that's used by many ravers to enhance their connection to the frenetically beat-driven music.

Less than 24 hours after a 15-year-old girl died of a suspected drug overdose after attending the Electric Daisy Carnival, a two-day music party that featured some of the world's top DJs and drew 185,000 people to the Coliseum and adjoining Exposition Park, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky called for a rave moratorium. Other public health and safety officials have echoed his concerns.

With multiple electronica-focused events planned in L.A. over the coming weeks, including July 17's Hard L.A. at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, a 36-acre plot just east of Chinatown, what was to be a dance-heavy summer was off to an inauspicious start.

"There's a concern, and I've heard from multiple agencies," said James Valdez, a state park ranger and the lead coordinator for events in the Los Angeles sector who'll be overseeing Hard L.A. "Will we reevaluate our plans and logistics? Yes. In light of Electric Daisy, we will increase our numbers all the way around."

Local producers and promoters, meanwhile, are doing their best to reassure ticket buyers that their shows will go on in an orderly fashion, without the gate-crashing and dozens of teenagers needing medical treatment that marred Electric Daisy Carnival.

Gary Richards, a veteran dance music promoter who's hosting Hard L.A., said in an interview last week that he is working with the LAPD to make sure his event goes off without problems.

But Richards also insists that his event shouldn't be called a rave.

"I do not want to be a rave. I do not want kids in there eating pacifiers," he said, a reference to some ravers' practice of holding pacifiers in their mouths to keep from grinding their teeth, which is a sometimes involuntary side effect of Ecstasy use.

"I'm trying to get to music fans who love this music. I've been involved with electronic music for 20 years," Richards continued, "and I've seen this cycle happen three times. It gets popular, and then something happens and then it goes away. My goal is to do these events with quality artists and make them safe and secure."