Music

After Wednesday’s JJA Jazz Awards event I club-hopped with award winner Nate Chinen, first to the new Poisson Rouge — kind of a fussy, disorganized space on first impression — for Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. I’m not a keen follower of the band, but Ernie Watts on tenor really grabbed me by the lapels. Haden’s lines on rhythm changes (“Passport”)

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I was tremendously saddened to learn of the pianist’s death in a scuba diving accident on Saturday. A few years ago, around the time of EST’s first U.S. release, the group did a special industry showcase at Tonic, and Columbia invited a handful of music journalists to a pre-show dinner with Svensson and the band on the Lower East Side.

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Had to put up just one more…

At 11pm every night during the Fes Festival, Morocco’s Sufi Brotherhoods would perform in a courtyard at a cultural center called Dar Tazi. These concerts were open to the public, although the cops seemed to be on high riff-raff alert, so the scene at the door was something like a velvet rope. The shows ran the gamut, from hypnotic a

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Another phenomenal moment with Tartit.

The most striking music I heard in Fes was by Tartit, a Tuareg (Tamasheq) ensemble from Mali. Two of the men played ngonis, which they tuned by adjusting tight leather straps with their thumbs. The women played hand drums; one of them would occasionally pour water on the cloth covering her instrument, resulting in a deeper tone. Her hands were

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I woke up in my own bed yesterday to the sound of a Philly garbage truck, and in my haze, I thought the sanitation workers were shouting in Arabic. I’d been in Fes, Morocco for only a week, yet my consciousness was pretty well altered. I’ve finally got it together enough to provide photo-album links on Shutterfly, not only of

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…and an unforgettable experience at the Fès Festival of World Sacred Music. Writing will ensue. But first, unpacking and regrouping. (Click on photos to enlarge.)