Latin-music pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri recorded his two-volume album set “Live at Sing Sing” in the early winter of 1972 — 50 years ago this year. Before an enthusiastic audience of mostly Black and Latino inmates, the event’s emcee, radio DJ and native Puerto Rican Francisco “Paquito” Navarro, spoke to the politics of their performance in the sequestered confines of the New York State Department of Correction.

“For all mankind!” he shouted over the courtyard loudspeaker, saying there should be “no walls,” “no fears” and “only one thing in life: liberty in the coming years.” Palmieri’s show at Sing Sing reflected a moment when popular discourse around systemic oppression had reached peak levels in the cultural mainstream, just as many Americans were first encountering an exciting, aggressive and youth-driven Latin music genre — salsa. Socially conscious musicians of that era, in expressing prisoner solidarity — or simply acknowledging prisoners as human beings worthy of love, empathy and entertainment — raised public awareness about prison conditions and critiqued mass incarceration as an unconscionable stain on U.S. society. This work continues today.

Not by coincidence, Palmieri’s performance at Sing Sing, Upstate New York’s notorious maximum-security men’s correctional facility, emerged on the heels of the Attica prison riot of September 1971, also in Upstate New York — an event became a flash point in modern U.S. history. More than 1,200 inmates seized control of the prison in a four-day standoff. In a manifesto, the prisoners called on the state to recognize their most basic human rights, including legal representation and adequate medical attention. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R) refused their demands and ordered the state police to “retake” the prison. The resulting assault left 10 hostages and 33 prisoners dead and more than 100 wounded.

Palmieri, a Bronx-born Nuyorican already immersed in the politics of social and racial justice, was expanding his activist focus to the plight of the incarcerated. Bemoaning the “barren creativity” of contemporary Latin musicians, Palmieri told Billboard magazine in May 1973 that he was conscientiously bound to continue performing free prison concerts, insisting that the imprisoned should be “given a chance to grow” and “not just stagnate in their cells.” Palmieri also played gigs at Rikers Island and Attica (twice) and continued playing prisons throughout the decade.

Read the full article in The Washington Post

Eddie Palmieri on TKA

Blues guitar veteran Walter Trout has announced a new full-length studio album, Ride.

Set for an August 19 release via Provogue/Mascot Label Group, Ride is Trout’s 30th solo effort, and was written and recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Eric Corne.

In tandem with the announcement of the album, Trout premiered the LP’s stinging opener and lead single, Ghosts. Fittingly named, the high-gain rocker shows the guitarist wrestling with his troubled past, and is highlighted by a pair of piercing, top-tier solos, packed with some big-time bends and awe-inspiring displays of vibrato. You can hear it below.

As Trout explained in a statement, Ghosts originally began as a poem. “It starts off with the lyric, ‘Sometimes I hear a familiar song and it brings back memories’ – that’s the truth,” Trout said. “I’ll be riding in my car, a song comes on the radio and I have to pull over and sob for a while. Ghosts sums this album up, y’know?”

Read the full article on Guitar World

Walter Trout on TKA

Until 2006, when Catherine Russell released her first solo album, Cat, she was known for more than two decades as a versatile backup singer and multi-instrumentalist for a genre-spanning list of musicians that includes David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Dr. John and Madonna. Yet with that album and the six that followed, the last two nominated for Grammy awards, Ms. Russell became a star in her own right—a commanding bandleader, and in the top rank of singers working in the fertile territory where traditions of jazz, blues and popular song meet.

She continues to perform in many contexts. In late March, she sang Duke Ellington classics at Carnegie Hall, with pianist Marcus Roberts’s trio and the American Symphony Orchestra. Earlier this year, as showcased on trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s album Good Time Music (Community Music, Vol. 2), she re-envisioned a half-dozen blues classics through inventive new arrangements. She has continued to tour with Steely Dan.

Ms. Russell has a particular fascination with early- and mid-20th-century songs—primarily forgotten hits and overlooked gems—that she invests with a freshness that comes from her sensitivity to the lyrics, and her sheer power. Her new release, Send for Me (Dot Time Records), contains 13 such tracks that should further elevate her profile as they deepen listeners’ appreciation for this repertoire. Few singers alive can express the nuances of blues feeling and swing phrasing that course through American songs as correctly and gracefully as can Ms. Russell, or with as much expressive range.

She sounds declarative, punctuating her vocal with handclaps, on the title track, which was a crossover hit for Nat King Cole in 1957. Her singing burns with longing on “Make It Last,” which Betty Carter memorably recorded in 1958; it is coyly teasing on “If I Could Be With You,” written in 1926 by Harlem stride-piano hero James P. Johnson and lyricist Henry Creamer. Her version of “Did I Remember” is slower than Billie Holiday’s 1936 version, but it carries the same relaxed phrasing. Her bluesy, gospel-tinged singing on “In the Night” invites comparison to vintage Aretha Franklin for its glistening resonance.

Read the full review on The Wall Street Journal

Catherine Russell on TKA

TKA congratulates Béla Fleck, who won Best Bluegrass Album for My Bluegrass Heart at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.

“They nearly always come back,” said Béla. “All the people that leave bluegrass. I had a strong feeling that I’d be coming back as well.” 

My Bluegrass Heart is that return the now 15-time Grammy winner is talking about – the third chapter in a decades-spanning trilogy which, by his counting, started with 1988’s Drive and continued with The Bluegrass Sessions, released eleven years later. Over the long and lauded course of his unique creative run, Fleck – the world’s premier banjo virtuoso and a celebrated musical adventurer – has both dug deep into his instrument’s complex global history and unlocked the breadth of its possibilities. My Bluegrass Heart is a homecoming in sound, to be sure. 

And when you travel, you bring home something new. When the endlessly curious Fleck prepared to make The Bluegrass Sessions, for example, he contemplated some other musical wanderers: “It was ten years after the Drive album, and I had been doing the Flecktones for all that time; I was coming back thinking hmm… what have I learned that I can bring back to bluegrass?” he said. “It resonated with me how Coltrane and Charlie Parker, after studying a lot of music from outside of the jazz world, brought some truly great things back to it from the outside.” 

In some ways, Béla Fleck has always thought of himself as coming from the outside of bluegrass. “I don’t come from the South, and I always felt like there were people who were more truly focused on doing that bluegrass thing really well. What I tended to want to do more was expand the banjo’s role and look for new things to do with it. Despite that, I was always a bluegrass guy first and foremost. That was certainly the root of my musical soul.”

Béla Fleck on TKA