L.A. Times, Diverse Influences Help Artists Produce Beats Without Borders >>
By DON HECKMAN
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
World music has always occupied a somewhat hazy position within the recording industry, largely because of its enormously diverse range. Embracing styles that can generally be described as pop music, traditional music and classical--with frequent crosscurrents between each--it is a genre that resists the usual pigeon-hole definition the industry prefers.
In general, that's a blessing for the world music fan. But the record business, recognizing the appeal of unusual and unfamiliar sounds, has worked hard to fit them into what it knows best: the territory of pop music. The result has been the emergence of a parade of hybrid world music forms. Although different in origin, they are strikingly similar in their reduction of an extraordinary assortment of complex rhythms to repetitive dance beats, and in their replacement of traditional modes and scales with layers of synth sounds and wearying melodic riffing.
Given the relatively small amount of musically rewarding material within that particular world music arena, I've chosen to focus this report on the most appealing releases of the first quarter of 2002, recordings that, fo rthe most part, illustrate the variety, rather than the fusion aspects, of the music that is happening around the globe. Start with a few divas. And, in this case, with divas who all have connections--although very different connections--with Portuguese culture:
[EXCERPT]
Mariza. "Fado Em Mim" (Times Square Records). The title means "The Fado in Me," and Mariza, still in her 20s, has already become a vital practitioner of the Portuguese vocal art. She sings a program blending classic fado with newer works, endowing them with a rich assortment of vocal timbres and a subtle sense of theatrical timing. Mariza, too, makes her Hollywood Bowl debut this year, on July 14.
04/26/02
|
