While Kanye West's admitted disdain for books is well known, I reflected on his recent comments while at the Eugene O'Neill Theater watching Fela!, the Bill T Jones production based on the life of Nigerian singer and political activist Fela Kuti. Last year I was blown...

It was shortly after 9/11 that I first saw Norah Jones perform. I went predominantly because my roommate was a jazz musician, and I was being sold on a jazz singer by a publicist. When I found out that Jim not only knew of Jones, but went to...

Bebel Gilberto slipped into the American imagination with Tanto Tempo in 2000 and has refused to leave. The efforts that followed -- Bebel Gilberto and Momento -- felt like extensions of that North American debut; beautiful in their own right, and never without taste, yet safely embedded within the...

Shantel's lightheartedness is an integral component of his music. The man has near-singlehandedly championed Balkan music for well over a decade, ever since dropping a few folk tunes into a dance set in Brooklyn and watching the crowd catch fire. He returned to his laboratory in Frankfurt, Germany, to...

While I try to stay on top of all the music I download from publicists--a blessing, in that less physical clutter in my mailbox, and easier deletion if it does not suit my iTunes playlist, and a curse: I'm nostalgic and enjoy the feel of an actual album in my...

If any band ever carried the spirit of Morphine in their blood, it has to be New Zealand reggae-inspired outfit The Black Seeds. Musically the connection is subtle; vocally, Barnaby Weir exhibits the easeful, country-tinged, downtrodden-but-hopeful tendencies of Mark Sandman. Had that man not passed on a decade prior,...

Our love of the world begins with romanticizing. Images of foreign cultures etch idyllic scenarios in our mind; we let our minds journey. The imagination is a powerful instrument, arguably consciousness's greatest, perhaps more so than reason. Both have their place. A half-decade back, Americans were asked to imagine long...

"It's such a hard sell," Carmen Rizzo tells me from his Los Angeles studio. "There are so many artists who are from other countries who want to do American Idol bullshit, or be the eastern Coldplay. I say: Why?"

The topic of discussion is Inbar Bakal, an Israeli/Iraqi/Yemenite singer...

While there is certain to be plenty of news to emerge in the following hours around the arrests of some thirty people regarding the money laundering schemes in New Jersey, this quote from Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, taken from the Criminal Complaint, United States of America v. Peter Cammarano III...

As Amiri Baraka so poignantly noted in his latest collection of essays, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, if you're standing in California, then Asia is west. This seemingly simple observation sheds light on many of our habitual appointments, the term "Middle East" being one of them. I...

One of the things I most look forward to every summer is Africa Day in Prospect Park, an annual musical tribute to all-things-Africa that goes down in Prospect Park. For years, I'd made the two-train trek from Jersey City; now that I live only four blocks from the park,...

When I first began documenting global electronica in 2001, I'd never imagined the breadth and depth with which producers would take their craft, especially in so short a time. Since the publication of my first book in 2005, Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music --...

While watching CNN on Tuesday morning, June 30, I saw two captions flash across the bottom ticker. One told me that E Coli was found in cookie dough; the other, that 380,000 lbs of beef was being recalled. These were both pretty important bits of information, and I suppose those...

The first time I really experienced the largeness of little was while watching Morphine perform at Rutgers University in 1994. The deceptively simple configuration of bass, drums, and saxophone exploded into a variety of textures and colors, so thickly entwined and sonically confident that I was hard put to believe...

"I am very hopeful about our Qawwali Gospel project," Pakistani singer Faiz Ali Faiz told me for a National Geographic interview recently. "It has potential. I think we had improvement since June 2008, when you auditioned us in Fes."

We chatted before Faiz's arrival in New York City, Brooklyn...

"The sun people," Brooklyn-based DJ Nickodemus told me, "are in some way all of us." Wishing to create an album that expresses the general attitude of the American population after the swearing in of Barack Obama, he realized that "not that much has changed--yet." Realist more than optimist, however,...

When I turned my journalism focus from rock and hip-hop to global music in 2001, I quickly realized that the political and media-driven clichés that I was being taught by newspapers and television accounted for but a small minority of each country's population. The way to enter and embrace a...

Hey future son,

I know it's a few years before your future mother and I have planned on bringing you into this world, but I figured it's never too early to open up the lines of communication. There's a lot going on in this world; it's never too early to...

While the name of his 1994 debut, Welcome to the Cruel World, implies a melancholy mood, his steadily growing fan base has been anything but cruel to him. Even back then, he knew how to combine sadness ("Walk Away," "Waiting On An Angel") with joy ("Mama's Got A Girlfriend Now,"...

"I have to tell you," the clerk said, leaning over the counter like he was about to whisper a secret, "That's a print-on-demand title. That means it could take two weeks to arrive." He then asked me if I still wanted to place a special order for it; I replied...