Derek Beres

When I began teaching yoga in 2004, what interested me most was music; more specifically, how music and postures played along together. Introduced to yoga through a dance class, music had become a necessary component for movement. While I learned to appreciate silence studying under some teachers, that path didn't...

The face looks familiar even if the angles appear different. Most photos of Ravi Shankar feature the man gazing down in fierce concentration, a musical sadhu performing intense tapas by plucking and stroking tightly wound strings. That the 91-year-old sitar player from India is a legend is already beyond mentioning....

After a chance meeting at a German airport, Israeli pop vocalist and pianist Idan Raichel would never have guessed that he'd record an album with the son of his musical idols, the late Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré. While Vieux Farka Touré initially thought of the thin, dreadlocked fan as...

Morley's sound has always been large. Even with just a simple guitar and her elegant voice, the Queens, NY native has consistently conjured music that can barely be contained in the room that attempts to house it. The reasons are numerous: smart production, intelligent songwriting and -- especially...

Mere moments into his breakthrough album, Black on Both Sides, Brooklyn rapper Mos Def likens people's perception of hip-hop to a "giant living in the hillsides." The assertion is that the music form has been removed from its fans' everyday experiences, which Def addresses: "If we smoked out, hip-hop's gonna...

Certain careers arc while others are rather like cliffs. Arcing usually results in a few lauded albums followed by a slow and painful descent, inevitably collapsing with matinee performances at local VFWs or, if lucky, a dedicated slot in the Vegas circuit. Cliff drops are predominantly reserved for artists who...

Magic happens on the dance floor. That's why I began dancing, why I began DJing, why I fell in love with electronic and tribal music the world over. Unsuspecting moments of active surrender that annihilate tremors of anxiety, depression or fear occur there -- dance floor as therapeutic tool and...

My fascination with Marseille-based band, Watcha Clan, began in April 2008, when a free pair of tickets from a local friend found me standing in the Parisian basement club, La Maroquinerie. Transglobal Underground offered a solid set of dub heavy, guitar ripping digitalism, yet they were truly openers...

With festival officials estimating 65,000 cramming into Scène Corniche El Hank to witness hip-hop artist 50 Cent's first Moroccan visit, I was not particularly shocked to later hear that that number was bumped to 100,000. 50 himself tweeted 200,000. I suppose from the vantage point of the stage, with the...

Watching John Martyn cue the drum machine on his epic folk journey, "Small Hours," you recognize that this man was way ahead of his time, implementing electronics in his genre the way Dylan ripped through electric guitar riffs.

I can't say I was ever a big John Martyn fan,...

When Americans reflect on Morocco in 2011, the initial image brought to mind will most likely fall on April 28, when 16 people were killed in Marrakech during a bombing at the touristy Argana Café. Reports of Al Qaeda were invoked in this usually stable country, and though having denied...

Years ago a friend in DC passed along a four-song EP by two Rastas best known as the bouncing hype men of Thievery Corporation. They wore white pants and black jackets with puffy fedoras while wielding canes, throwing off accessories in pure lion-dreaded fury as the show's energy rises. They...

The moment my friend Jesse sent me an early download of Tuareg musician Bombino, I fell in love. As I told him, I think I was Tuareg in a future life -- there's something about the scope of North African music, Gnawa and Tuareg to Malian blues and...

The process of naming something is of crucial importance, for in many ways that name defines the life of what that thing is to become. Individual names, brand names, band names -- all of these rely on the few letters sculpted into being to describe what you have created. After...

Few names raise eyebrows in the music world as Philip Glass. A constant innovator and diverse composer, the man's work ranges from the obscure to well-known and beloved projects, most of those in the broader public eye thanks to film scores, including the highly influential Koyaanisqatsi and the award winning...

Every Ben Harper record features much more than blues, but it's that specific sound that he does so well -- blues meaning as much an emotional attitude as an exacting sonic style. On his forthcoming album, Give Till It's Gone (Virgin, May 17), Harper's penchant for turning the tragic uplifting...

The remix of Argentinean folk artist Jose Larralde's "Quimey Neuquen" is the type of song that makes everyone I play it for stop whatever it is they're doing and grin, suddenly lost in a hypnosis of introspection. A placid longing consumes their face; a sensual comfort invades their heart. Larralde's...

Last year while walking along Beverly Road I noticed a large gathering on one of the many gigantic porches that line this street. This neighborhood is a Brooklyn anomaly: roughly four streets by three avenues of colonial style (and size) mansions plopped down between Flatbush and Prospect Park, at the...

Our knowledge of foreign cultures is most often obtained through the media we consume, outside of actual travel. Given the abysmal amount of Americans who even own passports (30%), we predominantly rely on the Internet, cable shows and newspapers. While the possibility of exploring innumerable forms of media now exists,...

Farhan Ezad was living what most would consider a fairly typical American life in June 2010. At 35 years old, he had three sons and a decade-long marriage to a loving wife. But the economic downturn had taken its toll in Canadensis, Pennsylvania, and he had just lost his job....