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Artist:
Albert
Kuvezin and Yat-Kha
Title:
Re-Covers
Label:
World
Village
Stolen Passports, Deportation, and Mob Shakedowns: Tuva’s Yat-Kha
Recovers with Electric Guitar and Supersonic Bass Voice
A couple of years ago, Albert Kuvezin, leader of the roots-rock band
Yat-Kha from the Tuva Republic in Central Asia, fell on seriously hard
times.
After a string of misfortunes worthy of an action movie—including
stolen passports, forcible deportation from Hungary, mob shakedowns,
and a car crash—Kuvezin found himself recovering from injuries
in a hospital in Tuva. Yat-Kha had gained fans worldwide, played major
festivals, and won a BBC Radio 3 Award, but the band was now in limbo.
A crucial U.S. tour had just fallen through, in part due to the
passport fiasco. Kuvezin was left with little solace save his collection
of rock and blues records.
The songs he blasted while convalescing took Kuvezin on a musical journey
so compelling that he knew he had to record his own versions of them.
He was due to lay down a new album in London, but instead of the originals
he had been working on, he decided to revisit and rework the music
that had carried him through those tough days. All in his unforgettable
double-bass, lower-than-low throat-singing style and using his unique
approach to traditional Tuvan instruments like the yat-kha, the long,
koto-like zither that gave the group its name.
For Kuvezin, the tension and resonance between rock and Tuvan traditional
music were more than just a temporary comfort in a time of trial or
a wacky novelty project. They were leitmotifs that had defined his entire
life. At the beginning of his career at the end of the Soviet era, the
ideology department of the Tuvan Communist Party was less than thrilled
when Kuvezin picked up the electric guitar and started singing. As a
little boy, he had been thrown out of the choir and told to never sing
again.
It wasn’t until the sounds of Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Slayer
reached his homeland of Tuva—a remote area of southern Siberia
nestled between the Altai and Sayan Mountains—that Kuvezin
found the musical bridge between his voice, his heritage, and the universe.
These same sounds helped him once again, this time on the road to recovery
and eventually to Yat-Kha’s latest album, Re-Covers (release date:
August 8, 2006 on World Village).
Kuvezin’s special style of throat-singing had all but died out,
and it was the combination of this impossibly deep overtone singing
with his progressive punk sensibility that set the stage for Yat-Kha.
Tuvan throat singing reached the American consciousness in the early
1990s largely through the recordings and performances of Huun-Huur-Tu,
of which Kuvezin was a founding member. Feeling trapped inside their
markedly “folkloric” style, Kuvezin decided to deploy the
ethos of perestroika/glasnost-induced spring-thaw punk rock explosion
he had experienced in the city of Sverdlovsk (today’s Yekaterinburg)
in the late 1980s.
Drawing on these two sets of roots, Kuvezin crafted a completely new
world for the rock, blues, country, and folk tunes on Re-Covers, where
the contours of the songs remain but the spirit is pure Tuva. It’s
as if Captain Beefheart had rehearsed on the banks of the rushing Kemchik
River, or Kraftwerk had opted for the Trans-Siberia Express, or
Motörhead had hung out a lot at the Kyzyl House of Culture.
Recorded in London, the album was produced by British musical agent
provocateur, world musician, and Billy-Bragg-supporting-player
Ben Mandelson, with a little help from Justin Adams, who plays guitar with
Robert Plant and who made a name for himself as producer for Tuareg
rock band Tinariwen. Along with Kuvezin’s zither and voice, Re-Covers
features the drums of Zhenya Tkachov, who grew up as an Old Believer,
the religious dissidents who fled European Russia centuries ago for
remote areas like the upper waters of the Kaa-Khem river in Tuva, where
they have lived for generations. Persecuted by officials, this cultural
group has preserved the old language, traditions, and way of life forgotten
by most Russians. Tkachov has performed with the Tuvan State Symphony,
played in several popular Tuvan bands, and can now add Stones and Zeppelin
covers to his varied musical résumé.
Re-Covers is no anomaly. Despite some irrepressibly hilarious moments,
the album continues Yat-Kha's serious quest for Tuvan roots music that
can kick out the jams, this time by showing that this seemingly remote
region is very much part of the growl and pulse of world rock. Yat-Kha
will take their musical journey on the road for a September North American
tour.
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Artist:
Arielle
Dombasle
Title:
Amor,
Amore
Label:
Wrasse
Records
International
Woman of Mystery: Actress and Singer Arielle Dombasle Embodies Romance
of Another Era
The story of French actress Arielle Dombasle’s
life is like something from another era, a time that exists in old movies
and Harlequin romances: raised on both sides of the Atlantic in the
company of diplomats and bohemians, the young Dombasle leads a jetset
life of intrigue, finds love in a widely followed seven-year romance
before marrying one of the most famous men in France. The elegant couple's
flat on Paris' storied Left Bank is a magnet for confidantes such as
Salman Rushdie and Yves Saint Laurent and also hosts politicians, dignitaries,
leading figures from the arts, as well as Afghan dissidents, Latin American
revolutionaries, and Chechen rebels. For a bit of rest the superstar
couple might dash off to one of their getaways on the French Riviera
or the eighteenth-century palace in Marrakech that once belonged to
John Paul Getty. All of this while being voted one of the most beautiful
women in the world, year after year, by her fellow French.
Her mystique has earned the admiration from men of stature worldwide:
Roman Polanski adores her passion, Omar Sharif her subtlety, Jean-Paul
Belmondo her soul, Christian Lacroix her incandescence, Tom Ford her
spirit and John Galliano her femininity. She has been described as dangerous,
complex, and a seductress. She is half of one of the most high-profile
couples in France: following a seven-year long affair during which they
traveled abroad regularly, meeting secretly in hotel rooms, she married
superstar-philosopher and author Bernard-Henri Lévy—a man
famous enough in France to be known simply by his initials, BHL. “Elevator
men and doormen were our best friends,” Dombasle says. “Our
private life was very secret, the most secret of secrets.” The
two are regular fixtures on the cover of Paris Match, as much for their
fashionable lifestyle as for Dombasle’s films and music and BHL’s
political activism.
The multi-talented femme fatale—who has worked as actor, director,
and screenwriter on more than 100 films and television pieces, ranging
from projects with John Malkovich to Miami Vice—has outclassed
herself again, reinventing her musical career, appearing as a crooning
songbird from a bygone era that bespeaks her romantic life story. “Je
suis inclassable! (I am unclassifiable),” declares Dombasle.
Amor Amor, released on Wrasse Records on April 18, 2006,
is a sparkling collection of Mexican boleros and Latin-tinged classics
that transports us back to the romantic starlet’s childhood in
Mexico, where her grandfather served as the French Ambassador.
Born in Connecticut, she had a charmed youth later in Mexico, living
“like Tintin among the Mayans”, until the age of 11, when
her mother died from cancer. From one to eighteen, she absorbed street
Spanish “and songs from the cook.” It was then that she “returned”
to Paris to study theater and performing arts, and entered the artistic,
literary and society life in the footsteps of her grandmother, a grand
Bohemian figure who translated the words of Indian poet and philosopher
Rabindranath Tagore into French and entertained artists and writers
at her home in Versailles.
Dombasle has made public very little about her upbringing in Mexico,
and this album is a way of connecting with her past. “When I first
came to France I very much hid the fact that I was Latin American,”
she confided to the French newspaper Metro. “Then suddenly, I wanted
to express the ultra-emotional, sensitive and suffering side of this
continent in relation to love.” Previous musical projects have
earned her a reputation as a chanson singer, but she is determined to
connect the roots of her music as much as the roots of her own identity.
She reminds us, “Mexican bolero has French roots. After all, it
was brought from Vienna by Napoleon III and adopted by the populations
of the Caribbean.”
The album showcases her opera-trained voice on old standards “As
Time Goes By,” “Rhum and Coca-Cola”, the beautiful “Cuando
Caliente El Sol,” as well as a duet with the ultimate lady’s
man, Julio Iglesias, on “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas.” The sound
is reminiscent of old Hollywood musicals; Arielle’s soft and very
effeminate French vibrato, backed by Recoveco, “a wonderful orchestra
that sounds straight out of yesteryear,” paints a dreamlike picture
of memory, fantasy, and mystery.
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Artist:
Easy
Star All Stars
Title:
Dub
Side of the Moon
Label:
Easy
Star Records
Echoes and Reverb of Pink Floyd:
Easy Star All-Stars Release Dub Side of the Moon Live DVD
“It
would be so easy to botch a project like this given the virtually iconic
nature of the material,” wrote Billboard magazine about the Easy
Star All-Stars’ 2003 sneak hit Dub Side of the Moon, an ambitious
reinvention of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side Of The Moon album.
But the band and producers “clearly appreciated the neo-psychedelia
of Dark Side and did a superb job of capturing that feel in translating
the music to reggae,” continues the review. Three years later—while
the album continues to register on the Billboard Reggae Catalog Chart—Easy
Star released their concert DVD, Dub Side of the Moon Live, on June
27, 2006.
While critics (and Pink Floyd fans) reached a consensus that the Easy
Star All-Stars nailed the spirit of Floyd’s classic original in
a reggae version on the Dub Side CD, the release of the live concert
DVD gives audiences a window into the band behind the music and brings
in new elements showing they have made this revitalized repertoire their
own.
The reinterpreted Dub Side mythology is carried on with the appearance
of the Rasta-naut, a Rasta astronaut orbiting the moon in original
animated sequences that punctuate the DVD’s footage (which was
shot in September of last year). The DVD captures visual elements that
were lauded by critics who have seen the live show: “The multiple
aesthetic streams continually shift one’s focus in brain-tickling
and body-rocking ways—the live grooves rewinding and fast-forwarding
with the mnemonic original sounds,” as L.A. Weekly’s Tom Cheyney
put it.
Just as the Dub Side CD was arranged to approximate running times of
Dark Side (even to the point of synching with The Wizard of Oz), the
live production runs like a seamless, theatrical performance augmented
by such elaborate lighting effects and video projections that Vibe magazine
might have to revisit their CD review that “All that's missing
here are some tickets to the Laserium.” The live setting of the
DVD also allows the players to spread out with improvised solos, spontaneous
dance moves, and the synergy that only comes from live performance with
an engaged audience. The interplay of musicians, lights, and reverb
encircle the live and DVD-viewing audience in a hallucinogenic reality
reminiscent of a prior smoke-laden, psychedelic era. (This evocative
spirit has found many a parent connecting with their bleary-eyed teenage
offspring since the release of the Dub Side CD.)
No music DVD is complete without the extras, and Dub Side comes through
with interviews of the album’s producers, players, and fans; pre-show
backstage and street footage; a making of the Dub Side album featurette;
a photo gallery; and the back stories on the Easy Star All-Stars and
Easy Star Records. Viewers can choose between watching on a wide screen
or letterbox, and between 5.1 Dolby Surround, 5.1 DTS, and 2.0 Dolby
Digital Audio Mixes. The video was produced by Grata Video, who has
produced video for Andrew W.K., DEVO, and the Dwarves.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, June 8, the Easy Star All-Stars made their first
New York City appearance in over a year. While it’s been a busy
stretch for the band—including tours of France, Italy, England,
Brazil, Argentina, Croatia, the West Coast, Mid-Atlantic, Colorado,
Texas, Louisiana—the popular reggae collective has not had a chance
to strut their stuff on stage in front of the New York massive. That
chance arrives thanks to an appearance at the twelve-year old Brooklyn
Academy of Music Rhythm and Blues Festival. The BAM R&B Festival
presents free concerts on Thursdays between 12:00 noon and 2:00 pm at
Metrotech Plaza in Downtown Brooklyn, two blocks from the Brooklyn and
Manhattan Bridges near the East River.
Whether you catch them live or on their first-ever video, step onto
the Rasta-naut’s space ship and join the Easy Star All-Stars for
a trip to the Dub Side of the Moon Live. The live DVD hits the streets
on June 27th or fans can pre-order it from www.easystar.com
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