Soundcheck

Monte is the project of Simón Mejía of Bomba Estéreo, whose new record Mirla is a meeting of electronic dance, ambient music, and environmental sounds. Mejía describes how he was inspired by the traditional folk music of Colombia, and Indigenous music from all over the Americas, which is largely based on bird sounds and natural sounds. So, Mejía got a really good microphone to put on his phone, and that every time he went on a trip in Colombia, to the jungles of the Amazon or along the Magdalena River, he would take recordings of the environment (Sounds and Colours.)

On, Mirla, Mejía’s approach to his art of using these environmental sounds to help people reconnect with nature is an indirect, yet thoughtful one. By centering less on speaking or writing songs about fighting against deforestation and mining, and concentrating his music on the sounds of birds, waves, or the deep Amazon jungle, he hopes to bring an awareness to climate issues. Monte (Simón Mejía) performs a set of these songs, remotely from his location of Bogota, Colombia.

Set list: "Mirla," "Sol," "Jungla"

This is "Sol":

Here is the full set:

Simone Dinnerstein avoided the child prodigy route in her career – taking her time to mature and avoiding the "competition circuit" - catching the ears of many by playing the works of J.S. Bach, including The Goldberg Variations. The Brooklyn-based concert pianist returns to the studio to perform selected Bach compositions, specifically the Inventions and Sinfonias.

Those pieces were originally written in 1723 as a musical guide for keyboard players and remain part of the core repertoire for students, amateurs, and professional musicians. Dinnerstein says the first Bach pieces she ever heard were the Inventions and has had a connection to this music ever since. Recorded at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York with Grammy-winning producer Adam Abeshouse, Dinnerstein not only demonstrates her stunning music prowess, but highlights why these small masterpieces have endured for so long. (From the archives, 2014.)

Anjimile wrote their new album, Giver Taker, after a battle with addiction and while they were establishing their identity as a non-binary trans person. Their tales of love, identity, and family unfold in a surprising mix of folk, African pop, and Western pop sounds. They play live from their home in Boston. 

Millions know Suzanne Vega’s hits, like “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner.” Since her debut album in 1985, she has been one of America’s leading songwriters; but her new album recorded last year at the Café Carlyle, An Evening of New York Songs and Stories, shows that she is even more specifically one of the great New York City songwriters. For this podcast, she recounts her experiences with days-long parties, describes how Lou Reed threw doors open for her lyrically as a songwriter when she was a student, and clarifies that while she might have been influenced by him, they both occupied different corners of the same city. Suzanne Vega plays some of these New York songs live at home and discusses her long career. 

Columbian band Bomba Estéreo explores their South American roots, mixing up cumbia, vallenato, & champeta with club & dub dance beats on their latest, "Ayo." Bomba Estéreo joins us in-studio in this 2017 session from the archives.

Singer, violinist, songwriter, composer, and arranger extraordinaire Owen Pallett has recently released a new album, Island, full of some of their most ambitious music yet. And that's saying something. (Pallett says that "there are more parts than a Ligeti score.")

Pallett is known both for their own music: several albums of songs, the film score for Her, and work for the Barbican and Bang on a Can; and their orchestrating work - which runs the gamut from folk, to punk, to R & B, to orchestral pop, and many off-kilter and fantastical tangents in between - with Arcade Fire, Frank Ocean, Fucked Up, Caribou, Taylor Swift, The Mountain Goats, Grizzly Bear, Linkin Park, and many others. For this remote edition of the podcast, Pallett and their instruments and looping station play songs that span their career. 

Set list: "Paragon of Order," "I Am Not Afraid," "This Is The Dream Of Win And Regine"

"Paragon of Order": "I Am Not Afraid":"This Is The Dream Of Win And Regine":

Since releasing their first album together in 2004, the band CocoRosie has beaten its own path through a thicket of musical styles. You’ll hear elements of indie rock, freak folk, electronic music, and hip hop, but CocoRosie are not bound by any of those genres. The two American sisters who make up the band, Bianca and Sierra Casady, have brought their band, which includes a table full of toys to play songs from their album Heartache City, in-studio. 

In 2010, jazz singer Gregory Porter made a big splash with his first outing, Water, billed as “an album of love and protest.”  Porter, a New York-based Californian who spent long years in musical theatre, was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Vocal Jazz Album category for the record. Gregory Porter talks about his love of Nat King Cole, and about the Detroit riots in 1967, the Algiers Motel shootings, and the riots after MLK's assassination in 1968. He plays "1960 What?," a song that addresses injustice as it links to a history of protest music in soul and jazz, in-studio, along with one of the love songs from the record, "Skylark."

By the age of 21, Richard Thompson had already helped to define the sound of 60s folk-rock with his band Fairport Convention. He emerged as a leading songwriter of his generation in a series of albums with his then-wife, Linda Thompson, culminating in one of the most harrowing breakup albums ever made, Shoot Out The Lights in 1982. Since then, he’s had a notable solo career, both for his own songwriting and for his eccentric and eclectic side-projects, like the brilliant 1000 Years of Popular Music.

He’s worked with an array of artists, from David Byrne to film maker Werner Herzog. For his 2015 album Still, Thompson joined forces with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. He plays some of these songs from Still, in-studio in this podcast from our archives. 

From the 1940s to the 1960s, Eva Garza’s voice could be heard singing Mexican rancheras throughout Latin America. Though her story and music is largely forgotten today, her genes live on: Garza's great-niece is the Texas singer-songwriter Carrie Rodriguez. In 2016, she released Lola, a bi-lingual record that combines her own Americana sound with the echoes of her family’s musical heritage, courtesy of a crack band led by Luke Jacobs that includes guest guitar polymaths Bill Frisell and David Pulkingham, bassist Viktor Krauss, and others. Carrie Rodriguez plays music from Lola, in-studio.