Chavela Vargas, the great Costa Rican-Mexican ranchera singer, once asked, “¿Cómo será de bella la muerte que nadie ha vuelto de allá?” (“How beautiful must death be that no one has returned from it?”) At a 2024 residency at the home of Vargas, one of the greatest musicians ever to speak on the subject, Silvana Estrada watched interviews with the late singer and wrote to understand her own grief.
For a musician so thoughtful about her words — and Estrada’s signature songwriting is, as ever, full of thoughtful words — the Mexican singer-songwriter’s latest album, Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, is often searching for them, doubling back, or abandoning them altogether. On 2022’s Marchita, Estrada introduced herself…
Category: latin
…Soul Jazz Records delve into the vast vaults of Discos Fuentes, one of the oldest and largest record companies in Latin America, known as ‘the Motown of Colombia’. Discos Fuentes played a major role in spreading Afro-Latin sounds both to Colombia and around the world and this album explores that legacy.
Latin Fire! features legendary Colombian artists such as Fruko, The Latin Brothers, Michi Sarmiento, Afrosound, Pedro Laza, Wganda Kenya and more and showcases the wide-ranging variety of styles that Discos Fuentes made unique to their sound. The album features music from the golden era of Fuentes; from late 50s and 1960s Cumbia through to the emergence of heavyweight and hardcore salsa and Afro-funk in the 1970s…
Few guitarists can transform a single note into a melody that sings, burns and heals the way Carlos Santana can. This special collection of live performances-captured from rare and legendary radio broadcasts spanning key moments of his career-offers a front-row seat to the artistry of one of music’s true visionaries.
From the opening bars, Santana’s unmistakable tone pours out like liquid fire, blending Latin rhythms, rock urgency and jazz-inflected improvisation. Backed by his ever-evolving ensemble of world-class musicians, he turns each performance into a journey, shifting effortlessly from hypnotic grooves to soaring, transcendent solos. These recordings showcase the very heart of his genius: the ability to communicate…
As a musical curator, Coco Maria has an ear for color. The third compilation in her Club Coco series, Coco Maria Presents: New Dimensions in Latin Music, offers a broad and brightly-hued sonic palette of sounds from across the global Latin diaspora and beyond. Born in Saltillo, Mexico, and now based in Amsterdam after stints in Berlin and London, Coco María is well acquainted with the vastness of the scene, whose titular dimensions she explores here.
She serves us a sampler that leans into the more playful possibilities of eclecticism, presenting the cutting edge with a sense of fun so often missing from visions of the avant-garde. What Coco knows — and shares with us in her virtual club — is that experimentation is better when…
To listen to a new release from Geneva-based label Bongo Joe is to have a twofold reaction. On the one hand, the Bongo Joe catalog is so eclectic that each new direction it takes is a surprise. On the other hand, the albums that come out of it tend to be so good that it seems only logical for the latest interesting release to be a Bongo Joe production. An inarticulate harmony and a tasteful eclecticism hold their discography together.
Now, the imprint celebrates its first full decade with a vivid compilation that makes the extent of the Bongo Joe palette clear. In 23 tracks, 2015-2025: Les Disques Bongo Joe – 10 Years of Sonic Explorations tells the story its subtitle promises, moving through space and time with an ear for quality. It’s unquestionably…
Mon Laferte is one of Latin music’s great shape- shifters. The 14 tracks on FEMME FATALE, her followup to the experimental rhythm collision of 2023’s Autopoiética, take on the male myth of the femme fatale (Laferte has often been referred to as “the femme fatale of Latin Music”) and her own relationship to the term, and valiantly redeems it as feminist manifesto reflecting her intelligence, style, self-determined sexuality, and fiery heart. Her songs journey through introspection and darkness before cultural history loses authority to her self-determination, using metaphor, symbolism, and even mysticism in her lyrics. In late 2024 and in July 2025, Laferte played the femme fatale Sally Bowles in a Teatro Insurgentes production of Cabaret in Mexico City. For this recording…
Born in Peru but currently based in Buenos Aires, Jorge Espinal has spent more than a decade touring and collaborating, participating in projects such as Ricarda Cometa and Calato, developing a musical approach in which body and instrument function as a single unit. With his debut solo album, Bombos y Cencerros, he uses prepared electric guitar, bass drum, cowbell, pedals, and a laptop to trigger samples, build loops, and freeze sounds. As his official bio states, “the guitar becomes a source of rhythm rather than harmony.”
The album, which took shape after a 16-date European tour in 2023, was recorded in a single session in December 2023, simultaneously played using hands and feet, but comprised a series of pieces that condensed years of…
Rocío Márquez is an established singer, experimentalist and PhD graduate intent on refracting flamenco through a 21st-century lens. Steeped in over three decades worth of performing, recording and reframing the genre, she flounces, skirts swishing, along a fine line between respecting tradition and innovating in ways that have flamenco purists pausing mid-palmas. An electric guitar wig out? A spot of Shakespearian word play? “¿Y por que no?”, figures Márquez, whose clutch of albums include the acclaimed Firmamento (2017), Visto en el Jueves (2019), and Tercer Cielo (2022) – she has also worked on film soundtracks and collaborated with Uruguayan musician Jorge Drexler and famed Spanish musician Kiko Veneno.
Nueva Timba is the sophomore Blue Note release by pianist and composer Harold López-Nussa. The first, 2023’s Timba a la Americana, marked not only his label debut, but his first recording since leaving Cuba for France in 2021. López-Nussa has been at the forefront of recontextualizing and innovating Latin jazz in the 21st century without once sacrificing tradition.
He uses most of the same band from the earlier album: harmonicist Gregoire Maret, bassist Luques Curtis, and drummer/percussionist brother Ruy Adrian López-Nussa. Their focus offers an irresistible meld of Cuban timba, post-bop, and Spanish classical music. It was recorded live in performance at studio Le Duc des Lombards in Paris. The tapes were then extensively…
In just five years, Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti has become one of experimental music’s biggest names. In addition to her spellbinding solo releases, she is an eager collaborator, working with the likes of Efterklang, the improv quartet Amor Muere – which she co-founded in her adopted home of Mexico City – and with her romantic partner, guitarist Hector Tosta, as Titanic. On the latter’s superb 2023 debut, Vidrio, they pioneered a genre-agnosticism that veered from squealing free-jazz saxophone to hammering drum grooves and aggressively processed cello, always anchored in Fratti’s soaring falsetto. It heralded the arrival of a group who embraced experimentation as much as earwormy melodies.
On Hagen, the duo double down on their…
A masterclass of 20th century Cuban-American showbiz, this has all the vintage allure of a night at Havana’s Tropicana, or indeed one of the Miami clubs Albita Rodriguez is still playing 40 years after abandoning her career as a country singer in Cuba for a white trouser suit and the bright lights (and anti-Castrists) of Florida.
Here she’s teamed up with fellow resident Chucho Valdés, grand old keyboard maestro responsible for 60 years of an unstoppable and headlining amalgam of Afro-Cuban lore, classics, jazz, funk, ballads and more. It’s all virtuoso stuff, with Valdés’ vamping montunos and rippling arpeggios flowing across a selection of six standards and three new compositions by Albita.
The standards are best: you can’t have too many…
From El Boraro, the vampiric demon on 2018’s Anticlines, to Petra, the alien observer of 2022’s ¡Ay!, Lucrecia Dalt often uses fictional personas to explore complex themes and emotions in her work. However, with A Danger to Ourselves, she sheds the chrysalis of these alter-egos to emerge with her most personal record yet.
The title, borrowed from David Sylvian’s lyrics on opener cosa rara, hints at the album’s preoccupations; emotional volatility, self-sabotage, and the uneasy pull between intimacy and annihilation. It’s Dalt at her most exposed, and somehow, her most inscrutable.
On ‘divina’, you sense this newfound vulnerability as she sings about improbable love against a backdrop of staccato piano and the sharp,…
Heavy rhythms rule the day on El Muki, the seventh recording by composer, arranger and trumpeter Gabriel Alegria’s Afro-Peruvian Sextet, one that marks the group’s 20th anniversary in 2025 by blending impactful elements of Peruvian, African and American jazz into a wholesome and flavorful banquet designed to whet the appetite of jazz aficionados of all persuasions.
El Muki, according to the notes, is “a mythical Andean elf, traditionally believed to protect miners in the Peruvian highlands.” He is represented here by the first of Alegria’s charming original compositions, a metric juggernaut dominated by the sextet’s heavy-duty rhythm section. Saxophonist Laura Andrea Leguia, the group’s second in command, wrote four…
Ecuadorian singer Grecia Albán’s first UK release Nubes Selva, which loosely translates as ‘Cloud Jungle’, reinvents traditional Ecuadorian, and South American, musical modes.
Albán does that by, as she puts it, “honouring tradition by embracing change.” From a family of anthropologists based in Cotopaxi province, Albán’s voice rings out over a panoply of rhythms, beats and colourful ensemble flourishes. Some of the music builds using shifts in time signatures to create surprise and emphasis.
Key to the compelling result is Albán’s vaulting between Spanish and the indigenous Kichwa, which has evolved from the indigenous Quechua language. The set’s first single ‘Virgen y Volcán’ combines melodies and unusual…
The idea of putting together songs like impressions of a feeling rather than a collection of recordings from a certain decade or style or genre was at the heart of a discussion I had with Norman in 2019. It was a warm July day on the Riviera. I had just finished putting together the sound system for our first and only festival. “It should paint a picture”…
We began a work of compiling. Norm would send tracks and we would try to situate them on the spectrum of a large “carte postale” encompassing in one corner the kitsch resort balneaire, in the other the sail boat in a Caribbean creek, with sandy beaches and glimmering waves in between. With the certainty that the French only seem to possess in matters of taste (my wife Emma is the same), Norm would go: “ah ca c’est 100% Blue Wave”…
It starts with a bang. Then a barrage of DJ tags, sampled vocals, and drum rolls carry us into a sea of ambience. This is the Los Thuthanaka experience in summary: ceremonial but swaggy, cataclysmic but healing, unrefined but magnificent. And these are the paradoxes you are confronted with immediately upon hitting play: A dizzying reorientation to the possibility of what music can or should sound like.
The monumental self-titled debut from siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton taps into the elemental practices of making music. The latter has described their work as striving to bring out “as much as possible from seemingly very little.” The “seemingly” is key, as in his hands, every note is an infinite portal.
What’s in a name? PulciPerla is the marriage of two long-standing groups: the high-energy Toulouse quartet of drums, bass, accordion and saxophone, Pulcinella, and the all-female vocal/percussion group from Bogotá, La Perla.
They met in 2019 and Tatekieto is their lovechild: an often fiery and frantic mix of the former’s iconoclastic contemporary groove and the latter’s Indigenous percussion, infused with elements of cumbia, reggaeton, funk, bullerengue, champeta and Balkan swing.
To compare the more traditional ‘Pájaro’, with its lovely breathy gaita sound, to one of the more freaky-deaky numbers like ‘Espuma del Mar’ or ‘Croissant’ is to appreciate just what a hybrid affair this is. If occasionally things can get…
…deluxe digital version of the album featuring three new tracks.
When New Zealand’s The Circling Sun released Spirits, their 2023 debut on Soundway, jazz fans weren’t prepared. A celebratory, spiritual intersection of Afro-Latin and spiritual jazz, 21st electronic grooves, atmospheres, a choir, and souled out charts, resonated across the South Pacific; the album was greeted with praise across the global jazz community.
Orbits, their followup, draws on the experience of touring over two years, expanding their confidence and creativity. Further, their primary influences here – Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra and Yusef Lateef – inspire the band to explore the subtleties in their own dynamic sound.
Gabriele Poso is an internationally recognized percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and recording artist from Italy. He has been preaching the gospel of tamburo music since studying it in his teens. The word “tamburo” in Italian simply means “drum.” That said, it is the beating heart of a genre-crossing, percussion-driven musical tradition that reflects Italy, Northern and Western Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Its presence and influence on four decades of Italian music — 1960s-1990s — can’t be overstated. These 11 tracks offer a kaleidoscope of hard-grooving tamburo style in jazz, library sound, rock, disco, funk, and film and TV soundtracks.
The record opens with an exotica version of Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” by…
For nearly a century, leisurely strolling through the Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla has meant being ready to party on any given corner. Booming from colorful sound systems known as picós, the sticky coastal air buzzes with a dizzying mix of Jamaican soca, Ghanaian highlife, Congolese soukous, Arab disco, and local staples like salsa and champeta.
These mobile discos, usually family-owned and passed down through generations, are synonymous with the neighborhoods where each clandestine party was formalized into a micro-economy. Picós are emblazoned with cheeky names and flashy visual identities, with the entrepreneurial selectors known as picoteros gaining notoriety with “exclusive” record collections procured…
An utterly abysmal set of reverb drenched mediocre songs. Those R.E.M. covers are so catastrophically tone-deaf it’s a wonder Michael…