Music

The closest American equivalent to the 65-year-old Brazilian music legend Caetano Veloso would probably be Paul Simon, who's 66. Like Simon, Veloso is a celebrity equally at home in folk, rock, and various international styles, whose career took off in the late sixties and early seventies before blossoming in various interesting directions thereafter. (Unlike Veloso, however, Simon has never been imprisoned by a military dictatorship, as Veloso was in 1968.)

You could even imagine Simon tossing his comfortable band aside in favor of a tight young rock trio, which happens to be what the immensely more prolific Veloso has opted for on his recent album, "Cê," and in his current tour, which came to Manhattan's Nokia Theatre Monday night.

Veloso's earlier appearances have usually been elaborate, almost theatrical presentations, with the singer indulging his cheerful flamboyance amid string sections, samba drummers, and horns—all under the musical direction of his longtime arranger, Jacques Morelenbaum (whom Veloso referred to at the Nokia as "the man who made me unafraid of music"). That's all missing this tour, however. Veloso bopped around the stage with only a slightly ironic twinkle in his eye, waved to friends in the VIP section and slapped every palm extended upward from the floor when he wasn't playing electric guitar. He performed virtually all of "Cê," an album containing songs about spiky relationships and the occasional regret: "I only envy longevity and multiple orgasms," he sings in "Homem" (Man). Veloso couldn't avoid playing a couple of crowd-pleasing ballads on acoustic guitar, and it was also great to hear the trio, which consists of musical associates of Caetano's son, Moreno, play stripped-down versions of Veloso classics such as "London London" and "Desde Que Sampa é Samba." Jagger and McCartney had better watch their backs.

Catch Veloso if you can Nov. 23 in Tampa, Fla., or Nov. 24 in Miami.

Friday's Wall Street Journal had a nice roundup of the many Roma Gypsy and Gypsy-influenced bands and films infiltrating the artistic mainstream. Previously marginalized, the new Gypsy mystique extends from indie rock groups such as Beirut to the Bastille Opera's production of "Time of the Gypsies" in Paris this summer. And the excellent film "When the Road Bends...Tales of a Gypsy Caravan" documented the American tour of a wide range of Gypsy styles.

Although the Romani people's origins are in India, today their music is usually associated with Roma's Balkan beats. But all Romani seem to have a knack for adapting themselves to local styles. As Nicolae Ionita, a percussionist in Romania's Fanfare Ciocarlia, explains, "I'm sure that Western artists who want to work with us do so because they love Gypsy music....I don't have the impression from our experience that something gets lost in translation. In the worst case, something new and different from both Western and Eastern styles is created. That's the most interesting thing."

Indeed, New York group Gogol Bordello's recent album "Super Taranta!" should be popping up on many a critic's year-end best-of list. Gogol Bordello plays a boisterous mixture of punk rock, Jamaican dub, klezmer, techno, flamenco, hip-hop, and Gypsy folk music from the Carpathian Mountains, all led by towering Kiev-born lead singer Eugene Hutz. The album is a history lesson, political seminar, and wild dance party rolled into one. If you buy no other Gypsy-influenced album this year...

Ravi Shankar was delighted to be playing Carnegie Hall last Saturday night. But at age 87, having suffered from both double pneumonia and a shoulder injury during the past year, he's undoubtedly quite happy, as the old joke has it, to be playing anywhere. Shankar was joined by his daughter, Anoushka, the 26-year-old sitarist (and half-sister of Norah Jones) who has been performing alongside her father at venues such as this for more than a decade. Ravi Shankar introduced the sitar and Indian classical music to Western audiences during the late sixties through his association with Beatle George Harrison, whom he taught for a while, and appearances such as this thrilling moment from the 1967 Monterey Pop festival.

Anoushka has been making her own crossover appeal recently via electronic music (as on "Breathing Under Water," a collaboration with Karsh Kale), but made no appeal for Western approval on Saturday, where she performed an hour-long raga with Tanmoy Bose on tabla and Ravichandra Kulur on flute. Raviji appeared frail as he walked out for the second half of the evening but broke into a big smile as soon as he began performing his own evening raga, Jogeshwari. Although it's no secret that his virtuosity has been diminished by age, Raviji's more somber sitar tones contrasted notably with the brighter, sharper riffs played by Anoushka, who sat at his feet. Raviji followed his formal raga with a ragmala, or string of melodies, that's basically a genial jam session. Even legends need to cut loose.

Ravi and Anoushka Shankar's tour continues tomorrow night in Germantown, Tenn.

Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain began the Global Drum Project show Wednesday night at Manhattan's Highland Ballroom by beating on a squid and twin dolphins. The former Grateful Dead drummer and the Indian percussion guru thumped and slapped the sea creatures— in reality two miked pieces of evocatively shaped old-growth redwood from Sonoma County, Calif.—with fingers, hands, sticks, and a broom. The duo, who have been drumming together on various Hart projects since 1974, were here as members of Hart's latest world-class drum ensemble alongside Latin percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo, from Puerto Rico, "talking" drummer Sikiru Adepoju, from Nigeria, and electronics wizard Jonah Sharp, from Scotland. Rather than highlighting the drummers' various styles through extended soloing, the Global Drum Project seeks common rhythmic ground onstage, and on their languorous new album.

No, there was nary a drum solo to be heard during the course of an evening that often resembled a Grateful Dead parking-lot drum circle—only with really good drummers. Ambient electronics usually established a continually shifting pulse the four drummers multiplied and divided as a group or in genially jousting pairs. Hussain maintained a flow of complex new patterns on his tablas, Hidalgo added dramatic accents on congas, and Adepoju provided constant commentary through the shifting pitches of his talking drum. The sounds of a Papua, New Guinea rainforest, a New York City salsa session, an Indian raga, or a Nigerian dance party all became part of a glorious, percussive polyglot. And it was pretty cool. The Global Drum Project tour continues Saturday night at the Wharton Center for the Performing Arts in East Lansing, Mich.

Many, if not all, roads lead to Rome for immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. But as with immigrants everywhere, a new life guarantees neither acceptance nor happiness. In late 2001, a trio of intrepid local activists in Rome's immigrant-intense Piazza Vittorio community decided to create an ambitious all-immigrant orchestra from among the local residents. Their somewhat comical recruitment process and the often chaotic rehearsals leading up to the orchestra's 2002 debut performance in a rescued theater are captured in The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio, which had its American premiere Thursday night in Manhattan's IFC Film Center. The movie was followed by a live OPV performance; and there are few things more strangely rewarding than the real-life sound of larger-than-life characters one has just met onscreen. (The orchestra's multimedia tour continues tomorrow in San Francisco and Thursday in Los Angeles.)

Directed by Mario Tronco, an Italian of seemingly unlimited energy and patience, the orchestra's 10-member touring combo is half the size of the full Roman version. One of the evening's big surprises was how joyously professional the group has become compared to the ragtag gathering of nervous, tired, and frequently exasperated collaborators portrayed in the movie. Today's OPV is a joyous rhythmic fusion of musicians from Tunisia, Cuba, Senegal, Ecuador, Hungary, and Italy who seamlessly integrate each player's regional prowess into a buoyant whole greater than the sum of its parts. And it turns out that the evening's contagious optimism also translates excellently onto the orchestra's two albums, Suite Ninderli and last year's Sona.

Your grandparents' favorite music rarely sounded better than when three groups brought old Europe and the Ottoman Empire back to life under a nearly full moon last night in Central Park's Delacorte Theater. The show had an interesting back-story. Last year the New York State Music Fund was established to share the proceeds of a payola settlement with major record companies negotiated by New York's attorney general's office in 2005. The fund has dispersed $13 million to nonprofit groups for events such as this concert, part of the Joe's Pub In the Park series.

Sizzling Macedonian clarinetist Ismail Lumanovsk leads the New York Gypsy All-Stars Band, a quintet that plays traditional Roma music with classical finesse and a jazzy snap. Other members from Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia played traditional instruments such as the karun, a Turkish zither, and the darbula drum in addition to modern traps and electric bass. Unusual time signatures, happy-sad melodies, and top-notch academic chops brought the past into the present in sharp focus. The sextet of rowdies who followed them were a different carload of clowns entirely. Balkan Beat Box combines Middle Eastern- and Mediterranean-influenced tunes with Jamaican ska and dub, electronic beats, aggressing rapping, and as much attitude as you could stand. Unconcerned with musical niceties, MC Tomer Yosef and his cronies transformed the theater into a sweaty, anarchic dance club for an hour before order was restored.

The evening's de facto headliner was Beirut, an eight-piece group from Brooklyn that mixes Eastern European brass band music with the lambent French strings and accordion of Jacques Brel. Zach Condon, a precocious twenty-one-year-old with global musical aspirations and a limited warble of a voice reminiscent of equally ambitious Rufus Wainwright, leads the group. And while bandmembers switched around instruments (including a baritone saxophone, ukuleles, trumpets, a French horn, violin, and balalaika) between nearly every song, each waltz-tempo tune somehow conveyed pretty much the same endearing innocence as the next. As unlikely as it may seem, the band is better represented by the elaborate website devoted to its new album, The Flying Club Cup.

We're goofing around in San Francisco for a few weeks, staying across 19th Avenue from Sigmund Stern Grove, home since 1938 to the Stern Grove Festival, the country's oldest free outdoor music series. The place smells great. Mornings, I've been running among the towering eucalypti and evergreens that surround the grove, which resembles a lush elongated bowl set surprisingly deep into surrounding neighborhoods lined with stucco houses. The grove's natural amphitheatrical landscape provides generous acoustics for the ten thousand or more picnickers, many perched high up the grove's slopes, who turn the place into a gigantic party most summer Sunday afternoons.

Breathing Under Water, a collaboration of sitar player Anoushka Shankar and laptop-computer jockey Karsh Kale, performed yesterday afternoon following the Non-Stop Bhangra Collective, a multiethnic group of local DJs, dancers, rapper, and live drummers who reignite the music of India's Punjab region. Dancers danced, picnickers picnicked, listeners listened, and gabbers gabbed as Shankar, Kale, and their group played a type of Indi-electronic-rock fusion that leaned heavily on the Hindustani (or Northern Indian) classical music semi-popularized by Anoushka's father, Ravi Shankar, who provided the melodic inspiration for at least one tune, which was dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva. Shankar and Kale's group also included a flutist, a singer, and a morsing (South Indian jaw harp) player. As Indian classical music, it was lighter than light; as picnic music for a warm, slightly foggy afternoon in a verdant natural womb, it sure beat a pops concert.

In 2001, five gypsy bands from four countries toured the United States together for the first time. Director Jasmine Dellal's recently released documentary about the tour, When the Road Bends...Tales of a Gypsy Caravan, is both one of the best tour movies ever made as well as a valuable, enlightening, and sometimes heartbreaking look at one of the world's most misunderstood cultures. Originally from India, the Roma people, as they are more accurately known, currently number between eight and ten million. Although concentrated in Eastern Europe, at least a million gypsies (the name derives from the mistaken notion that they were 'gyptians from Egypt) have settled in the United States.

When the River Bends celebrates the common musical threads connecting the Macedonian "Queen of the Gypsies" Esma Redzepova, Spain's Antonio el Pipa Flamenco Company, Romania's Taraf de Haidouks, India's Maharaja, and Macedonia's Fanfare Ciocarlia brass band. Onstage, the musicians display variations on a happy sort of sadness, the indefinable mood the Spanish call duende. During the six weeks of their tour, their differences dissolve into a single communal spirit, and their offstage interactions are hilarious and touching.

As successful as each group may be, nearly all these musicians emerged from, and still subsist amid, shocking poverty and discrimination back home. Dellal's footage of their homes and families includes both a wedding (the marriage of one musician's nineteen-year-old son to a girl of thirteen) and a marathon musical funeral. (Veteran documentarian Albert Maysles, of Gimme Shelter fame, was the film's principle photographer.) In one scene, a group of men in Rajasthan debate the merits of literacy, and one of them notes that it helps to read the numbers on the bus.

When the Road Bends is an emotional cornucopia of music and stories originating in cultural contexts a long way away from our own. Roma pride is expressed in all five acts' music as well as in their (stubborn?) commitment to a very old way of life. "I've never assimilated for anyone," says Esma Redzepova proudly.

Each time I walk into the medina, the mile-square medieval city that's the heart of Fes, Morocco, I promise myself I won't get lost in its mazelike alleyways. But of course I always do. The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, on the other hand, is the punctual and well-ordered counterpart to the medina's chaotic and relentless mélange of sights, sounds, and smells, both charming and sometimes not so.

The Batha Museum courtyard, one of the most tranquil concert spaces ever, was the perfect location for my personal festival highlight, a Friday afternoon performance of Southern Indian classical music by vocalist Vasumathi Badrinathan. A deep-voiced, joyously improvising singer in the Carnatic tradition, Badrinathan's songs and single complete raga were accompanied by violin, mridangam (a double-headed barrel drum), and the ancient morchang (or so-called Jew's harp). The following day's Batha show was a much more sober affair consisting of Syrian singer Waed Bouhassoun, who accompanied her dry yet moving (to others, mostly) verses by the Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammmed Rumi on oud, and Uzbekistan singer Nadir Pirmatova's Uzbekistan songs reminiscent of Chinese folk music.

Lebanese singer Jahida Wahbé also concentrated on songs by Rumi at the tonier Bab Makina Friday night. Without understanding the Arabic lyrics, though, I tired rather quickly of her Streisand-esque emoting. Which made Syrian vocalist Elias Karam's following set all the more exciting. Although his music came from the same tradition of sacred poetry as Wahbé's, his arrangements shifted constantly through the course of each call-and-response tune. Karam would sing a verse with certain instruments at a certain tempo, then the orchestra would reply with a magnificent variation at a slightly brighter tempo. It was over far too soon.

The Dar Tazi courtyard, where different ensembles dug deep into the Sufi tradition every night at eleven, is another wonderful venue and a great place to wind down at the end of the day's three concerts. Sufi acts like Friday night's Chadilia Mchichia (from Tetouan, Morocco) attempted to raise audiences to a higher plane through repetitive beats and chants. As the elders looked on, however, one got the idea they were giving the younger B team a shot, and after an hour it was time to leave.

For the real Fes experience, however, one had only to enjoy each evening's free concert in the large plaza outside the medina's great gate, That's where you could hear Moroccan groups such as Mazagan and Darga\ turn up the volume for tens of thousands of fans and curious medina residents, many of whom expressed their hurling younger brothers high into the air. Darga, from Casablanca, cranked up a ten-man fusion spectacular that mixed everything from reggae, hip-hop, and acid rock with Algerian rai, Andalusia riffs, and trancey gnawa rhythms. It was exactly what a festival concerned with preserving the sacred and traditional in a complex contemporary world was supposed to be about.

For the past couple of days I've been in Morocco for the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music. The thirteenth edition of the festival is once again "presented under the high patronage of his majesty King Mohammed VI," and I'm part of a press junket that is also appreciating his patronage. The week-long event's "sacred" aspect is interpreted loosely. Some of the music heard during the fest's three or four daily concerts is religious, certainly, but much is more generally spiritual, or simply spirited.

This would apply especially to acts such as Angelique Kidjo, who was born in the West African nation of Benin and now lives in Brooklyn. She performed her energetic afropop in the Bab Makina palace courtyard to an upscale crowd that embraced her as an African sister. Kidjo was in a loquacious mood, too. "People talk about the new global community," she said in French. "But is it possible to keep your own culture and identity in such a world? I don't have the answer. I simply pose the question." She delivered something of an answer, though, in the music she performed from her new album, Djin Djin, a rooted yet cosmpolitan call for a return to African culture. Much of the audience joined her onstage for one of her final songs, "Ae Ae," which suggests that young Africans shouldn't be forced to move abroad in order to improve their lives.

Kidjo's query is at the heart of this festival, which was established following the first Gulf War as a means to reconcile the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. And it would be hard to find a better crash course in many of the more important Islamic musical styles. Festival organizers wisely program nightly free concerts in the immense square near Bab Baoujlud, the great gate that serves as main entrance to Fes al Bali, the Arab world's largest functioning medieval city. These concerts seem to take their energy from the medina and draw audiences that would not otherwise be able to afford this music.

Wednesday night's Bab Boujloud act was the Akhtar Sharif Arup Vale. This Pakistan qawwali ensemble features the wildly soaring vocal style, accompanied by handclaps and harmoniums, made famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Last night's performers consisted of three great female singers, Tunisia's Sonia Mbarak, Algeria's Beidhja Rahal, and Morocco's own Fadwa el Malki, all accompanied by the Fes Orchestra. The three vocal styles may have been quite different, but they all obviously came from the same place musically.

Sufi Nights, another remarkable festival tradition, feature a different aspect of the Muslim sect each evening at 11 in the Dar Tazi courtyard garden. Wednesday's Chekouriya ensemble, from northwest Morocco, consisted of thirteen singers, arranged in a horseshoe shape, whose mesmerizing, droning songs were accompanied by a single bass drum. But last night the gnawa ensemble Ouled Kamar (AKA the Sons of the Moon, Keepers of the Invisible Sacred Music) was an eighteen-strong mass of kinetic energy that had the crowd in a near-frenzy at times and sent at least one woman into a full-on trance state.

Afternoon concerts are held beneath a giant oak tree in the serene and beautiful garden of the city's Batha Museum. Singing birds accompany all performers at this location, and yesterday their featured guests were the Piñana brothers' flamenco trio and Diapason, a Cuban string quintet. The two groups performed singer Curro Piñana and guitarist Carlos' flamenco mass. Diapason added subtle Cuban rhythmic accents to Curro Piñana's passionate evocations of the Christian liturgy. It was sacred, spiritual, and spirited all at once.

Like a glossy yellow-bordered and lavishly illustrated magazine for your ears, National Geographic's ambitious world music website WorldMusic.NationalGeographic.com is a great place to discover new international sounds. Recent online features have zoomed in on Cuba, the Nigerian Afrobeat sound of the late Fela Kuti, Benin-born Angelique Kidjo's spunky new album Djin Djin (with a free MP3 of "Papa"), and the Grammy-winning klezmer sounds of New York's Klezmatics. The site's most recent weekly World Music Profiles podcast consists of an interview with Mali kora master Mamadou Diabate.

The organization recently released GeoRemixed: Big Beats for a Small Planet, an album's worth of downloads that give an urban twist to music from the Balkans, Africa, Israel, Romania, and elsewhere. It's a terrific introduction to bands like New York brass collective Slavic Soul Party and Tel Aviv Mediterranean surf quartet Boom Pam. Taking the global ubiquity of hip-hop for granted, GeoRemixed proves that some music sounds even better when taken out of its natural habitat.