Kleber Gomes was 10 when he penned his first song about São Paulo. The year: 1985. The 1985 track: a punk rock tune about his home on its gritty southside. One of five brothers and sisters born to migrants from north-east Brazil, the budding composers kn

A NIGHT IN RIO Who can take a folk song and whip it into a dance frenzy? Brazilians, of course. For the third year, the Latin American Coalition celebrates Carnival with music, dance and a spread of the multi-ethnic South American country’s delicious cul

Like Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso before him, Arthur Verocai and his auspicious 1972 debut transcend borders, time and genre. An album full of ‘moments’ – “Na Boca Do Sol” and “Caboclo” immediately come to mind – it’s “Sylvia” I have lined

Last November, I blogged about local beatboxer Shodekeh contributing a track to what appeared to be a promising Meredith Monk remix project, Monk Mix. It boasted contributions from the likes of Bjork, Bang on a Can, Caetano Veloso, DJ Spooky, and Vijay I

A long time in coming Caetano Veloso and David Byrne: Live at Carnegie Hall offers listeners a listen into Mr. Veloso’s weeklong 2004 Perspectives concert series at Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium. Amassing 18 stunning live tracks from the concert

Gal Costa, Recanto The grand dame of tropicalia shakes off mainstream samba and bossa nova to deliver a starkly minimal, deeply introspective masterpiece. All of the songs were written by Caetano Veloso, who produced the album with his son Moreno. The ar

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne is set to release a collaborative album with Brazilian musician/artist Caetano Veloso. The album, with a self-explanatory enough title of Caetano Veloso and David Byrne Live at Carnegie Hall, is set to be released throu

In the spring of 2004, Caetano Veloso curated a week of special concerts at New York's Carnegie Hall as one of its prestigious Perspectives artists. As part of the series, he invited his longtime friend and collaborator David Byrne to join him for an eve

Although David Byrne hasn't given us a proper new solo album in some time, the Talking Heads legend has kept his output steady with collaborations, soundtracks, compilation appearances and concert recordings. In the coming months, this trend will continu

Later this year, Byrne will publish a new nonfiction book, titled How Music Works, via McSweeney's. The book is Byrne's anthropological treatise on the evolution of music, tackling the ever-looming topic of how to make money as a musician in the current

As is obvious by now, 3-D cinema doesn’t replicate reality in its infinite gradations of depth so much as offer a stylized version of it - a trick we buy into when it works and instinctively resist when it doesn’t. It is an abstraction, in other words, a

Vera Paiva has spent four decades trying to find out what happened to her father after he was arrested in 1971 during Brazil's military dictatorship. Rubens Paiva, a former congressman, is one of the country's most famous desaparecidos, or "disappeared o

Every week, Good Food’s Music Supervisor Gary Mecija selects a song to cook by. All of Gary’s music selections are added to Good Food’s Music to Cook By Playlist which lives on the right-hand sidebar of the Good Food Blog. This week’s selection is Alfome

Among the 62 albums I acquired in 2011, many were old albums I'm only now catching up on. Some stuck with me better than others. Here are my (unranked) favorite new-to-me albums of the year. Harmonia: Musik von Harmonia and Cluster: Zuckerzeit 2011 was k