Interview With Cuban Musician Omar Sosa

Cuban Omar Sosa's vision of contemporary jazz reaches across every imaginable boundary. His music is an exploration of African culture with a global perspective. His foundation for all of his musical compositions is rooted in his spiritual beliefs.

His religion is Santeria, an Afro-Cuban faith that developed on the Caribbean island during the years of slavery, under Spanish colonial rule. Many of the slaves were of Yoruba origin, from what is now southwestern Nigeria, and brought with them belief in a supreme god, Olofi. Humans cannot communicate directly with Olofi. They have to use intermediaries, powerful deities known as orishas, or in Cuba also as Santos (saints). Ancestors are regarded almost as deities and their spirits are called upon at all times for assistance.

Sosa initially studied percussion at the legendary Escuela Nacional de Musica in Havana and then began to focus on the piano. In the late 80s, having studied everything from Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions to European classical music, Omar began working with two Cuban vocalists - Vicente Feliu, and Xiomara Laugart, serving as musical director for their touring and recording ensembles.

Moving to Quito, Ecuador, in 1993, Omar discovered the folkloric music of Esmeraldas, a small African-rooted culture on the northwest coast of that country known for its use of the marimba. He launched his own jazz-fusion ensemble, Entrenoz, and produced "Andarele," a recording by the Afro-Ecuadorian group Koral y Esmarelda.

Sosa moved to San Francisco in 1995 where he became a noted member of the local Latin jazz community. The next year he made his U.S. recording debut on Otá Records, and followed in 1997 with the first in a trilogy of recordings, "Free Roots, Spirit of the Roots and Bembon," that mixed jazz piano with rhythms from across Latin America and Africa.

In 1998 he began collaborating with Bay Area percussionist John Santos. The duo released a live recording, called "Nfumbe," and appeared at the San Francisco Jazz Festival that year. The following year Sosa released his second solo piano recording, "Inside," and he also traveled to Ecuador in 1999 to record his large-ensemble CD "Bembon." In 1999 Omar relocated from California to Barcelona, Spain, where he has dived into West Europe's most vibrant music scene.

With the CD's "Prietos" (2001) and "Sentir" (2002), Sosa expanded his musical fusion further with the use of traditional vocals and instruments from the Gnawa culture of North Africa. The 2004 album "Mulatos," a mix of Cuban music with Indian tabla, jazz drums and studio mixing, features the talents of Dhafer Youssef (oud), Steve Arguelles (drums, electronics), Dieter Ilg (double bass), Hilippe Foch (tabla) and Renaud Pion (clarinets). Ota Records released "Ballads," this year, a collection of his early Latin jazz recordings.

You can find the interview here

Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco

A review of Jorge Franco's Paradise Travel

Gabriel García Márquez imprisoned a generation of aspiring writers. Jorge Franco-with Paradise Travel, now available in English translation-has set them free.

The prose of García Márquez, entrenched in the novelist’s bittersweet hardscrabble bohemian struggle- but soaring on the gossamer wings of an intricate mythology-was so compelling it was almost impossible for the novice not to try to write like him. Nor was it uncommon for the serious reader to look for more of the same species of word spell. Won over by this Colombian from Aracataca and his new way of telling the old tales about love and solitude and death, the global literary community seemed to turn "magical realist" for a while.

Then along comes Jorge Franco, and once again we learn we are in the grip of another Colombian with universal designs for his fiction and the mastery to achieve it. With four well-received works published in Spanish in his native country, Franco’s already a name to reckon with there. But here, in the United States, the fervor is only just beginning.

That’s because, somewhat improbably, Franco has written the great American novel-no, the great Pan-American novel-from Medellín. And he’s done so, on his own terms, on the strength of his own voice, one that manages to get the whole world into his prose without resorting to the techniques of magical realism. With Franco, the magic is all hidden. All we get is the story, all that we crave most from it.

You can find the review here

Don Quixote - Interview with Edith Grossman

Don Quixote has trotted into the 21st century, retranslated for our times, thanks to Edith Grossman, who makes Spanish sensible - and seductive - to English ears.

Thanks, also, to smoking. It wasn't just talent that drew Grossman almost 40 years ago to the precarious, perhaps quixotic life of a professional translator. She found she could work at home and smoke as much as she pleased without bothering anyone. "No, it's not apocryphal," she laughs when asked about this story. "Back in the bad old days I was a heavy smoker." Home is still New York City. The cigarettes are gone but there's a jazz club huskiness in her voice. Next Saturday, Grossman will be talking translation at the Ibero-American Cultural Festival in Canberra. And if Spanish is a language in the ascendant, she is its star translator into English. Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia's Nobel prize-winning writer, speaks of her simply as "my voice in English".

According to one tradition, the ideal translator is invisible. Yet on the cover of the new Don Quixote, her name sits just below Picasso's image of knight and squire. Asked about this prominence, she pauses, then remarks, rather dryly: "Well, you'll forgive me if I say: 'And rightly so!'

"I don't think any translator ever thought he or she was supposed to be invisible. What I mean is, I don't think it's possible for the translator to be invisible, in the same way that a reader brings an entire life's experience to the reading of each book."

As for Quixote, he brings to life his experience of reading. His beloved books of chivalry, some of them translated, send him forth in search of adventure. Out in the world he hears accounts of his doings, some of them false, and even becomes a plaything for the cruel among his readers.

You can find the review here

The Tango Singer by Tomas Eloy Martinez

ON a dawn as beautiful as any since the world began, a young man watches the sun rise from the balcony of his Buenos Aires hotel. "There [had] never existed a city as beautiful as Buenos Aires at that moment," he reflects. Exalted by the glory of the moment, he goes to write a letter full of joy to a friend; instead he writes another letter, an act of unredeemable baseness.

The young man's name is Bruno. He is an American who has just written his PhD on Jorge Luis Borges's essays about the origins of the tango, a thesis he wrote without travelling to the city where it all began. So in September 2001, when Argentina is again threatening to dissolve into financial and physical anarchy, Bruno travels to Buenos Aires on a different quest. In his native New York he has heard about a fabled tango singer who has never recorded and doesn't give concerts but appears regularly at bizarre venues across the city. Julio Martel has a voice that threads the air like the shadow of an angel's wing and Bruno is obsessed with the need to hear him sing.

That obsession is the sketch from which this remarkable novel starts. In its finished form, it is a painting burning with life, dazzling with ideas; in essence it is an exploration of Walter Benjamin's theory of history. Tomas Eloy Martinez, director of Latin American studies at Rutgers University in the US, is not an instantly familiar name in the Latin American canon although he was short-listed for last year's International Man Booker Prize won by Ismail Kadare. Martinez, born in Argentina in 1934, is two years older than Kadare and, like the Albanian novelist, has spent much of his life exiled from his native country. This is his third novel to be translated into English.

This is a writer familiar with the nature of obsession. As an exile from Argentina, he cannot help but write about, inquire into and trace out some map of understanding for the violent and unpredictable history of a country that in the early decades of the 20th century had claims to greatness. One of those claims has to be the tango, which has come to define Argentina and, specifically, Buenos Aires.

You can find the review here

Buy The Tango Singer at Amazon.com

Buy El Cantor De Tango at Amazon.com

The Motorcycle Diaries directed by Walter Salles

In the spring of 1952, two young men set out by motorcycle on an ambitious, footloose journey that they hoped would carry them from Buenos Aires up the spine of Chile, across the Andes and into the Peruvian Amazon. (They made it, a little behind schedule, though the unfortunate motorcycle did not.) Their road trip, however inspired and audacious it might have been, could have faded into personal memory and family lore, even though both travelers produced written accounts of their adventures. The older, a 29-year-old biochemist named Alberto Granado, is still alive and appears at the very end of "The Motorcycle Diaries," Walter Salles's stirring and warm-hearted reconstruction of that long-ago voyage. Granado's companion was a 23-year-old medical student named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, whose subsequent career as a political idol, revolutionary martyr and T-shirt icon — Che! — reflects a charismatic, mysterious glow onto his early life. (...)
But the film, written by José Rivera, is really a love story in the form of a travelogue. The love it chronicles is no less profound — and no less stirring to the senses — for taking place not between two people but between a person and a continent. Mr. Bernal's soulful, magnetic performance notwithstanding, the real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring and enigmatic beauty.
At the end of the film, after his sojourn at the leper colony has confirmed his nascent egalitarian, anti-authority impulses, Ernesto makes a birthday toast, which is also his first political speech. In it he evokes a pan-Latin American identity that transcends the arbitrary boundaries of nation and race. "The Motorcycle Diaries," combining the talents of a Brazilian director and leading actors from Mexico (Mr. Bernal) and Argentina (Mr. de la Serna), pays heartfelt tribute to this idea. In an age of mass tourism, it also unabashedly revives the venerable, romantic notion that travel can enlarge the soul, and even change the world.

You can find the review here

Amores Perros directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

When a director shifts gears as often as does Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the man behind the emotionally rich debut film "Amores Perros," you may wonder if he knows what he wants. He does, and this film is satisfying in many ways.
He is unashamed to immerse this tough-minded, episodic film noir in freshets of melodrama. Significantly, he knows the minute difference between being unashamed and being shameless, and because he knows how to keep things hopping -- working from an intricate script by Guillermo Arrianga that has a novelistic texture -- we watch a man with immaculate control of the medium.(...)
It's rare that a director can enter films with this much verve and emotional understanding. Mr. Gonzalez Inarritu loves actors, and his cast brings so many different levels of feeling to the picture that the epic length goes by quickly. "Amores Perros" vaults onto the screen, intoxicated by the power of filmmaking -- speeded-up movement and tricked-up cuts that convey a shallow mastery of craft -- but evolving into a grown-up love of narrative. In his very first film Mr. Gonzalez Inarritu makes the kind of journey some directors don't, or can't, travel in an entire career.

You can find the review here

Maria Full of Grace directed by Joshua Marston

It's painfully understandable that the 17-year-old title character of "Maria Full of Grace" would risk her freedom and even her life to be a drug mule. This gripping Colombian film, written and directed by Joshua Marston, follows the desperate plunge of Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) from a dead-end job as an assembly-line worker in a Colombian flower factory into the drug-smuggling underworld.
This treacherous territory, where young women, seduced by suave, sweet-talking recruiters, can earn large sums by smuggling heroin into the United States, is Maria's last resort when she finds herself unemployed and pregnant. Her ruthless new bosses make her former taskmasters look like angels.

Before the story zeroes in on the harrowing details of drug running and its dangers, it depicts Maria's hopelessly circumscribed life in the rural village where she lives with her mother, grandmother and sister. She is expected to turn over to the family the minuscule salary she earns dethorning roses in a sweatshop atmosphere.

Hounded by her boss to be more productive, she impulsively quits. Even when her family panics, she refuses to grovel to get her job back. She also becomes pregnant by her deadbeat boyfriend, Juan (Wilson Guerrero), who reluctantly offers to marry her. Because she doesn't love him, she turns down the proposal.

You can find the review here

Real Women Have Curves directed by Patricia Cardoso

The culture-clash comic melodrama "Real Women Have Curves" is effervescent and satisfying, a crowd pleaser that does not condescend. And it is a crowd pleaser; the tumultuous audience response to "Curves" during screenings at this year's Sundance Film Festival made it a sure Dramatic Audience Award winner. (The movie, which opens the New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art tonight, also received a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for its ensemble cast.) It's rare to see a movie about two strong-willed women, let alone a film in which the one who's in the wrong is not painted unequivocally as a heartless villain.
The generational conflict is set off between the blossoming Ana (America Ferrera), a Mexican-American teenager who has a chance to attend Columbia University on a scholarship, and her mother, Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros), who is determined that Ana follow convention and go to work with her in a Los Angeles sweatshop. Carmen's blithe cruelty comes out of love; she's ashamed of her daughter's zaftig figure and whittles away at Ana before the entire world.

"Real Women Have Curves" is full of pitched battles and comic set pieces at the sweatshop, brought about when Ana joins her mother and older sister to make some extra money. A couple of the scenes may feel a bit contrived; the comedy is at times a little obvious. But this is more than made up for by the film's simplicity and directness.

The shrewdness in "Curves" is that Ana is her mother's daughter: she gives as good as she gets. And the director, Patricia Cardoso, in her first full-length film, gives her puppyish star all the care that she deserves; it's a generosity we'd expect from a veteran. Ms. Cardoso is steady-handed, choosing against the blind pursuit of obsessive camera technique that's often the province of newly hatched filmmakers. (Maybe it's because she spent 10 years trying to get this film made.)


You can find the review here

New Spanish-Language Paper in Washington

The Herald in Everett, Washington - owned by the Washington Post Co. - plans to launch a Spanish-language weekly April 21, called La Raza de Noroeste.

Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga

Obabakoak is Bernardo Atxaga's best-known book, the one that brought him a small international reputation. Yet it's perhaps his least straightforward novel. It's a novel that operates on several different levels of reality.

Bernardo Atxaga is the pen name of a writer called Joseba Irazu Garmendia, from Asteasu, Gipuzkoa. (Not so long ago, it was not a smart move to write in Basque under one's own name). A storyteller from Asteasu has access to the world's treasure trove of stories. But he chooses to write his own Basque stories as well.

While Atxaga is definitely a novelist, Obabakoak may or may not be a novel. It may be just a collection of stories. Connected or unconnected. It doesn't matter. There are no characters that you can follow all the way through the book, not even the village of Obaba which only appears and reappears from time to time. Obaba is a dark, mysterious place. A place where both local and universal stories are told. People from the outside are out of place there, and they stay that way. Nor is it all about Obaba. Parts take place in Hamburg, Peru, Castile, Iraq, and China. This is a Basque book and it is an international book.

(The title Obabakoak may or may not mean: The things and people of the village of Obaba; It may be just that obaba is the sound a Basque baby makes. )

This is a brilliant, moving book. It does not exploit the reader. It is about storytelling. It is about storytelling in a language understood by a small group of people: a people that understand that if they were to choose not to use Basque, they would be complicit in the death of one of humanity's oldest and most distinct forms of speech. There is not a political word in the book; it is all political. When a writer chooses to write in a language that is marginalized, it is a political act. There are no literary signposts for such a writer.

You can find the review here

Interview with Bernardo Atxaga

A 2001 interview with Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga.

Bernardo Atxaga sent no address, just a piece of paper with crosses marking the pelota court, the church, the fountain, and then his house, in relation to the three basic components of any Basque village. He might just have easily have been describing Obaba, the imaginary setting of his most famous book Obabakoak.
"No," he laughs, "Obaba is an interior landscape. You don't remember all the places of the past, but what sticks in the memory is this window, that stone, the bridge. Obaba is the country of my past, a mixture of the real and the emotional."

Atxaga is, as one critic has pointed out, not just a Basque novelist but the Basque novelist: a writer charged, whether he likes it or not, with exporting a threatened culture around the world. Born in 1951, Atxaga grew up in a Basque-speaking valley of scattered houses and villages near San Sebastian. Basque is a rural language, with no relation to neighbouring Spanish or French, and spoken in Atxaga's infancy by less than half a million people. Franco sought to eliminate it after the civil war: tombstones in Basque were torn up, and the language was forbidden in schools.
In evoking this Basque heritage, Atxaga avoids nostalgia, often the curse of writers recreating lost rural childhood. "The look backwards can be very deceptive, a siren song that any time past was better. You have to be very disciplined about feelings. If you let a sense of nostalgia dominate, you only write false texts." he says.

Two Brothers, the most recent of his works to arrive in the UK, is a short novel with a long history. It was written in the mid-1970s and published in Basque in 1985; Atxaga himself translated it into Spanish for publication in 1995. The two brothers of the title are orphaned in their adolescence. Paulo inherits the sawmill and too much responsibility, because his brother, Daniel, has a mental age of three. Like all Atxaga's characters, they have little room for manoeuvre. They are trapped in their situation, which is in turn aggravated by their neighbours. "Village life is tough. People are often disagreeable and ignorant," Atxaga says.

You can find the review here

10th annual Kiriyama Prize

Luis Alberto Urrea won the Kiriyama fiction prize for "The Hummingbird's Daughter".

The Kiriyama Prize, is given to "literature that contributes to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia", and is sponsored by Pacific Rim Voices, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco.