News & Updates — Celebrate Icons

The much loved Cuban singer Ibrihim Ferrer rose to world-wide fame as part of Buena Vista Social Club, but not before a long career in Cuba with, among others, Los Bocucos, Beny Moré and Afro-Cuban All-Stars, with his first Cuban hit record coming in 1955. He had been an orphaned street youth singer who became a Santero, as well as a singer of sones, guarachas and boleros. In 1962 he toured Europe with Los Bocucos and met Nikita Kruschev. He continued his singing career in Cuba, largely shut off to the world. Said Ferrer: "The music got better after the...

When a pre-fame Fela Kuti took his Koola Lobitos band to the USA in 1969, they ended up stranded in Los Angeles, working nightclubs into 1970. There they took in the Black Power movement, and the politicized perspective being away from home helped radicalize Fela, who was just another black nobody in L.A. dealing with the struggle but trying to keep moving forward. But his drummer and future musical director, Tony Allen (the man who would co-create the Afrobeat sound), took even more back to Nigeria with him. He learned how to play with looser wrists, more touching than hitting...

Perhaps the original "freak-folk" artist, the Bahamian musician & herbalist Tony McKay (aka "Exuma") was created from a lightning bolt and raised on Cat Island before moving to NYC in the late '50s. He participated in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the mid-'60s, hanging and playing with Dylan, Hendrix, Richie Havens, Peter, Paul & Mary and others. He released his first Exuma album in 1970 and proceeded to create his unique brand of psychedelic folk/funk/island pop with his Junk Band (sometimes members of the Blues Magoos), very much rooted in junkanoo and Obeah culture while also displaying the influence...

(Clive Chin, left and Bertram Brown, center. Photo by Malcolm Allen) Jamaican producer Bertram Brown was the man behind Freedom Sounds, founded in '75 and operating into the '90s, an important reggae label from the Greenwich Farm ghetto of Kingston. The imprint put out some great music of social concerns by Prince Alla, Rod Taylor, Phillip Fraser, Horace Andy, Ranking Dread, Michael Prophet, Earl Zero and many, many others, with a special regard for neighborhood talents and singers not part of the island's mainstream. These rootsy 45s usually were with the backing of the Soul Syndicate band (often cut at...

I never personally knew Jack Rose (although several of my friends did), but I always dug his playing. It brings me back to my fondness for John Fahey and Robbie Basho. I used to listen to his noisy group Pelt back in the '90s as well. It was still a shock to hear of his passing in 2009 at just 38. There have been many tributes to him, rightfully so, and on his date of birth we'll share a few videos here too. His music mostly pulled from country blues, ragtime and Indian ragas. "A lot of people, when they...