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[youtube width=”525″ height=”360″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESj164wKc6I[/youtube]

Super excited about this new event, BomBeat, that I am launching with my crew Cumba Mela, and Nickodemus from Turntables on the Hudson.  Its all going down this Saturday, November 24th at Le Poisson Rouge, in Manhattan. Expect to hear a wide range of global bass music: cumbia, dancehall, kuduro, house, moombahton, reggaeton….

We have Jeremy Sole coming from LA, repping KCRW, TheLift, and Afro Funke.

We are going to try our best to get a free EP for ever event. Be sure to check out the first one bellow!

BomBeat EP1 November 24, 2012 @ LPR NYC by BomBeat

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Palaceer Lazaro of Shabazz Palaces, better known as Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler of Digable Planets
Portrait by Kyle Johnson

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Shabazz_Palaces-anechofromthehoststhatprofessinfinitum.mp3]
Shabazz Palaces “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum” from the upcoming album Black Up on Sub Pop Records. Considering how heavy we’ve been listening to the first two EPs, and how hungry we are for new Shabazz, this is obviously some some great news! A glimpse of things to come “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum,” densely textured poems and verses delivered with that signature measured cadence, swirling and chewed up synths and samples, ridiculous beats and more mbira solos!  Looking forward to seeing Shabazz Palaces at SXSW this week. It will be very interesting, even if they’re only giving abbreviated performances!


Tendai , Dougie, and Ishmael

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Whenever I land in a new city, I go into town with three intentions.

*Find out if there is a really old and amazing music from the region.

*Find out what the locals are listening to at the pubs and clubs so I have an idea what my set should be like.

*Find something really new listen to.

Language barriers usually don’t usually impede this. You might go in with an idea of what you’re looking for but the skilled know not to expect anything. Just find something amazing.

Walk the streets with eyes and ears peeled. Somewhere some 14 year old kid that cut class today, came home early and is blasting a local mixtape so loud the whole neighborhood can hear it. On the metro, someone is rockin out their mp3 player so loud you can hear their headphones above the racket of the moving train. A restaurant owner from a foreign country is simultaneously playing the most amazing CD of music from his country to make his establishment feel like home. Music is everywhere and when its good, its usually loud.

I was walking around Oberkampf in Paris with Marie Maurin from Jacasseries Radio an area where a lot of the college kids go to get wasted for cheap and we ended up checking out a bar called International. We were just walking over to see what was playing because there’s always some live act going on in there but what we found heard from outside was amazing.  I’m talkin Konono no. 1 on acid.

The street outside was mobbed with with smokers. Gotta love that you can walk out the bar with your beer there. We pushed through the crowd to get closer to the music. I spent the next couple minutes trying to figure out if what was on the projection screen of the crowd downstairs was really happening or if it was a tape. There was a bearded man in a faded santa suit throwing popcorn at the crowd dancing downstairs. When I realized it was real time I told my friend I needed to push through and check out the basement.

Congopunq as a duo are a fairly odd pair of dudes to behold. Dr Kong is a towering 6’2 dude jumping up and down and pulling all manor of tricks out his suitcase. He is happy to make you crepes on stage or bang a kettle with a broomstick or stare at one person menacingly for the duration of a song. His performance interacts with the crowd and makes the show more participatory something I’ve been looking for in new acts to book.

Percussionist Cyril Atef performs in a custom made jock strap and sits behind the oddest drum kit I’ve ever seen assembled. A djimbe for a kick drum, a random collection of random shakers and percussive instruments gathered from around the globe all microphoned through a sample station to loop and stack beats. There is a roland or korg synth which also ran through the loop station and probably a couple pots and pans. He’ll stack a few loops to the beat add a synth line then proceed to rock out the amplified thumb piano for 15 minute jam sessions of improvised dancefloor mayhem.

This is them performing live in Haiti. Watch how the crowd goes from chanting for the local dancer Chi Chi Man to going totally mental for Congopunq’s jump up carnival vibes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEB_UBJOtfQ[/youtube]

Cyril, is the long-time percussionist for Mathieu Chedid (french megastar with the oddest haircut in the biz) and he’s also founded another project called Bumcello. He has been living in France for some 20 years now. I  sat down with him to talk about the new project at his apartment and from what I can tell he’s completely insane in the healthiest sense of the word.  Here’s the video for their single from the Candy Goodness album released on Crammed Discs. This guy should be rocking at tropical parties around the globe right now and no one seems to know about him. Promoters and Booking Agents… get on your P’s and Qs and BBM’s and twitter… I’ll be playing with him tonight at the same bar I met him at International 5/7 Rue Moret. Planning on bringing him to NYC soon so please hit me up if you wanna host them at your parties.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBXVf2XXS70[/youtube]0

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Thomas Mapfumo

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Thomas_Mapfumo-Hwa-Hwa.mp3]

Thomas Mapfumo & The Acid Band – Hwa-Hwa

In Harare, Zimbabwe (or what at the time was known as Salisbury, Zimbabwe Rhodesia) — sometime in the middle of the 1970s, Thomas Mapfumo stopped playing covers of American rock and soul (music by Elvis Presley, Bobby Darrin, Mick Jagger, etc.) He began singing in shona, and transcribing the sounds of the mbira (chief instrument for traditional Shona music) to the electric guitar. His lyrics became overtly political, in support of the revolutionary movement in the rural parts of the country. The white minority Rhodesians/ruling population, which was brutally suppressing voices of dissent, didn’t catch on due to their lack of understanding of the native language/culture until 1978 when Thomas Mapfumo released the song “Hokoyo,” which means “Watch Out!” in Shona, and Mapfumo was eventually arrested and jailed. “Hokoyo” became a regional hit in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The song “Hwa-Hwa” is from Thomas Mapfumo’s first full-length, also titled Hokoyo! –first time available in the US thanks to Water.

A few years back, Rupture wrote about and posted some Mapfumo tracks, especially digging his 1980s catalog. Thomas Mapfumo made most of his albums in the 1980s and ’90s, releasing politically charged music, criticizing Robert Mugabe’s government for its gross human rights abuse and torture/beating and killing of opposition party candidates and supporters. Mapfumo was exiled from Zimbabwe in the 1990s. He now lives in Oregon, still making music and touring internationally.