Tom Cheyney

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Poet In the Midst

Tom Cheyney
As longtime emcee/curator of the Hammer Museum’s poetry-reading series, Stephen Yenser has presented many heavyweights and lesser-knowns of modern American verse. Since his pithy, personalized introductions have often resonated as much as the verse that followed, I’ve often wondered: What of Yenser’s own poems? It has been more than a......
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Ali Farka Touré, 1939–2006

Tom Cheyney
Ali Farka Touré didn’t like being called the king of Malian blues, since he often pointed out that the music he championed was much older and deeper than its African-American offspring. Non-Malians started tuning in to his mesmerizing fingerpicked guitar and salt-of-the-earth multilingual vocals when Nick Gold of World Circuit......
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The Immense Sweetness of Amadou & Mariam

Tom Cheyney
Lover-musicians Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia — better known as Amadou & Mariam — met in the mid-’70s at a school for the blind in Mali. Says Amadou wryly, “It was love at first sight.” A shared love of music drew the two together; since then, they’ve rarely been apart,......
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Worlds Within Worlds

Tom Cheyney
Photo by Arnold Newman PETER GABRIEL IS NOT ONE TO SHY AWAY FROM pondering life's mega-mysteries or coming to terms with the vast cauldron of human emotion and behavior. Birth, death, grief, fear, joy, loss, God and other unseen forces get serious play on his new, 10-years-in-the-making album, Up. The......
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From the Motherland

Tom Cheyney
Bamba Dembele could have kept yakking for hours. As he gorged himself on chicken and potatoes at the KooKooRoo across from downtown‘s California Plaza, the burly manager, MC and djembe whacker for the Super Rail Band complained about music piracy in Mali and the predicament of his country’s music industry......
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The Calling

Tom Cheyney
“Persian music is minor-key and very melancholic -- it’s a form of the blues, and you can never forget that,” says Loga Ramin Torkian, musical director and guitarist of Axiom of Choice. Although the material on the L.A.-based group‘s new release, Niya Yesh (Narada World), doesn’t stray far from the......
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Rai ‘Em Cowboy

Tom Cheyney
KHALED, A. CARRARA; BAHAMADIA, PIOTR SIKORA; MODEST, PAT GRAHAM KHALEDKenza (Ark 21Universal) Khaled and Beck may not seem like kindred spirits, but the Paris-based Algerian rai royal and his collaborators throw as much into the musical kitchen sink as homeboy does. Not that you’d confuse one with the other: Khaled‘s......
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Rising Son

Tom Cheyney
Photo by Lisa Rinzler MARC RIBOT Y LOS CUBANOS POSTIZOS ¡Muy Divertido! (Atlantic) If Arsenio Rodriguez, lounging in son montuno heaven, can hear what Marc Ribot has done to his music, he’s either cringing or clapping his hands. One thing’s for sure: The late “father of the Afro-Cuban sound” won’t......
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Global Beat

Tom Cheyney
In much of Africa, it is still word of mouth -- not television -- that carries the information payload. Sub-Saharan oral culture circa 2000 has evolved into a tumultuous blend of gossip, radio patter and music. Denizens of Dakar, Douala and Luanda -- where TV and movies are rare --......
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Shimmy Shimmy Globopop

Tom Cheyney
Dinner‘s done, the dishes are in the sink. It’s been a long day, and you decide to load up the CD player, hit ”shuffle“ and relax into your overstuffed couch. From the plethora of recent platters featuring the West African kora -- a 21-string harp-lute hybrid -- you select a......