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Bashiri Johnson: NYC Session Specialist

Bashiri Johnson isn’t exactly a household name. It’s not as if he hasn’t played on some of the best-selling albums of the last 30 years, or that he hasn’t been on tour with some of the top-grossing musicians in history. He has. But Johnson is a session percussionist whose fame lives quietly in liner notes and shadowy corners of sold-out arenas. He’s the guy producers call when they want to add the perfect percussive touches to an album, tour, or commercial — the guy the music industry adores and the average Joe has never heard of.

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Sammy Figueroa: Rhythms & Metaphysics

Listening to Sammy Figueroa tell his life story is like being led, blindfolded, through the back alleys of some exotic foreign city.

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Santana’s Karl Perazzo & Raul Rekow

Look up the phrase “rhythm section” in the Encyclopedia Britannica and you’ll see their pictures — the prestigious percussionists who have shared the stage with one Devadip Carlos Santana. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Mexican-born guitarist’s collective of San Francisco-based musicians fused Latin and rock like none before them. The 1969 debut-album rhythm section of percussionists José “Chepitó” Areas, Mike Carabello, and drummer Michael Shrieve are the beginning of a long lineage of legendary percussion sections.

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A Look Inside The Drum Circle With Kalani

Kalani may be able to drum circles around us, but why bother? Fact is, he’d rather circle drums around us.He hasn’t always felt that way. Flash back to his high school years in Oakland, California, and you’ll find him as another Bonham-dazzled kid with a fistful of sticks and a head full of attitude. His place was with a band onstage, preferably atop a riser bathed in lights.

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Arthur Hull Interviews Olatunji

In this rare interview, drum circle guru Arthur Hull talks with his mentor, Nigerian master percussionist Babatune Olatunji, about the birth of drum circle culture and the future of community drumming.

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Rebound Man: Pablo “Chino” Nuñez

As the old adage would have us believe, you’ve got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues. Turns out that the same is true for salsa musicians. Pablo “Chino” Nuñez will be the first to admit that he never did much in the way of dues paying – gigs came his way easily since before he could shave – but in 2002, after a career that had already spanned 30 years and had seen the acclaimed percussionist perform with the likes of Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, Marc Anthony, Ruben Blades, Johnny Panhreco, and Victor Manuelle (the list truly goes on and on), Nuñez, an explosive, expressive, and highly versatile player, with chops so prodigious that one would never expect him to be out of work anytime or anywhere, joined the ranks of New York’s homeless.

Features

Motherland Music: A Passion For Africa

Motherland Music Imports Authentic African Percussion

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Cyro Baptista: Ingesting A Musical Feast

On the final cut of Brazilian master percussionist Cyro Baptista’s new album, Banquet Of The Spirits, a soothing voice with a thick accent imparts a history lesson. Underlined by spooky bulbul tarang (a type of Indian banjo), melodica, slide bass, and cymbal crashes — the latter spaced apart like waves pounding the shore — Baptista’s wild tale introduces “the only law of the universe,” Anthropofagia.

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Marc Quiñones:  The Other Allman Brother

Raised in the Bronx on a steady diet of salsa, percussionist Marc Quiñones found himself playing with The Allman Brothers, the definitive white-bread blues band, for 15 years. It has become a career and Quiñones digs it.

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Ralph Irizarry: Ruben Blades’ Timbale Titan

Much of the world knows Ralph Irizarry as an innovative timbalero whose work with Ray Barretto, Ruben Blades, and especially as leader of his own two groups – Timbalaye and Son Café – redefine the parameters of Latin jazz percussion. But he’s also a guy who seems to find himself in situations that you can laugh about after some decent amount of time has passed. Chalk both up to his thirst for experience, in life as well as music. Long before launching his solo career, before his 13-year run with Blades, his first major gig with conga master Barretto, and his sessions with David Byrne, Paul Simon, Earl Klugh, Celia Cruz, and other headliners, Irizarry was a kid in New York City – but he wasn’t raised in any bosom of Latin music. In fact, he was more likely to hear klezmer or R&B than salsa outside the first home he can remember, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

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Trilok Gurtu: When World Cultures Collide

It took world music to return to Indian music the legitimacy it deserves within Western contexts. More than any other artist, Trilok Gurtu should be credited for rescuing this music from its psychedelic associations and finding ways of integrating it with less gimmickry into jazz and rock. The world-music phenomenon allowed this to happen, but it took a musician of Gurtu’s remarkable skills to take advantage of our broadened tolerance and prove that there is plenty of power to be drawn from his artistic traditions.

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Jamey Haddad: Inventing And Reinventing

“I’m about as cool as I can get,” Jamey Haddad says over the phone from his home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio.

What the veteran drummer and percussionist means is that after pushing back our interview half an hour so he could finish up a couple of things, he’s as ready as he’ll ever be to proceed. But it’s funny he put it that way because the description is actually very apt. Jamey Haddad is a cool cat. His chilled-out attitude and comedic storytelling ability (complete with accents) alone would make him cool. When you add his infectiously intense passion for music, he oozes coolness.