Thoughts on the Week: Messages in a bottle

Looking back, I realize that before I moved to New York, New York had already started moving toward me.

My love of Spanish language music had led me to work with artists in Spain, and I was finishing my own bilingual Spanish-English album, Bohemia.

Around that time, I received a promotional copy of Brazilian Girls, the debut album by the New York band that had emerged from the scene around Nublu in the East Village. It was music that seemed to connect so many of the things I loved: jazz, latin music, electronic production, dance music, evocative songwriting with lyrics that moved effortlessly between English, Spanish, French and German.

I knew, almost immediately, that I wanted to be wherever that music was being made.

My 2022 conversation with Brazilian Girls keyboardist Didi Gutman helps tell the story of that remarkable band and the creative community that surrounded it.

Around the same time, another cultural current was pulling me east. I subscribed to Heeb magazine, the irreverent Jewish publication that managed to make Jewish identity feel contemporary, funny and adventurous. It’s easy to forget now, but in the early 2000s a single CD or magazine could change the trajectory of your imagination. Living in the Midwest in the early days of the internet, those discoveries felt like messages in a bottle from the other side of the world.

One of those messages came in the form of the Hip Hop Hoodíos, the multilingual Latin alternative group whose songs mixed hip-hop, rock, Jewish identity, Latin culture and a healthy dose of absurdist humor. It was another reminder that New York was becoming the place where all of the musical threads that fascinated me seemed to intersect.

The Hoodíos were founded by Josh Norek, who today runs Regalias Digitales, a company that helps artists collect publishing and neighboring-rights royalties. Long before that, Josh co-founded the Latin Alternative Music Conference with Thomas Cookman. Over the past quarter century, LAMC has become one of the most important gathering places for Spanish-language alternative music, helping artists like Jorge Drexler, Natalia Lafourcade, Julieta Venegas and Mexican Institute of Sound reach wider audiences while building a creative community that continues to evolve.

My 2020 conversation with Josh tells much of the story of Nacional Records, Hip Hop Hoodios, LAMC and the changing landscape of Latin alternative music.

Josh and I eventually became friends. He was briefly my lawyer. Somewhere along the way, I also remixed the Hoodíos’ “1492,” their retelling of the Spanish Inquisition. (Nobody expects the Inquisition.)

This week LAMC returned to New York, and, as we do every year, Josh and I met up. We went to see Julieta Venegas at SummerStage in Central Park and ran into Didi Gutman, who was in town for the Brazilian Girls reunion show, which, of course, I also went to.

More than twenty years after arriving in New York hoping to find the musical world I had read about and listened to from Madison, I found myself sitting in the middle of it, and now, in some small way, helping document it too.

That feeling stayed with me this week when an interview I recorded last month in Madrid with Andrés Ayala Tomás for the Número Mágico podcast was released. It’s probably the most complete conversation about my life and career ever recorded in Spanish. In fact, Andrés had me talking about my own path in ways I hadn’t really considered before.

The podcast is built around three deceptively simple questions: What three elements made you who you are? What three records define you? And what three things give you hope? From there we ended up covering an enormous amount of ground.

A number of this week's stories for WBGO grew out of artists and ideas connected to that same world.

Camilo Lara (Mexican Institute of Sound) and Eblis Álvarez (Meridian Brothers) are two of Latin America’s most inventive musical minds. Together, with Ruido Tovar, they’ve created a project that explores cumbia’s past, present and future. We talked about collaboration, cultural identity and the remarkable ability of tradition to reinvent itself.

Listen to the full interview:

Mexican-born, Miami-raised, LA-based singer-songwriter Andrea Bejar is part of a generation of artists who found an audience online before stepping onto concert stages. Before her New York solo debut, we talked about growing up between cultures, writing in two languages, and how that experience has filled her songs with a distinctive sense of nostalgia and longing.

French-born Chilean MC Ana Tijoux remains, in my view, one of the most important voices in Spanish-language hip-hop. Earlier this year we spoke about her EP '97. That full conversation never found a home on WBGO, so this week I finally uploaded it to YouTube, where you can now watch the complete interview.

I also had the pleasure of speaking with Christian McBride about the accidental beginnings of the Montclair Jazz Festival, Montclair's deep jazz history, the mentors who taught him to pay it forward, and the joy of introducing new listeners to the music he loves.

In addition to being one of the greatest bassists of his generation, Christian has become one of jazz's most important advocates and ambassadors. Every time I speak with him, I'm struck by his inexhaustible enthusiasm and his complete commitment to the moment.

I’ll do my best to commit to the moment this Thursday at Barbès in Brooklyn.

Tickets are also on sale now for my 50th birthday concerts in Madison on October 23 and at Joe’s Pub in New York on November 27.

August 6 — Barbès, Brooklyn
August 17 — Dakota, Minneapolis (with Ben Sidran)
August 26–27 — North Street Cabaret, Madison (with Ben Sidran)
August 28–29 — Green Mill, Chicago (with Ben Sidran)
September 3 — Barbès, Brooklyn
October 23 — Bur Oak, Madison
November 6–15 — Spain (with Leo & Leo)
November 27 — Joe’s Pub, New York

Anyway, that’s the week.

Talk to you soon,

Leo