Eight years after the Tierra Amarilla native Lara Manzanares released her award-winning album Land Baby, this weekend she’s launching an engaging and accomplished new album of original tunes, Yo Soy de Ti, with concerts in both Santa Fe and Corrales, presented by AMP Concerts. It’s definitely been worth the wait.
Bébé La La—the multiaward-winning singer/songwriter duo of Alicia Ultan (viola, guitar, vocals) and Maryse Lapierre (accordion, harmonium, vocals), backed by longtime collaborators Micky Patten (bass) and Joe Chellman (drums)—celebrates its 15th (crystal) anniversary with a November 15 concert at the Outpost, presented by AMP Concerts.
Most musical compositions can be classified by the instrumentation and the musical structure. Cartography is not usually part of the notational features. But in the case of Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and Albuquerque denizen Raven Chacon’s Tiguex, the city known today as Albuquerque is both the subject and the stage, and the composition itself is notated as a hand-drawn map that captures the city cartographically, historically, and culturally. On September 27, the composition’s 20 overlapping movements will be performed by more than 200 musicians from dawn to dusk in places across the city. Conducted by Chacon’s childhood piano teacher, the full composition will be broadcast on KUNM (89.9 FM in Albuquerque and online) and live streamed on the One Albuquerque Media (GOV-TV) YouTube channel. A week before the event, Musically Speaking had the opportunity to speak with Chacon about this extraordinary project. Our conversation is reproduced below, edited for length and clarity. For full details about the project—including the score, movements, locations, and timing—please visit tiguex.com.
It’s taken more than six years, even longer for some of the tunes on the album, but vocalist, songwriter, bandleader Isaac Aragon’s new album, The Healing, is here at last, with a vinyl release party at Rio Bravo Brewing on Friday, June 13. It’s well worth the wait. From songwriting to packaging and everything between, it’s a first-class production. The live show will be memorable, all but guaranteed to move body and soul.
“My level of I-don’t-give-a-fuckery is so high right now,” Mustafa Stefan Dill, oudist, guitarist, composer, told me on the phone. He meant that in a positive way. Explode Yourself, the new release from Love Unfold the Sun, is a liberated celebration of life, unconcerned with fitting itself into any box‚ blowing the box wide open, in fact. This Friday, the band celebrates the album’s release at Paradiso in Santa Fe.