Do not be fooled by the seemingly casual nature of the title of this album – Passing By – the song itself is an eminently graceful...
Canada, home of one of the largest populations of Cubanos, boasts [among them] two of the best percussionists living in this country. One of them certainly...
Vibrant, earthy rhythm, often evocative of the comparsa, not to mention beauty of tone, a sense of yearning, and an uncommon sensuousness pervade all the music...
About a decade ago, Alma Records’ founder and producer Peter Cardinali shared a clutch of recordings he had produced with me over the years. Among them...
Of all the albums that the trumpet and flugelhorn player Rachel Therrien has released so far, Mi Hogar is the most fiery and intense. Each song...
This recording – Forever Lecuona – is a glorious tribute to the great 19th century Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona – glorious because of the performance of...
Miguel de Armas has always come across as a musical voluptuary, born of a kind of rhythmically seductive pianism with which we first heard him in...
On the evening of Saturday, February 9, 2019, Cuban-Canadian piano master Hilario Durán and his Latin Jazz Big Band returned to Koerner Hall in Toronto. This...
If you’re not a Cuban musician living in Toronto chances are you might not have heard a great deal about Amhed Mitchel. But that would be...
The pianist Miguel de Armas is blessed with a magnificent tumbao and he uses it to great effect on What’s to Come. But if you thought...
Svetlana Boym was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, lived between 1959 and 2015, and has been described as...
Although the brilliant, virtuoso pianist Hilario Durán might be heard in a recording studio warming up by playing a Bach Partita or one of Charlie Parker’s...
If there is one place outside Cuba, El Barrio and the Bay Area, where African music survives and thrives it is in Toronto. This is largely...
If the idiocy of so-called “cultural appropriation” were to be taken any more seriously than it is right now, would that ever make it possible for...
Canada sometimes feels a lot like the Afro-Cuban mainland. The country is bristling with talent from the fabled island of the Orishas among other not-so-savoury things....