Bearing Witness, or Not – Part 2

I went downtown to the Federal Courthouse in the early afternoon, hoping to catch some of today’s opening statements, hoping even to attempt to share some of this public trial with the greater public in relative realtime. But for a number of reasons, I’ve had to return emptyhanded, so to speak. For one, I had […]

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Bearing Witness, or Not

Speaking of family and defending the truth, the Joel Tenenbaum case begins today. And it’s looking like it’s not going to be the trial that Charlie was hoping it would; instead it will be, no surprise, the judge’s trial. Judge Gertner made a series of rulings this weekend, including one at 1:37 this morning — […]

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Family Dem, Y’know

Charlie shares the latest product from our-man-in-JA, Kevin Wallen, who has in recent months — with the generous support of USAID — shifted his media-rich, tech-savvy, and yet rather holistic approach to education (i.e., Students Expressing Truth) from Jamaica’s prisons to its schools — and in particular to students on the verge of expulsion. Kevin […]

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Nettles, Neighbors, and Nu World Music

I’ve received repeated requests to share the text I delivered in my pre-concert talk for the Nettle residency at Brandeis. It’s only taken me four months to post it here finally. Regular readers of this blog may find certain passages familiar; some are literally cut-n-pasted from posts here (where I do a lot of my […]

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Folk Carioca

A couple weeks ago, a bunch of Boston’s “baile funk” enthusiasts were assembled by the um-and-only Gregzinho — who, incidentally, is our guest tonight at Beat Research! — to watch a couple DVDs showing different sides of the carioca scene: DJ Cabide’s self-produced “national” and “international” DVDs (which were both great & grainy), and the […]

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El Arte De Tocar El Amazon

from Raquel Rivera to wayne marshall, Deborah Pacini Hernandez date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:38 AM subject riddle me this Hi dear compis. I still don’t quite understand how the amazon sales work, but I got a big kick out of seeing us #1 in salsa and and #1 reggae. And #11 in rap. […]

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Vampire Squid Beats

Tonight’s Beat Research brings to Boston the shady presence of a shadowy figure known as DJ N-RON. N-RON first caught my ear back in ’05 with his (& Leftenant’s) mix, “A Thunder Sound” (mp3), chock full of remixes and drawing together a wide range of sounds — from dancehall, grime, electro, leftfield hip-hop, ethnomusicology classics […]

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Radio Free Boston

Kevin Driscoll, whose work I mentioned at the end of the songs-as-shared post, is having me on his Todo Mundo radio show tonight on MIT’s WMBR from 12-2am EST (88.1FM or streaming here). Among other things “new, weird, and local” (sez Kev), I’ll be playing some newer versions of old but current things (Akon’s “Wanna […]

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