The London Latin Music Festival April 6th – April 19th 2011
“La Linea has built an impressive international reputation
as one of the world’s most eclectic celebrations of Latin music.”—Time Out
Wednesday 6th April – Yasmin Levy + Melingo Barbican Hall
Friday 8th April – Muchachito with Santos de Veracruz Cargo
Friday 15th April – Ojos de Brujo Special 10th Anniversary Show + Depedro
Barbican Hall
Sunday 17th April – A Night of Twisted Cumbia featuring Mexican Institute of Sound, Axel Krygier, Pollito Boogaloo + special guests to be announced. Koko
Tuesday 19th April – Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club® Featuring Omara Portuondo Royal Albert Hall
Details of all shows, videos, music and to book online at www.comono.co.uk/lalinea
La Linea ’11 lands with its trademark mix of established heavy hitters plus the best of the new generation plucked from throughout the Latin music diaspora – with Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba and Brighton all represented. Barcelona’s Ojos de Brujo have never been known to give less than 100% in a stage show rooted in flamenco with flavourings from reggae, raga, rhumba, hip hop and house, and as this will be their last show for at least 2 years expect multlifarious musical fireworks. Debutants include Spain’s Muchachito with Santos de Veracruz, Depedro who will be supporting Ojos de Brujo and the entire Twisted Cumbia night line up of Mexican Institute of Sound, Axel Krygier, Pollito Boogaloo who are all La Linea virgins. And then there’s Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club® Featuring Omara Portuondo and paying homage to the music and musicians who helped make Buena Vista Social Club the worldwide phenomenon that we all know and continue to love.
Wednesday 6th April.
Yasmin Levy + Melingo
Barbican Hall
Silk St
City of London, EC2Y 8DS
7.30pm. £12 – £22
www.barbican.org.uk / 020 7638 8891
The star singer returns to London with her electrifying Ladino songs and smouldering flamenco, performing tracks from her latest release Sentir. ” The next world music superstar” THE GUARDIAN**** “Levy’s biggest asset is her voice, which is versatile, sensuous, and brimming with emotion” THE INDEPENDENT. In Yasmin Levy’s music there is a tension between the purity of Ladino (the Judeo-Spanish music) and the fiery heart of flamenco. As she explains ’There’s a very traditional way of singing Ladino. I learnt it…listening to women singing and it’s beautiful, but I missed the passion. Flamenco is nothing but passion.’ In her latest album Sentir, produced by the acclaimed Javier Limón (who has worked previously with the likes of Portuguese fado star Mariza), she has found a vision that integrates these musical directions. With Sentir, Yasmin’s music truly becomes ’of the world’.
Support comes from the extraordinary Melingo, according to The Independent he is “the man who’s making tango seriously cool” but it’s also his experiments in the rebetika of his Thessalonikan Jewish ancestors that make him am interesting foil for Yasmin Levy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rmK99BZsKo&feature=fvst]
Friday 8th April.
Muchachito with Santos de Veracruz
Cargo
83 Rivington Street
Shoreditch
London EC2A 3AY
Doors 7pm. Muchachito onstage 8.30pm
£15 in advance
www.cargo-london.com / 0844 771 000
UK debut for Muchachito the Spanish composer and singer whose intimate but energetic mix of music and monologues has taken him from playing on the streets to filling bullrings with his band Bombo Infierno. Tonight Muchachito appears in something close to his original street material format, a one-man-band Rumboxing – at the point where rumba and swing meet hand to hand combat. Oh, and he’s bringing his painter Santos de Veracruz with him to create some old school art onstage. An intimate evening of improvisation and a broad canvas. Cut faster Old Master.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/18148842]
Friday 15th April.
Ojos de Brujo Special 10th Anniversary Show + Depedro
Barbican Hall
Silk St
City of London, EC2Y 8DS
7.30pm. £12 – £22
www.barbican.org.uk / 020 7638 8891
Ojos de Brujo, from Barcelona, fuse flamenco’s driving rhythms with hip-hop, funk, punk and other stray sounds snatched from the Barcelona street. The group calls this musical mashup ‘Jip Jop Flamenkillo’, a sound that catapults flamenco into the 21st century without losing any of the power or passion of the music’s roots. Anyone who’s heard the Gypsy Kings’ brand of rumba catalana – which married traditional flamenco guitars to fiery Latin percussion – will recognize Ojos as the latest instalment in flamenco’s inclusive ida y vuelta (or ‘go and return’) tradition of assimilating New World sounds into the repertoire.
Depedro is the nom de music of Spanish guitarist-singer-songwriter Jairo Zavala, sideman for Calexico, as well as Andrew Bird. His second album for National Geographic Nubes De Papel (Paper Clouds) is just out and was produced (as was his debut “Depedro”), by Calexico’s Joey Burns with other Calexico members sitting in on the sessions.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sRP1f5hGIs]
Sunday 17th April
Mexican Institute of Sound, Axel Krygier, Pollito Boogaloo + special guests to be announced
Koko
1A Camden High Street,
London, NW1 7JE
7pm / £15 in advance
www.koko.uk.com / 0844 847 2258
A special La Linea sampler night of artists playing with the unstoppable, loping cumbia beat that is rattling the ribcages of a continent’s youth from Buenos Aires to Mexico City.
Headliner’s Mexican Institute of Sound make their UK debut “Cutting the high-octane pace from dance with energetically proud Mexican flavours is a fierce combination” Clash. Cumbia is just one ingredient but its flavour rubs off on everything else in the mix.
“ Nuts, quite frankly, and probably the most fun you can have without removing your poncho.” The Word
“Can’t stop listening to his frazzled mariachi remake of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony’. It’s Amazing” Dazed & Confused (link below)
Buenos Aires’ own Axel Krygier and his band pop some twisted digital cumbia into their mix “…like a llama on speed…unashamedly, wonderfully weird stuff” Songlines
And kicking off the night is the defiantly Old School Cumbia of Pollito Boogaloo led by Colombia’s Rafael Berrio playing live in the style of classic 60s cumbia, vallenato and puya and mixing in a little dub proving that in cumbia to know where you are at you truly have to hear where you are from.
A fun-packed welcome to the wild extremes of cumbia.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiGlrGF49Ok]
Tuesday 19th April.
Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club ® Featuring Omara Portuondo
Royal Albert Hall
Kensington Gore,
London SW7 2AP
7.30pm
Tickets £22.50 – £27.50
www.royalalberthall.com / 0845 401 5045
Following a series of hugely successful performances in recent years, the twelve-piece Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club® which features a number of Buena Vista Social Club alumni make their eagerly awaited return to Europe.
This Cuban musicians’ collective has played together for over half a century. Stylistically, they span the entire spectrum of Afro-Cuban music. Deliciously slow bolero ballads and majestic danzones feature the swell of strings, while background vocals conveying messages of romance hide behind arrestingly beautiful melodies.
Buena Vista Social Club’s most influential style is the exuberant, polyrhythmic music known as son, which gave birth to both Mambo and Salsa. These upbeat numbers are full of infectious guitar licks, multilayered Afro-Cuban rhythms, soaring vocal melodies, and brash, Big Band-style horn parts.
Joining this new and expanded lineup of Cuban players is vocalist Omara Portuondo, a member of the original Buena Vista Social Club, whose 2008 recording Gracias (World Village / Montuno) won a Latin Grammy and scored a Grammy nomination.
The show features an interesting contrast as young vocalist Idania Valdes, who came to prominence in the last year as the singing voice of Rita in the animated film Chico & Rita, shares the stage with Omara.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiongAHJNto]
Details of all shows, videos, music and to book online at www.comono.co.uk/lalinea
more information for journalists: Gerry Lyseight
020 7095 8146 / gerry@glpr.co.uk / www.gerrylyseight.co.uk
La Linea is produced by Como N—o
