Soundcheck

The Mexican singer  Silvana Estrada  made an immediate impression with her debut LP Marchita back in 2022. Quickly hailed as a unique voice in Latin music for her blend of jazz, chamber music, and traditional folk, Estrada took her time making her follow-up album, and it appears to have been time well-spent:  Vendrán Suaves Lluvias , or “there will come soft rains,” is a heartfelt, elegant, quietl...

The singer Meklit, born Meklit Hadero in Ethiopia, is based in the Bay Area, where she has released a number of albums that blend jazz, pop, and soul with the echoes of Ethiopian pop. Her latest album,  A Piece of Infinity , finds Meklit singing mostly in Amharic, and looking back to what is sometimes called the Golden Age of Ethiopian music – the time in the early 70s when Latin music, American f...

Canadian singer and composer Patrick Watson has been making records for almost a quarter century – with a cinematic blend of indie rock, cabaret pop, and chamber music that has made him a favorite of film directors and music supervisors.  His latest record, Uh Oh , is the result of a pretty big uh-oh moment for a singer: Watson lost his voice. He thought it was broken forever, and wrote a collecti...

American indie rock band The Antlers began almost 20 years ago as a solo project from singer and songwriter Peter Silberman. While the previous album, Green To Gold , was a pastoral, almost folky affair, the new album, Blight, is almost like a classical song cycle, and is a musical warning about nature under siege.  “The consequences of accelerating technology and environmental neglect feel immine...

GRAMMY-winning musical omnivore Sullivan Fortner merges New Orleans grit and spice with invention (and not just J.S. Bach), for an alchemical jazz that is wise, feisty, mischievous, and dynamic. His exposure to R&B, soul, and gospel at home; his time at Oberlin and the influence of various teachers in jazz and classical disciplines; and his longtime collaborator Cécile McLorin Salvant have all inf...

The Spanish-born singer, songwriter and producer Pablopablo recently released his debut LP, but he’d already built up an impressive array of writing and producing credits, winning Latin Grammys back in 2022 under his given name, Pablo Drexler. Those awards were for his work on a collaboration between his father, the popular Uruguayan-born musician Jorge Drexler, and the Spanish superstar C. Tangan...

Christone "Kingfish" Ingram has been steeped in the Blues since he was eight years old, when he visited the Delta Blues Museum as a student in Clarksdale, Mississippi ( Jackson Advocate ). He played drums, bass, and GUITAR and was recognized at a young age for his exceptional musical talent with his debut album Kingfish , in 2019 on Alligator Records . Since then he’s released two more albums, won...

“Shamstep” band, 47SOUL, take their name from the Arabic name for the Levant region – Bilad al-Sham, with members from Jordan, Washington DC, and Israel - spanning the divides of the Palestinian Diaspora. The music is a mix of dubstep, hip-hop and electro-Arabic  dabke  with lyrics in both Arabic and English, which are intensely political in their call for celebration and freedom in the struggle f...

The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is a musically free-ranging band of brothers from the south side of Chicago. Their music draws from funk, funky jazz, Afrobeat, hip hop, rock, reggae, and R&B, and they’ve performed with Tony Allen, Wu Tang Clan, De La Soul, Prince, Femi Kuti, Gorillaz, Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), and the B52's, to name a few. Growing up, the members of HBE were raised with music as a con...

Rumbo Tumba is the project of the Argentine musician Facundo Salgado, who uses a looping station and a battery of handmade, traditional South American instruments to create brilliant musical conversations between South American traditions and modern technology.  Rumbo Tumba can make an improbable amount of sound, live and alone, constructing sounds and atmospheres that transport listeners to the p...

From the 2025 New York Guitar Festival, hear music from legendary American jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and Icelandic bass player Skúli Sverrisson, who were about to go into the studio and record their second album as a duo. Part of the New Sounds Live concerts, the music was recorded at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, and was a co-presentation of World Music Institute.  Set...

Cole Quest & The City Pickers are a bluegrass band from Brooklyn, and if that surprises you, well, the fact is New York City has had a long, strong bluegrass scene going back to the 1950’s. Cole Quest draws on that tradition, and his own family tradition - he’s the grandson of the folk icon Woody Guthrie – in originals and updated versions of Guthrie tunes. Cole Quest & The City Pickers shred with...

The Soundcheck Podcast series offers up music from recent sessions, all revolving around The Blues –at the root of so much popular music, and where the roots have grown into other fruits worldwide. Listen to French-Moroccan band Bab L' Bluz and their hot psychedelic blues spiked with the Gnawa trance rhythms of northern Africa's Maghreb. There’s the “Desert Blues” of West Africa in music by singer...

Canada’s Ron Sexsmith is a songwriter whose fans include Elvis Costello, Elton John, Paul McCartney, and a few other folks who know a thing or two about that mysterious process. Sexsmith is now forty years into his career, with 18 albums, three of Canada’s Juno Awards, and a novel to show for it. His latest album is called Hangover Terrace , and it ranges from aching ballads to the tongue-in-cheek...

Distinctive songwriter Cass McCombs takes a broad view of the American experience – from the mundane to the mythic. His new songs from a wide-ranging double album -  Interior Live Oak contain “specific detail amid strange painterly settings” ( The Guardian ) and remain hopeful despite the feeling of listening to someone who has lived the extreme aspects of modern life. Cass McCombs plays a strippe...

Pianist and composer Omar Sosa draws on his own Afro-Cuban heritage, American jazz, and spiritual and meditative practices from around the world to create music that defies categorization. He’s traveled widely, especially in Africa, recording the sounds of the people, the animals, and the instruments of those places and sometimes incorporating them into his own works. Sosa, along with the Cuban-bo...

“Failed bull-rider turned seminal songwriter” (Red Light Management), native Texan Rodney Crowell is considered to be one of the chief architects of Americana music, and a songwriter admired by good songwriters. Crowell has had an eventful career in his half century of writing songs, making records and helping create the style that’s come to be known as alternative country. He’s worked with a who’...

From the 2025 New York Guitar Festival, listen to a live set by the adventurous guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson along with drummer/composer Tomas Fujiwara, playing their original works. This show was recorded at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, as part of the New Sounds Live concert series, and was also a co-presentation of World Music Institute.   Set list: 1. Fujiwara: J...

Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen and his trio, featuring new bassist Sigurd Hole and long-time collaborator, drummer Jarle Vespestad, combine together folk influences and church music for unhurried embraces of melody. Expressive and reflective, Gustavsen’s ‘Nordic blues’ slowly unfurls passages of delicate lyricism, with enough space for contemplation, and only the notes that are needed from all p...

Adrian Quesada is probably best known as one of the two co-founders of the psychedelic soul band Black Pumas, but the guitarist and producer has also been part of Grupo Fantasma, Brownout and Ocote Soul Sounds.  Lately, he’s also been pursuing another musical project called   Boleros Psicodélicos, an homage to the phenomenon of balada music that blossomed throughout Latin America between the late...

The New York-based singer, songwriter, and producer Anand Wilder was a cofounder of the experimental indie band Yeasayer, and more recently has pursued a wide-ranging solo career.  His 2022 solo debut, I Don’t Know My Words , was a genuine solo project, with Anand playing everything himself. Now, though, Anand Wilder has a new record called Psychic Lessons, and it is very much a collaboration with...

The singer Elisapie is an Inuk musician, filmmaker, advocate, and writer who has become a nationally-celebrated figure in Canada – her portrait appears on a postage stamp in that country’s Indigenous leaders series. Her latest album,  Inuktitut , is notable for a couple of reasons: first, it’s sung in the language called Inuktitut, and second, it is an album of reworked songs by Fleetwood Mac, Led...

Named after being mis-identified while returning a uHaul, the pop’n’roll band We Are Scientists has been making melancholic, nostalgic, and melodic songs, familiar and fun, for some 20 years. Since their debut album With Love And Squalor , they’ve wandered into the worlds of comedy and English soccer while continuing their own spin on indie rock with and without synths. Keith Murray and Chris Cain...

Eleanor Friedberger, best known as one half of the indie rock duo The Fiery Furnaces, has recently shifted her musical landscape, swapping out live instruments in favor of drum programming and synths for a sound that she can create mostly on her own. (Part of her desire to be more self-reliant, in the wake of the 2016 election.) On her 2018 record, Rebound , she channels the sound and energy of an...

The duo of Rachael & Vilray turns the idea of "Everything old is new again" on its head – making new things that sound really old. Over the course of three albums they offer a contemporary take on tin pan alley, the great American songbook, and vintage small combo jazz.  The duo’s latest album is West of Broadway and it brings Rachael & Vilray back to our studio to play some of these new and knowi...