Tag: Generation

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Entertainment

As Bang on a Can Returns, a New Era Rises

As Bang on a Can Returns, a New Generation Rises

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. – Venturing back to live performances and finding a classical music institution in rude health can be like putting on old jeans and discovering a light fit with relief.

This is what it felt like to attend the Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend festival, held here on Friday and Saturday throughout the Mass MoCA complex.

With over 20 hours of performance, one could see one familiar look after another – all trademarks of the legendary, free Bang on a Can Marathons in New York City. But here, in a two-day environment with paid tickets, there was more time for each musician’s set to take on an individual character. And although some artists got nervous on the first day, most of the appearances unfolded with a crisp, defiant touch – as if they hadn’t spent time without the audience.

This was especially true for the pianist Lisa Moore’s show on Friday with pieces by Philip Glass, Don Byron, Martin Bresnick – and a world premiere by Frederic Rzewski, who died in June. The set confirmed the interpretative knowledge that she brought to her recordings with works by these composers. And the Rzewski premiere – “Amoramaro”, with the subtitle “Love Has No Laws” – was bittersweet: an alternately seductive and prickly memory of all his music that can no longer be written.

“Amoramaro,” commissioned by her husband for Moore, is nonetheless something to be cherished (and certainly included). Its occasionally lush chords – half remembered and half transformed from the American Songbook – mingle with austere, rocky runs that create trapezoidal vibrations between distant registers. And its climatic, pounding clusters may have been inspired by Rzewski’s experience with Stockhausen’s “piano pieces”. The fact that everything stuck together for over 15 minutes was proof of both Rzewski’s peculiar and personal palette and Moore’s fine instinct for it.

Elsewhere the festival gave names in bold: It is significant that the audience this weekend asked each other: “Which Kronos Quartet concert was better?” For me it was on Friday evening, a dark but intense set that included Jlin’s “Little Black Book” began and ended with Jacob Garchik’s “Storyteller”. This performance was coherent than the one that followed on Saturday, which was well played but more diffuse, including the premiere of Terry Riley’s “This Assortment of Atoms – One Time Only!” – an attractive but modest addition to the composer’s significant work for Kronos.

As with the previous Bang on a Can Marathons, contemporary and modernist trends from all over the world were also present and taken into account at the LOUD Weekend. These included French spectralism (in the music of Gérard Grisey); Minimalism (Riley, Glass, and their descendants); and collective improvisation (by Banda de los Muertos, a jazz ensemble inspired by the music of Sinaloa, Mexico).

And there were solo acts throughout. The violinist, improviser and composer Mazz Swift brought the Saturday evening to an early climax with a presentation of her “Sankofa project”, which she described as “new interpretations of so-called slave songs as well as freedom songs and my own versions” of what I call modern protest songs. ” When Swift used subtle electronic processing to boost a few notes of the chest voice – or when she looped a striped violin passage to create a hazy cloud that supported Spitfire solo lines – her range of effects proved as protean as they were powerful.

In addition to the starry headliners, there were also students from the summer institute Bang on a Can, who were given moments to shine. Some of them seemed ready to build their own ensembles and maybe return for future festivals. The saxophonist Julian Velasco shone on Friday in a mixed professional and student ensemble in Julius Eastman’s “Femenine” and on Saturday in a duo with Shelley Washington’s “BIG Talk”.

Ken Thomson, Velasco’s seasoned pro from a partner in Washington, was practically omnipresent on both days, including as a member of the organization’s house group, the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

Thomson and his all-star colleagues made the most of their nickname on Friday with a rousing version of “Workers Union” – a minimalist-influenced classic by Louis Andriessen, who died in July. And while the band’s keystone set on Saturday evening – which also served as the finale of the festival – was played crisply and energetically, the program was mixed.

At this concert, a new arrangement of Terry Riley’s “Autodreamographical Tales” (soon to be on an All-Stars recording) was released, a work that seems to be considered a curiosity in the legendary composer’s oeuvre. Or a curiosity on a curiosity, because that version has its roots in an obscure piece that Riley recorded in the 1990s.

The text comes from a dream journal that Riley kept for a while. There are moments of reserved humor, and the “tales” impale the musical ego in a winning way; we get a feeling for how often in Riley’s dreams other musicians complement his work. But the piece also wanders and is not always as clever as the subconscious would have hoped – as telling dreams tend to be.

“Tales” still offers stray joys, especially when Riley comes up with a vampy blues or rock number – here happily arranged by his son Gyan Riley. Guitarist Mark Stewart took on vocal duties as Riley has been in Japan since the beginning of the pandemic. (He made a brief appearance in the form of a live, light-hearted video introduction.)

In the last hours of the line-up on Saturday, listeners were able to move from a short set by rising star Nathalie Joachim (sings and plays the flute on excerpts from her acclaimed album “Fanm d’Ayiti”) to a concert of Pandemic Solos, that of Bang. was commissioned to sprint on a can for his virtual marathons during the pandemic.

I couldn’t stand hearing these live streamed marathons right now. I tried, but the cluttered audio – inevitable with artists streaming from so many places – was recorded as microtragedies that distracted from the works themselves. I told myself I would hear some of these in the future; and i have on saturday.

A series of works for all-star bassist Robert Black opened the day, including Maria Huld Markan Sigfusdottir’s haunted, creepy “pending”. And after Joachim’s set, I heard a trio of burning and distinctive pieces by Aeryn Santillan, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Anna Clyne, all written for Thomson.

This is a secret strength of Bang on a Can. It attracts audiences with big names. But when the Legends disappoint in any given hour, as Riley did, there’s always the next set – and the next generation – to save the day.

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Health

Coaching the Subsequent Era of Indigenous Information Scientists

Training the Next Generation of Indigenous Data Scientists

“Native DNA is so sought after that people are looking for proxy data, and one of the big proxy data is the microbiome,” said Yracheta. “If you are a Native, you need to consider all of these variables if you are to protect your people and culture.”

In a presentation at the conference, Joslynn Lee, a member of the Navajo, Laguna Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo Nations and a biochemist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, shared her experience of tracking changes in microbial communities in rivers that drained mine wastewater Silverton, Colorado, discontinued. Dr. Lee also provided practical tips on planning a microbial analysis, from taking a sample to processing it.

Rebecca Pollet, a biochemist and member of the Cherokee Nation, took a data science career panel on how many mainstream pharmaceuticals were developed based on traditional knowledge and plant medicine of the indigenous people. The anti-malarial drug quinine, for example, was developed from the bark of a species of cinchona that the Quechua people used as medicine in the past. Dr. Pollet, who studies the effects of drugs and traditional foods on the gut microbiome, asked, “How do we honor this traditional knowledge and compensate for what has been covered up?”

One participant, Lakota Elder Les Ducheneaux, added that he believed that medicine derived from traditional knowledge mistakenly removed the prayers and rituals that traditionally accompanied treatment, making the medicine less effective. “You have to constantly balance the scientific part of medicine with the cultural and spiritual part of your job,” he said.

During the IndigiData conference, attendees also discussed ways to manage their own data to serve their communities.

Mason Grimshaw, data scientist and board member of Indigenous in AI, spoke about his research on language data at the International Wakashan AI Consortium. The consortium, led by engineer Michael Running Wolf, is developing automatic speech recognition AI for Wakashan languages, a family of endangered languages ​​spoken by multiple First Nations communities. The researchers believe that automatic speech recognition models can preserve the fluency of the Wakashan languages ​​and revive their use by future generations.

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Entertainment

Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Subsequent Musical Technology

Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Next Musical Generation

Angélique Kidjo, the singer from Benin who has been forging pan-African and transcontinental hybrids for three decades, actually didn’t need another Grammy.

In 2020 she received the award for the best world music album for the fourth time with “Celia”, her homage to the Afro-Cuban salsa dynamo Celia Cruz. True to its form, Grammy voters chose well-known names and snubbed the world music phenomenon of the year: Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy’s ambitious, thoughtful album that attracted hundreds of millions of streams and made it an international sensation. (“African Giant” also featured a guest appearance by Kidjo.)

In her acceptance speech, Kidjo was friendly, but pointedly looked ahead. “The new generations of artists coming from Africa will take you by storm,” she said, “and the time has come.”

Kidjo, 60, follows this declaration with her new album “Mother Nature”, which is full of collaborations with aspiring African songwriters and producers: Burna Boy, Mr Eazi and Yemi Alade from Nigeria as well as the Zambian rapper and singer Sampa the Great, who American songwriter Shungudzo and singer Zeynab, who was born in Ivory Coast and lives in Benin. Throughout the album, their guests do everything they can to keep up with Kidjo’s leather fervor.

“This young generation has the same concern that I have had throughout my career – they tried to convey a very positive image of my continent Africa,” said Kidjo via video from Paris. “I also wanted to hear from them about climate change and its impact on their lives and how they want to deal with it. With climate change, we will pay the highest price for it in Africa, especially the youth. It will be up to the future generation not to ask questions, but to act. Because time is running out for questions. “

The songs on “Mother Nature” offer snappy programmed Afrobeats, lively Congolese soukous, lavish Nigerian juju and a dramatic orchestral chanson. Irresistible beats carry serious messages about the preservation of the environment, about human rights, about African unity and about the power of music and love.

Kidjo recorded “Dignity” – a song that got excited when protesters against police brutality in Nigeria were shot – with Alade, 32, a major Nigerian pop star she had worked with earlier in 2019. Like Kidjo, Alade has worked with musicians from all over Africa and beyond (including Beyoncé on the soundtrack of “Black Is King”).

“I grew up with their music,” Alade said in an interview from Lagos. “She is one of the few role models I have. The only thing that definitely drew me to Angélique is her uncompromising Africanity no matter where she goes. As for Africa, she is definitely our Angélique, our songbird – anytime, any day. It’s always heartwarming to see how she does what she does and how she does it, even though she’s been doing it for so long. I look at them and I am encouraged to just keep doing what I am doing. “

Like most of Kidjo’s music over the years, the new album is multilingual – mostly English, but also French and West African languages ​​like Fon and Nago – and it blends new sounds and technologies with Africa’s past. In “One Africa” Kidjo celebrates the year she was born – 1960 – because it was a turning point in African history when several countries gained their independence. (She was planning a Carnegie Hall concert in March 2020 around the milestone, which was canceled when New York closed due to the pandemic.) She based the music on “Indépendance Cha Cha,” which was made in 1960 by Joseph Kabasele’s group L’African Jazz was released.

For “Africa, One of a Kind” Mr. Eazi built the track around a sample of the song “Africa” by Malian singer Salif Keita from 1995, but Kidjo increased the stakes: She persuaded Keita, now 71, to come out of retirement to sing it again. The video of the song shows a dance, Gogbahoun, from Kidjo’s home village in Benin, Ouidah.

“Gogbahoun means the rhythm that breaks glass,” she said. It’s a beat, she explained, originally tapped on an empty bottle with a piece of metal: a ring, a spoon, a coin. “And if the bottle is broken, the party’s over,” she said.

The reception of “Mother Nature” was shaped by the pandemic. “We had time and had nowhere to go,” said Kidjo. Her two previous albums were re-Africanized tributes to music from America: “Celia” and before that, a transformative remake of Talking Heads’ album “Remain in Light”. But Kidjo and her husband and long-time musical partner, keyboardist and programmer Jean Hébrail, wrote their own songs in 2019, the year in which they also released and toured for “Celia”.

When bans were imposed in 2020, Kidjo set out to complete the songs with new, far-flung staff working remotely. There was one perk on an album that dealt with global warming: “a minimal carbon footprint,” noted Kidjo.

She gathered the album’s staff through connections and chance. Kidjo happened upon Sampa the Great, 27, a rapper and singer who was born in Zambia and built her career in Australia, at an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and contacted her through direct messages on Instagram. In fact, they had met years earlier at a fan encounter when Kidjo signed a t-shirt for Sampa at WOMADelaide, a world music festival in Australia.

Their joint song “Free & Equal” is based on the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the United States’ Declaration of Independence. “We have been fighting since I could speak,” raps Sampa and then praises “Angélique / Connecting through the generations, power of musique”.

“She was the person I saw, who looked like me, who was from the continent, spoke in her own language and made a huge impact outside of the continent,” Sampa said in an interview from Botswana.

“She knows how much reach African music has today – the continent is simply connected to the world,” she continued. “The beauty of this album is having legends who are able to nod to young people to acknowledge that we are continuing what people like Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo started. She said, “I want you to express yourself. That’s why I’m turning to you. ‘”

Kidjo didn’t just invite songwriters and rappers to add vocals. She also gave skeleton tracks to some of the electronics savvy producers like Kel-P from Nigeria, who spread Afrobeats and other African rhythms around the world. “I said you found a way to make this a global rhythm,” said Kidjo. “Anyone in any part of the world can claim Afrobeats and do it their own way because their own culture fits it perfectly. The puzzle is just perfect. All the music that comes from Africa is based on our tradition and always has an integrative way of doing things. “

Some of Kidjo’s vocals are given a computerized twist in “Do Yourself,” a duet with Burna Boy that calls for Africa to become self-employed. “I asked Burna Boy, I asked his engineers and producers, ‘What did you do with my voice?'” She said. “He sent me a snapshot of the board and I don’t understand anything about it. It looks like something from space! ”She laughed. “But it’s okay, I’ll take it. I don’t have to understand to love it.

“Any collaboration is about preserving people’s freedom,” she added. “I would say I send you the song and you let the song lead you to what you want to do. I said, ‘Just do it.’ What this album taught me is that we develop beautiful things when we really take the time to talk to each other. “

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Business

5G rollout boosts demand for backup energy technology, Generac CEO says

5G rollout boosts demand for backup power generation, Generac CEO says

Aaron Jagdfeld, CEO of Generac, told CNBC on Monday that the emergency generator company expects to benefit from the adoption of 5G wireless technology.

“We believe this is an area that will grow tremendously over the next five years,” he said in an interview with Jim Cramer about Mad Money.

For Generac, the opportunity lies particularly in the telecommunications sector. The company is already a leading provider of backup generation for large wireless carriers, said Jagdfeld.

The introduction of 5G technology or the fifth generation cellular network promises faster network speeds and connecting more activities to the Internet of Things. The way people learn, drive and take care of their health is expected to be influenced by new technologies.

Because the networks are becoming even more critical for society, the demand for electricity security will only increase, according to Jagdfeld.

“None of this works without a continuous source of power, and telecommunications companies really need to improve their game on reliability, and that’s where we come in,” he said.

Generac’s shares fell more than 2% on Monday, trading at $ 293.95. The stock is up nearly 30% since the start of the year.

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Business

A New Era of Wi-Fi to Enhance Your House Community

A New Generation of Wi-Fi to Improve Your Home Network

Keerti Melkote, the founder of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company that provides Wi-Fi products for businesses, offered a different theory. Most of the devices in my house would need to have chips that make them compatible with Wi-Fi 6 before the benefits are more pronounced, he said. Only about a quarter of my internet connected devices have this.

These weren’t great results. But the good news was that with Wi-Fi 6 I noticed subtle changes all over my house.

For one thing, my smart speakers from Amazon are now reacting faster. In my bedroom, I ask Alexa to control a pair of internet-connected light bulbs. When I said, “Alexa, turn the lights on” with the older router, there was about a two second delay before the light was on. Now it’s less than half a second.

I noticed something similar with MyQ, with which I can control my garage door with a smartphone app. Before that, after pressing the button, I waited a few seconds for the door to open. Now the wait is a split second.

My video calls also look clearer than they used to be and take less time to connect.

This suggests that Wi-Fi 6 is a long-term investment. The more internet-connected devices that get into people’s homes in the coming years, the more the benefits will become apparent.

“It will take time, but the improvements will be real,” said Melkote.

Of the two Wi-Fi 6 routers I tested, I preferred the Eero Pro 6. It’s $ 150 cheaper than the Netgear Orbi, and both routers were equally fast in my tests. Setting up the Eero was easier too.

But who should buy?

My experience has shown that people who have bought a router in the past five years probably wouldn’t see major improvements right away, so there’s no rush to upgrade.

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Entertainment

A Flamenco Dancer for the YouTube Technology

A Flamenco Dancer for the YouTube Generation

BADALONA, Spain – In a makeshift dance studio in an industrial warehouse, flamenco dancer Miguel Fernández Ribas, known as El Yiyo, practiced his moves next to a pile of pink and orange synthetic blankets his father sells in local street markets.

He lives just a few minutes’ walk from the warehouse with relatives and friends who are part of the Roma community in Badalona, ​​a city north of Barcelona.

It’s a gritty working-class neighborhood far from the Teatro Real opera house in Madrid, where El Yiyo made his debut in November and performed with such energy that he broke the heel of his boot. Undaunted, he threw off his boots and finished the act barefoot.

“It’s unfortunate to break a heel, but I didn’t feel like it was a serious crisis because I always improvised,” he said in an interview in Badalona.

At the age of 24, El Yiyo belongs to a new generation of flamenco artists, some of whom push the boundaries of traditional Spanish music and dance style by combining it with other genres.

While traditional flamenco is the cornerstone of an El Yiyo performance, it is self-taught and combines the genre with elements of contemporary dance: “Whatever can inspire me,” he said. Such a mix comes at a time when Spain has been debating what constitutes real flamenco, reinforced by the success of the singer Rosalía, who has become one of the country’s leading music exporters by adding a flamenco touch to pop music confers.

As a Roma, El Yiyo belongs to the community whose members present themselves as guardians of Spanish flamenco culture. Rosalía, who is not Roma, has been criticized as a kidnapper of tradition. But El Yiyo does not want to get involved in disputes over cultural appropriation.

“I really don’t understand this debate between purists and modernists because even if you can find reasons to argue that Rosalía doesn’t really do flamenco, there is no reason to deny her originality and talent,” said El Yiyo.

“I can dance classical flamenco if I am asked to. But I want my dance to be more open, ”he added. “I want inspiration from anyone who can help me dance better, be it Michael Jackson or a kid on my street trying a nice little move.”

El Yiyo said he was proud of Roma culture, but that flamenco had also long been enriched by non-Gypsy artists, such as guitarist Paco de Lucía, who also helped create a six-sided Peruvian box, the cajón to make flamenco percussion a staple. Being Roma was just an asset and relevant to flamenco, El Yiyo said, “in the sense that we start with flamenco in our DNA.”

After a brief pause, he added, “I really don’t want to make a race statement by talking about my DNA, but I mean that I have never attended a family event that my parents, uncles and cousins ​​have not attended weren’t clapping, singing or dancing flamenco – and that doesn’t happen in every family in Spain. “

He grew up surrounded by the sounds of flamenco, but he really learned to dance by watching it online, he said. His biggest idol, he said, was Michael Jackson, whose movements he would repeat as a child, as well as those of Fred Astaire and other Hollywood actors he spotted on YouTube.

“I was born into the technology generation. I’m a YouTuber who learned more by dancing in front of a screen than in front of a mirror, ”El Yiyo said. “I didn’t have a great teacher who made me a good flamenco dancer, but I was fortunate to have a family who always loved flamenco.”

Juan Lloria, a journalist who covers flamenco for Onda Cero, a Spanish radio station, said El Yiyo was not Spain’s only self-taught flamenco artist, but there were certainly very few who did not have at least one professional artist as an example follow in their family.

“When I see El Yiyo, I see someone who has studied on the street,” he said with real energy and spontaneity.

In December, El Yiyo traveled to Valencia to give one of the few stage performances he had been able to plan since March when the pandemic brought cultural life to a standstill in Spain. His show at the Talia Theater was sold out – or at least the 50 percent of the seats that could be filled under local coronavirus rules.

Partly due to the limitations, El Yiyo presented a scaled-down version of its latest production. He danced alone, accompanied by only three musicians and without his usual backup dancers and his large orchestra.

El Yiyo went on stage wearing a silver jacket and a black fedora that covered his face and looked a bit like his hero. For much of his opening dance he seemed to slide smoothly across the floorboards, but he suddenly jumped in front of the stage and hit his feet on landing, causing the audience to collectively gasp. From then on, every break in the show was greeted with enthusiastic applause and shouts of “Olé!”

“I have to feel like I’m setting my audience on fire,” said El Yiyo after the show. “I need to let her forget everything else that’s going on for at least an hour, especially amid this pandemic.”

In some of his recent shows, El Yiyo has appeared with his two brothers Ricardo, 20, known as El Tete, and Sebastián, 13, who uses the stage name El Chino.

“We all have the same hair and the same face, but I think we are really very different when it comes to our dancing,” El Tete said in an interview. “Our older brother is pure energy and has horse power, while I think I’m a little more elegant.”

He added that the sibling relationship “is clearly competitive, but I think in a healthy way that motivates each of us to dance at our best.”

El Yiyo sounded good at the competition too, insisting that the coronavirus should unite, not separate, artists who are now facing a second season of canceled shows. Aside from the economic impact, it is difficult to convey the essence of flamenco without having an audience and feeding on its reactions.

Even when he sat down for an interview, El Yiyo continued to fidget, tapping the palm of his hand on his thigh to a flamenco rhythm that apparently sounded in his head.

“Of course there is a lot of technique in my dancing,” he said. “But flamenco is really about letting all sensations flow through your veins.”