Felix Contreras

Editor's note: It is February and that can mean only one thing. It is time for Black, Latino And Proud: Black History Month With Alt.Latino hosted by our friends and colleagues Felix Contreras and Jasmine Garsd. We pass the mic to Felix to hear what they will be featuring ...

Gina Chavez's voice stops you in your tracks the first time you hear it. At least that's how it worked for me when I came upon her performance during South by Southwest a few years ago. She was playing a semi-acoustic set on a sunlit patio above a busy sports ...

Martirio owes an artistic debt to both a dictator and jazz.

She is a living, breathing and performing example of the artistic explosion that greeted the death of Francisco Franco, the despot who ruled Spain from 1939 through 1975. After decades of severely limited creative expression, Martirio and other ...

La Santa Cecilia spreads joy every time its members plug in to do a show. They do it one dance step at a time, with cumbias, corridos, elegant mambos and plain old rock 'n' roll.

I first saw La Santa Cecilia perform in an Austin, Texas, parking lot about ...

Concha Buika's voice doesn't come from inside her petite body: It comes from Africa, and from the past. There are obvious traces of flamenco, itself a historical mash-up of the Moors and various transitory cultures in southern Spain and north Africa.

During her flights of improvisation, we also hear ...

A while back, I found myself weary of hearing music played in 4/4 time, with the snare hitting on the 2 and 4. For relief, I dug deeper into an existing passion for Afro-Cuban music — and, during that journey, discovered the Argentine trio Tremor.

Tremor creates a mash-up of ...

Marian McPartland, who gave the world an intimate, insider's perspective on one of the most elusive topics in music — jazz improvisation — died of natural causes Tuesday night at her home in Long Island, N.Y. She was 95.

For more than 40 years, she hosted Marian McPartland's ...

It's already August 8, which means you've got maybe three or four weeks left to complain about preseason football, inadequately shield yourself from the scorching heat of the sun, and communicate with your kids about something other than why they haven't done their homework. So why not get cracking on ...

It's possible to chart the development of Latin Alternative music by following the career of Andrea Echeverri.

In 1992, Echeverri and Hector Buitrago formed Aterciopelados in Bogota, Colombia, during a time of great innovation in rock en Español. Bands from all over Latin America were experimenting with indigenous ...

It is not easy to play both jazz drum set and Afro-Caribbean percussion. Lots of drummers do it, but few have mastered it in a way that makes their sound in either style unmistakable from the first beat.

The music community lost one of those true innovators Wednesday with the ...

Jazz fans will get the reference in the name of Chucho Valdés' quintet, The Afro-Cuban Messengers. Just as drummer Art Blakey did with various versions of his Jazz Messengers, Valdés is nurturing future generations of Afro-Cuban jazz musicians while also spreading the gospel of the music ...

Ever since her self-titled debut in 2005, Spanish singer Concha Buika has mesmerized fans with her dark, husky voice, which mixes the Moorish roots of flamenco with the dexterity of great jazz singers. Buika, part of a long line of captivating female vocalists from Spain, has progressed from her ...

I wish we'd put a camera in the Alt.Latino studio to capture Jasmine Garsd's face as she listened to my picks for the first time. It would have captured the way she stared into space as the sounds came through her headphones and made their way into her musical consciousness; ...

I was in high school, playing drums in a band with some pals in the mid-'70s, when I got a call from my uncle: Would I like to play a couple of dates with his norteño band over the summer?

While my drumming skills were decidedly high-school-level in terms of ...

You don't really listen to an Omar Sosa concert so much as experience it. The Cuban-born pianist's overall demeanor exudes a sense of calm and deep reflection, while a spiritual connection to music and his ancestors comes through in his piano playing.

You can hear Sosa draw on more ...

The percussionist and bandleader Tito Puente would have celebrated his 90th birthday this weekend on April 20. And the recently released box set Quatro: The Definitive Collection is a great place to start celebrating the once and forever King of Latin Music. It captures the driving sound of ...

When California Gov. Jerry Brown named Juan Felipe Herrera to the honorary post of poet laureate, he was tapping into a slice of Chicano history.

Herrera came of age during the late 1960s and early '70s, when politics, culture and social change influenced what became known as the Chicano Movement.

This week, Alt.Latino takes a look at five people who've been affected by U.S. immigration or immigration law. As you might expect, we take a musical approach, as we ask each subject to bring along a song that depicts his or her situation or status. The playlist is thought-provoking, and ...

With eight accomplished musicians from Argentina and Uruguay, and a sound rooted in tango traditions, Bajofondo lays out a visual and aural feast. Led by Oscar and Grammy winner Gustavo Santaolalla, the group mashes up traditional candombe sounds and other forms with electronica to produce a mix that's hypnotic ...

Politics and rock en Español go hand in hand, and Mexico City's Molotov is a flag-waver for that combination. The band formed in 1995 during an era in which seismic political changes transformed Mexican society; from the start, Molotov's music pointed fingers at economic and political institutions — and even ...