Felix Contreras

This week on Alt.Latino, the two iconic Brazilians discuss history and music.

The original Santana made music history nearly 50 years ago. As the band reunites for a short tour this spring, the guitarist tells Alt.Latino how he and his collaborators did it.

In a fun and vibrant conversation with Alt.Latino, the Cuban singer makes it clear that her country's political isolation from the U.S. didn't apply to music.

The reunion of Carlos Santana's mid-'70s-era band captures the musicians' intense chemistry, while still updating the massively influential sound they created.

Outlaw, "Okie from Muskogee," poet of working-class values and a fixture in country music for 50 years, Merle Haggard died Wednesday, April 6, his 79th birthday.

Singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi and guitarist Derek Trucks celebrate the blues, jazz and much more.

Watch as this band from Southern California sends waves of velvet-sounding Chicano soul over the crowd at NPR Music's SXSW showcase in Austin, Texas.

The festival-within-a-festival at Austin's SXSW featured more than 200 Latin bands. Choosing just six to highlight was a challenge Alt.Latino cheerfully accepted.

This week on Alt.Latino, hear an incredible range of Latin sounds from this year's entrants.

Monsieur Periné hails from Colombia, a country known for its Afro-Colombian cumbia, as well as New York-style salsa. Instead, however, the band has embraced 1920s-era, guitar-driven jazz from the U.S. The unlikely inspiration has resulted in a large and international following, as well as a Latin Grammy not too long ...

On Sunday night, the 88th annual Academy Awards will once again gather together the movie industry in a lavish ceremony to acknowledge the year's most celebrated performances and films. For some, though, the Oscars represent just another instance of the cool kids gussied up for prom night, trying to ignore ...

This week, Alt.Latino takes a deep dive into the animated Fox sitcom Bordertown with two of its writers, Lalo Alcaraz and Gustavo Arellano. Alcaraz is also the author of the Latino-themed syndicated comic strip La Cucaracha, while Arellano writes an advice column called Ask A Mexican for OC Weekly in ...

In my mind, there's a magical Mexican restaurant located somewhere in Austin, Texas; it's a place where people of all cultures, backgrounds, ages and languages rub elbows over mouthwatering Tex-Mex combination plates. Aging hippies, Chicano hipsters, old-school Texans in cowboy hats, abuelitas, blues musicians, Western fiddlers — they're all there.

...

Richard Blair is from Britain, but his heart is in Colombia. Blair went from producing albums for Peter Gabriel to immersing himself in the music and culture of Colombia — itself a country with deep African roots.

He chased a sound he'd heard in his head; one that mixed the ...

The theme for this week's episode of Alt.Latino is simple: When you're having one of those days, just pop this mixtape into your cassette boombox and groove your blues away.

For some, it's the seemingly unending winter. For others, it's a day that started with spilled coffee, a missed train, ...

It's hard to keep a good idea down. In 1996, Richard Blair and Sidestepper introduced their innovative mix of Afro-Colombian and pop music to a Colombian scene that was about to explode onto the world stage.

The masterminds behind Bomba Estereo and the rappers in Choc Quib Town ...

This week on Alt.Latino, things get emotional quickly. That usually happens when singer Natalia Clavier and I get more than five minutes to talk about her music. The only difference: This time, we recorded it and added songs.

The result provides an insight into how Clavier's emotions and passions ...

Mariachi Flor de Toloache's 2014 self-titled debut album earned a Latin Grammy nomination in the Best Ranchera category — quite an accomplishment, given that the category celebrates an incredibly long tradition of Mexican music. But it was no fluke: The group's members come by their mariachi skills honestly and with ...

What's a New Year's Eve party without music?

This week, Texas DJ Luis Espada (a.k.a. King Louie) of the Peligrosa collective visits Alt.Latino to share samples of the style they created — the one they call "screwmbia."

The music is much more than a bunch of creative types taking liberties ...

Her voice dripping with Southern R&B grit, Moreno and her band never lose sight of the emotion in the holiday classics they perform at KUT in Austin, Texas.