Musicians who explore the fringes of music as we know it often seem to operate in a parallel dimension with few points of reference for the average music fan.

This historically has been true in jazz, where such innovators as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus abandoned the rules established by their predecessors and opened new sonic vistas, leaving many fans in the dust with their experimentations.

Banjoist Béla Fleck chose an instrument most closely associated with tradition-minded country, bluegrass and folk music, but he's also a longtime jazz aficionado who has typically thought and played with the anything-goes sense of his jazz heroes. On the surface, that makes his current holiday music tour look somewhat curious.

But there’s a method to his musical madness, as he told me when we chatted recently for a profile that appears in Friday’s Calendar. He spoke about why he and his band, the Flecktones, chose to record an album of holiday tunes two years ago, and how they applied their penchant for experimentation to yuletide standards such as “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for the record,  “Jingle All the Way,” which went on to collect a Grammy for best pop instrumental album of the year.

 
When South African musician Johnny Clegg started playing music in earnest in the 1970s, he was something of a trendsetter, one who assembled an integrated band of white and black musicians at a time when his nation’s government officially sanctioned racial segregation in the form of apartheid.

His blend of Western rock, mbaqanga African jazz-pop music, Zulu chants and choreography and multilayered vocal harmonies akin to those of Ladysmith Black Mambazo predated the incorporation of elements of traditional African music by such savvy world-music proponents as Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and David Byrne.

But as Clegg anticipates this week’s release of his first album in the U.S. in nearly two decades, “Human,” he recognizes how much has changed, both at home and around the world. Apartheid, against which he often railed in his music, is no more. Nelson Mandela, who was a political prisoner during most of the time Clegg and his bands exerted their presence in the U.S. on tour and with a string of major-label albums, came and went as president of the Republic of South Africa. And the Western culture that was long suppressed during the apartheid era has flooded through his country.

“From 1994 to 2004, we saw this amazing influx of hip-hop, rap, dance and house music coming in and new styles of dress, a new youth culture, coming up into the townships -- and completely to the detriment of traditional rural music styles,” Clegg, 57, said recently from his home in Johannesburg, South Africa. “All the traditional music forms and styles lost their [radio] airplay and now are relegated to ‘traditional hour,’ which is usually 3 a.m. in the morning.”

That leaves Clegg, the onetime barrier bender who picked up a Grammy nomination for best world music album for his 1993 collection “Heat, Dust and Dreams,” as something closer to a standard bearer.

Press play on the above clip, and once one gets past a brief blare of a police horn, what follows is relatively pleasant, at times perhaps even soothing. Yet the Dø -- pronounced "dough" -- traffic in something that always seems to border on the unsettling. 

There's plenty of pain, longing and bitterness in the lyrics, and the vocals of Olivia Merilahti are attention-grabbing -- high-pitched, but not aggressively so. Yet they're not exactly completely playful either.

The song embedded above, "On My Shoulders," is a more conventional offering from the French-Finnish duo of Merilahti and mult-instrumentalist Dan Levy. The orchestral flourishes are brief, the guitar is calmly downtrodden and the atmospheric streaks and rhythmic scrapes come to weirden things up, but never overtake the song. 

The Roskilde Festival in Denmark, billed as Northern Europe’s biggest music and culture festival, usually coincides with Independence Day in the U.S., and this year, veteran composer-arranger-orchestrator-raconteur Van Dyke Parks decided to weave something socio-politically relevant into his recent performance as one of the headliners of  the 2010 event, which wrapped up on July 4.

So he turned to an expansive arrangement of “Across the Borderline,” the Ry Cooder-John Hiatt-Jim Dickinson song that was featured prominently in the 1982 Jack Nicholson film “The Border.”

Now a fascinating behind-the-scenes video has surfaced from Parks’ performance, including interview footage with him and highlights of the song featuring young Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno and the Danish Radio Youth Ensemble.

“When I got asked to come to Roskilde, I decided that I should keep a focus on something that I’m interested in,” Parks says in the video. “And I found by going to Pan-American music that I could hit on something which is essentially a very hot political topic right now, and that is immigration.”

To complement the songs’ lyrics about the perils people are willing to risk in search of a better life for themselves and their families in another land, longtime Southern California resident Parks said, “We took a trip back to these great romantic classics of Latin America to find the rhythms we love that said the things that we think are important to think about.

Musically speaking, “I presented some very difficult arrangements for a bunch of young people. …I think it served what I wanted to do: I wanted it to serve people that are younger than any of my neckties.”

As for the heated debate raging over immigration back home, Parks notes, “I don’t have any answers. But I want my music to raise questions. I would like to comfort people, but I'd also like to take the people that are comfortable by the throat and yank them into a sense of obligation into improving this world.”

Take a look and give a listen.

-- Randy Lewis

The media are  often critical of the concert industry, what with its high ticket prices, unexplained service fees and often an inability to get a decent seat without dealing with the secondary market. But there is one nifty new feature on the Ticketmaster website that deserves some praise, and that's the "interactive seat map." Pictured above as a graphic of the Hollywood Bowl's seating arrangement, the map allows the user to roll over various sections, and see, in real time, how many tickets are still available. 

There is, however, a downside, at least if you're a promoter. Those with time on their hands and the know-how to use a calculator (needling journalists are among that lot), can instantly see how many tickets remain unsold for major events hours before they're supposed to go down. Never before has it been so easy to see how concerts are under-performing. 

Sad news, then, to learn that approximately 10,000 tickets remain, as of Thursday morning, for Sunday's concert with Yeasayer and Baaba Maal, with, as noted in the screen shot above, sometimes more than 500 available in a single section. With a capacity of around 18,000, it's safe to say there's going to be plenty of room for your picnic basket and cheese spread.

The best music often comes from the strangest places. That’s certainly true with the RockTigers, a tight outfit from South Korea that has put a hip twist on some American rock 'n' roll standards. 

The RockTigers are profiled in Thursday's Calendar, and Pop & Hiss presents a glimpse at the band's music, dubbed Kimchibilly, below.

"Kimchibilly"

01 Kimchibilly

With words and music from the band’s rhythm guitarist, Tiger, this song serves as a sort of mission statement. According to Jaeyoon Lee, a friend of the band who helps promote the act's work, the term "Kimchibilly" was suggested by a foreign fan and it ended up sticking. 

Jae says he personally didn't like the word at first, but in the end realized that it was easy for fans to grasp. Jae calls Korean rockabilly a sound that’s both modern and vintage -- a blend of the East and West. As Jae says, "Kimchi is more than just food for Koreans, and other cultures may consider it nasty, but the RockTigers play nasty rock & roll!"

King Sunny Adés spring tour of North America has been canceled for a combination of visa and personnel issues. After two members of the Nigerian Afro-beat band died last month in a car accident, the U.S. Embassy had been slow to approve visas for replacement members.

“At the same time,” according to a statement issued Monday by Adé’s representatives, “it became clear that the artist and the band had neither recovered from the impact of the tragedy, nor were they able to find consensus on how to move forward with normal touring.”

“As a result, [the tour] has been canceled until such a time as King Sunny Adé and his group have sufficiently regrouped and are ready to face the rigors of an International tour again,” the statement said.

The itinerary had included Southern California stops on May 7 at the Echoplex and May 8 at San Diego’s World Beat Center.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: King Sunny Adé. Credit: www.graviton.net

Singer Tanya Tagaq hails from the Nunavut autonomous region in northern Canada, a gateway to the North Pole. She's a progressively spirited musician who is extending the technique of Inuit "throat singing," a tradition usually pairing two women in a singing game that simulates the sounds of nature. Tagaq, however, is not as interested in preserving tradition as she is in impelling it into entirely new musical forms.

Tagaq's appearance at California Plaza's Grand Performances on Saturday night was a bracing, exploratory experience. Tagaq demonstrated the modernist bent that has found her collaborating with similarly inclined artists, including vocal work on Björk's 2004 "Medulla" album and 2005's "Vespertine" tour, and performances with the Kronos Quartet in 2008. Tagaq's 2008 album "Auk/Blood" was released through Mike Patton's avant-leaning Ipecac Recordings label.

On her sophomore project, 'Vagarosa,' the Brazilian singer-songwriter continues to embrace music from far and wide.

Critics showered praise, the disc rose to the top of Billboard's world music chart and Céu (pronounced say-u) scored a Latin Grammy nomination for best new artist of 2006 and a Grammy nomination for best contemporary world music album of 2007.

Céu's creamy vocals and camera-friendly looks helped make her the rare foreign chanteuse who can break through the English-language barrier that often blocks world music artists from the U.S. market (she sings almost exclusively in Portuguese). With her much-anticipated follow-up, "Vagarosa," to promote, she's back on tour and has a return engagement Friday at the Roxy.

But on both her first recording and her new album, the São Paulo native demonstrates that she's a serious artist who's not making music simply to serve as a pleasant aural backdrop for coffee klatching.

Speaking in English by phone from her São Paulo studio, the 29-year-old singer born Maria do Céu Whitaker Poças said that she didn't plan for her new record either to meet or sidestep the expectations born of her previous success.

"What I wanted to do is be honest with myself, doing what I really feel I should sing," she said. "Because when you do this music, you're going to be with this music for a long time."

Fluent in the rhythms and emotional palette of bossa nova and samba, a sort of birthright for Brazilian musicians, Céu cultivates a cosmopolitan interest in electronica, Brazilian northeastern regional music, reggae and Ethio jazz. She absorbed American blues, jazz and hip-hop while living in New York in 1998, and also developed a taste for neo-soul artists such as Erykah Badu.

It's hardly the triumphant return to the U.S. that South Korean pop superstar Rain had hoped for -- an appearance that will do little to further his stated intention of becoming an "Asian fusion" answer to Ricky Martin.

Confirming anxious speculation that has lit up K-Pop chatrooms from here to Seoul, Sunwoo Lee, an attorney representing Rain -- the wildly popular singer-actor dubbed "the Justin Timberlake of Asia" -- said that the performer would appear in court in Hawaii next week to face charges stemming from his abruptly cancelled concert there in 2007.

Ready to expand your knowledge of Indian music beyond the soundtrack to "Slumdog Millionaire"? Here's a little help from our video team, who spent some time with local Paul Livingstone.

Born in Beirut and living in Los Angeles, Livingstone has studied North Indian classical music for the last 20 years, working with such known practitioners of the form as Pandit Ravi Shankar, Rajeev Taranath and Amiya Dasgupta.

He's done some film work as well, composing for 2005's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" with Michael Giacchino. He talks about the art of the sitar and the relevance of world music to Los Angeles in the above clip. You can check all his upcoming performances here.

-- Todd Martens

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