Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao” Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940. As a member of Arcaño y Sus Maravillas in the late 1930s, Cachao and his multi-instrumentalist brother Orestes “Macho” Lopez reworked the rarefied French-influenced parlor music of the danzón into the mambo. But by the 1950s, when Perez Prado and many others (from Rosemary Clooney to Bill Haley) rode the mambo to international fame, Cachao had moved on to perfect the descarga, the “jam session” format that provided breathing room for serious instrumental improvisation. More than a rhythm master, Cachao united melody and harmony into an irresistible connecting thread—what George Clinton would later call a “groove.”

Because Cachao was a Cuban expatriate who spent his postwar years in places ranging from Madrid to Miami, it would be easy to give his career the Buena Vista Social Club treatment, viewing him as a nostalgic relic of Cuba’s romantic past. But that would understate his legacy. One of Cachao’s few peers, pianist Bebo Valdes, has noted that before Cachao, Cuban music had counter-tempo, but still lacked real syncopation. Cachao, who spent decades in the Havana Symphony performing with conductors ranging from Ernesto Lecuona to Igor Stravinsky, elevated the seriousness of the bass even as he made it dance, swing and shimmer.

Some of Cachao’s obituaries quote from a hero of mine—musicologist and “cowboy rumba” innovator Ned Sublette–whose astonishingly good book Cuba and its Music describes Cachao as “arguably the most important bassist in twentieth century popular music.” While this may beg the question of whether Charles Mingus was “popular,” Sublette has a point. As he notes, “with Cachao, the modern bass feel of Cuban music begins. And with that begins the bass feel of the second half of the twentieth century in U.S. music as well—those funky ostinatos that we know from later decades of R&B, which have become such a part of the environment that we don’t even think about where they came from.”

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A Tribute to Devendra Banhart

And hey there mister happy squid, you move so psychedelically
You hypnotize with your magic dance all the animals in the sea
For Sure

Devendra Banhart - Little Yellow Spider

At first spin of Devendra Banhart’s Little Yellow Spider, one might think it a children’s song. That is what came to mind when I first heard it on a mixed CD a friend sent as a New Year’s gift. Then I reached the line about the pig mating with a man. The appeal only grew.

Who was this poetic troubadour artfully warbling lyrics that were both playful and taboo, naturalistic and psychedelic, odd and profane? Suddenly a drawer had been opened and in it, amongst the lacy vintage shirts and bright paisley dresses, lay the sparkling spangles and baubles of wonder, magic and healing. Every time Little Yellow Spider came on my daughter would yipe, “I love this song,” and I would cough loudly over the pig verse.

I was driven to learn more about this man who could equally endear my child and myself, yet had a secret darkness, a seedy underbelly, a heart that had been broken by human folly.

And hey there Mrs. Lovely Moon, you’re lonely and you’re blue
It’s kind of strange the way you change
But then again we all do, too.

Over the course of a few months I purchased all of Devendra Banhart’s CD’s and found myself enraptured by song in a way I hadn’t been since my birth in the Summer of Love. Wordsmith of alchemical poetry, knitter of connections between microcosm and macrocosm, Banhart was projecting a wolf cry for our generation. In one album I could find pagan spell work, poignant love ballad and subversive declarations of liberation. Banhart was showman with a bowler hat and cane, skinny 60’s love child smoking peace pipe amongst oat straw and star thistle, edgy outrageous queen performing acts of desire behind closed doors, mother, yogi, long haired child. All this, and multilingual vocalist extraordinaire, who can, as my husband likes to say, “play his axe.”

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Jefferson Airplane and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters may have invented the acid test, but after a while, black lights, fluorescent paint, and ink swirling between the sheets of an overhead projector - as trippy as they were - had to pull up a beanbag and make way for the integration of the greater pop culture.

There’s a long history to the art of film - or film collage - being played behind live performances. Ghost images of Nico and other band members flashed behind the Velvet Underground at the happenings of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In Clint Eastwood’s 1968 “Coogan’s Bluff,” Clint visits a New York disco where half-nekkid go-go dancers cavort with a band playing in front of projected films. The Stones and early Pink Floyd were known to perform in front of films in 1960s London clubs.

These days (or more recently anyway), the Butthole Surfers blast a hole through concert-go’ers trips by projecting footage of penile reconstructive surgery behind their performances. And on a completely different, non-filmic but genetically related planet, Norton Wisdom paints ever-morphing hypo-allergenic stick men and swirly gigs live behind the intricate thud of Banyan (Janes Addiction’s Stephen Perkins, plus Nels Cline and ex-Minutemen Mike Watt).

Jump sideways a few years, to the mid-90s. “Post-rock” has risen to fill an unnamed void, and Boston’s quartet Cul de Sac (not to be confused with the Croatian improv group of the same name) are bringing the ghost of John Fahey together with Can, Faust, and the Velvet Underground, creating fascinating, pulsing instrumentals that go way beyond hybrid, into uncharted territory that belongs exclusively to New England. Film makers Scott Hamrah and Chris Fujiwara started assembling powerful collages of classic obscure film, 1970s TV advertisements, and found scraps into films specifically designed to play - much larger than life - behind the band, helping to make Cul de Sac performances the unforgettable performances they were. Nearly a decade later, at least one of those films - a piece made to accompany “Doldrums,” from Cul de Sac’s 1996 album China Gate, has made it to YouTube:

Seeing the piece again swept me back to Boston, Glenn Jones’ potato-masher guitar rig, and memories of a piece I wrote on Cul de Sac for the Utne Reader in 1996, shamelessly reprinted below, regardless how embarrassing.

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M.I.A. mania is starting to sweep the world in anticipation of the official release later this month of Kala. The new album follows the thoroughly unclassifiable British/ Sri Lankan aural graffiti artist’s breakthrough Arular album and Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape, the sources of several of the Zeroes’ most arresting rhythms so far. Since the artist otherwise known as Maya Arulpragasam–whose website should remain unvisited if you are not wearing sunglasses–has been known to draw from everything from bhangra and baile electro-funk to dancehall and Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, you might wonder about the source of the leadoff sounds you will hear on her new album. Uh, how about…Jonathan Richman?

That’s right. In her continuing quest to bring the noise to college radio-obsessed geek rockers, Maya’s new “Bamboo Banga” starts out with a twisted, tripped-out reworking of the Modern Lovers’ car radio classic “Roadrunner,” which will remain Richman’s most iconic song no matter how many charming ditties he writes about dinosaurs, bumblebees and lesbian bars. Achieving speeds usually reserved for professional stunt drivers and Lindsay Lohan, M.I.A. doesn’t even notice the Stop n’ Shop as she drives “with the radio on,” and I’m betting that her car is equipped with satellite radio. Here’s an audio snippet from M.I.A.’s mini-cover, juxtaposed with a video playing “Roadrunner” Modern Lovers-style.

“Bamboo Banga” isn’t even the most interesting reworking of a rock classic on the new album; after the click-through we’ll present her take on the Clash.

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Dana in white, fully-clothed.

The final season of The Sopranos is casting a long shadow in my life these days. I know, this is a music site—we’ll get to that. But as I write this, there are merely two episodes left in the greatest television show ever, and I’m pretty deeply engrossed. Anyone familiar with the show knows that music has always played a huge role, and after a recent episode used Van Morrison’s cover of “Comfortably Numb” to set-up maybe the series’ most singularly breathtaking moment, I was ready to dig deep into why the song choice was absolute perfection…

…until I discovered that those crafty Sopranos-deconstructors at Slate beat me to it. (And did a far better job than I ever would have; I mean, the guy brings Hitler’s secret bunker into his analysis—no way I would’ve dug that deep.) But it led me to ask: what is my favorite moment of pop song/TV show symbiosis?

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Plastic Bertrand is not answering his email. I’m trying not to take it personally — maybe he’s on tour in Eastern Europe, playing “Ça plane pour moi” over and over for 40-somethings in Buda, or across the Danube, in Pest. Maybe he’s overwhelmed with interview requests. Maybe he just doesn’t check his MySpace page very often. Shame though - I really wanted to learn more about his “cellophane puppet” girlfriend, and where she got the “large rubber beer glass” mentioned in his 1977 punk/new wave crossover smash. Does he still have that magnificent rubber glass? Does he use it to quaff large quantities of Belgian ale? (Bertrand is one of Belgium’s finest one-hit punk rock exports).

In case you don’t speak French - or in case you do but can’t make heads or tails of those jackhammer lyrics, an English translation is in order:

Allez-oop! One morning
a darling came to my home,
a cellophane puppet with Chinese hair,
a plaster, a hangover,
drank my beer in a large rubber glass
Oooo-ooo-ooo-ooo!
like an Indian in his igloo

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I could call Prince a “genius,” but would it matter? In music, art, and writing, everybody’s a goddamn genius. So let’s come at it from a different angle. My dad, a physician, tends to look at things from a genetic point of view. When we’re watching a truly brilliant athlete or musician, he’ll point out that their “genius” is based on their genetic aberrations. Basically, they’re mutants, if you want to make it sound comic-book sexy. Or, as I prefer to look at it, they’re freaks.

Michael Jordan? Total freak. Absurdly mutant-like muscular control combined with freakish creative spatial analysis abilities. He won the genetic lottery and got to test-drive the prototype genes. In 10,000 years, all of us will dunk like Jordan.

And everyone will make music like Prince.

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Via WFMU, wonderful video clip of a youngish and very dapper looking John Cage, appearing on a TV game show to perform his piece “Water Walk” on a motley collection of household objects. By 1960, when this piece aired, Cage was already controversial for his seemingly innocuous idea that “music is a production of sound” and because of his hallmark piece “4:33″ (a.k.a. “Silence”), composed a few years earlier. The list of instruments for the game show performance included a rubber duck, ice cubes, a blender and five radios.

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I’m on my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans, the big not-so-easy-anymore, checking out the first weekend of the Jazz and Heritage Festival, or JazzFest for short. Fest is an orgy of music, food, and crafts, not necessarily in that order. Every year we try to revisit some old favorites, check out a few ringers, and stumble over some music we’d never heard before. Last year’s discovery was twisted Louisiana piano perfessor Bobby Lounge, who we’ll be seeing again tomorrow. This year so far I’ve fallen in love with Bonerama (not what it sounds like) and have two more days to discover something totally fresh.

Between the soft-shell crab and cochon du lait po-boys, rosemint ice tea, popcorn shrimp, and beignets today we heard jamming’ string-band music from Jeff and Vida and caught snippets of Zachary Richard, Trombone Shorty, Soulive, and Percy Sledge. We ended the day by shoving our way to near the front of the Acura stage (where they’ve finally outlawed those obnoxious frat/sorority style easy-chair encampments), to watch Van Morrison prove he’s still got it with a country-ish (dobro and fiddle included) band offering five-party backing harmonies. Dr. John came out to sit in on a Fats Domino tune but it looked like they had woken him up from a nap or a nod, because he tootled on the piano just a little bit and interspersed a little response to Van’s call in his inimitable “Y’at” drawl. Van opened with “Moondance” and took his time with “Cleaning Windows” and country classics like “There Stands the Glass” before my arthritic knee threatened to kill me if I didn’t hobble off the green and find some place to rest.

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Iggy Pop is missing some bones. I’m sure of it. There’s no other way to explain how his 60-year-old frame can slither through space the way it does. The rippled wall of lithe-yet-steely muscle he calls a torso compensates for the bonelessness, suspending The Iguana like a marionette. Fewer bones, more muscle, and just a little bit of celebratory butt crack to seal the deal (unless he gets pantsed, in which case all bets are off). Iggy’s body is one of the most beautiful canvases ever to grace a stage, which makes it all the more amazing that after all these years of hard living, Iggy still has no tattoos. It’s as if he knows that any art would detract from, rather than add to, the visual spectacle of his body. Wonder if Henry Rollins sometimes wishes he had stuck with his birthday suit.

Iggy Pop turned 60 yesterday, in front of an audience wishing it had half as much energy at 40. But make no mistake - this was a Stooges show, not an Iggy Pop show. All tracks were from the eponymous first Stooges album, Fun House, or their recent The Weirdness, with not a single nothin’ from the dozen-plus albums released under Iggy’s own name or recorded with other bands. That was OK, since some of us consider The Stooges and Fun House to be Rosetta Stones of rock, untouchable and unrepeatable in their massiveness, both in sound and in influence (it’s hard to imagine what punk or heavy metal might have evolved to become without these two albums). And yet Iggy seemed oblivious to his own birthday, until the band launched into a thudding version of “Happy Birthday” late in the show, and balloons silkscreened with Pop’s praying hands Raw Power image fell from the sky. The SF Chronicle summarizes last Thursday’s show pretty well: “Punk’s godfather is now its grandfather.”

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The Bay Area’s burgeoning ukulele scene, which (like most ukulele scenes) has endless fun covering both 1930s trad and classic punk, has found another natural affinity in the gritty catalog of Tom Waits. And where goes ukulele, so go its companion instruments: the washboard, the singing saw, accordions, kazoos, and toy pianos — instruments that do what they do with the least-possible investment of either technology or capital, and that can be played passably without spending a decade at Juilliard. The singing saw wants a player with grapes, not cash.

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Remember ingesting the Talking Heads’ 1979 Fear of Music for the first time? You may have come away with your brain drenched in a hybrid African / New Wave alchemical sweat. Not quite as aromatic as the sweat that oozed from Remain in Light, nor quite as pungent as the sweat that squirted from the somewhat more ragged 77. Fear of Music-generated sweat had a darker scent: More earthy, with an undercarriage of oak and peat moss. Beneath all that deep African funk was something very American - iconic portrait/bursts on simple themes: Drugs, Paper, Heaven, Animals, Cities. And underneath it all, something strange and wonderful and unlike anything you had heard before. But on the first track — I Zimbra — the African stuff did something sneaky to your brain: It set you up for deception. If you’re like most people (not saying that you are, but if you are), you may have assumed that the lyrics were a lifted tribal chant, cribbed from somewhere deep in the bowels of the Serengeti. The rhythms told you to assume that.

As for Marie Osmond… we’ll get to that.

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Don Aicardi (aka the “Egg Roll King”), roots archivist extraordinaire and our favorite authority on all things Dylan, passes along this classic new bit of inspired insanity, featuring a faux mid-sixties Dylan voice assaulting Green Eggs and Ham, the Zax, and the Cat in the Hat, among other bits of classic Dr. Seuss. I wish he’d also taken on Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?, but it’s really hard to quibble. As these things go, it’s even better than Bruce Springstone: Live at Bedrock, and almost as good as the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra’s all-kazoo version of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”