The Boston music scene is thriving, including right here at GBH. On top of all of our amazing local talent, the best artists in the world pass through here, and on this Music Monday, we’re bringing you another edition of the All Things Considered Turntable because we have access to some of the best music journalists in the world.
Marco Werman, executive editor and co-host of GBH’s The World, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk about what’s on his playlist. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: Let’s jump right in. What’s your first piece?
Marco Werman: Well, I want to spin a track that is about to come out. It’s a single from Femi Kuti, the eldest of the two musical offspring of the late Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì of Nigeria. Femi is following in his father’s footsteps of keeping lyrics and music relevant to the social and political landscape of Nigeria. This track is called “Oga Doctor,” which means something akin to Boss Doctor in Nigeria.
The groove is classic afro-beat and very danceable, but when you stop and listen to what he’s talking about, you may be less inclined to dance and more inclined to sit down and just pay attention. He’s singing about a scourge in Nigera: doctors abusing their patients, and often, it’s sexual abuse. Not your usual kind of content in music.
Where Fela, his father, criticized military rule, his sons, like Femi and the younger son, are drilling deeper into these social ills they see around them. I won’t attempt to recite the lyrics in Pidgin, but Femi basically sings, “Come hear about the things doctors do with our women inside their room. Come here. Talk about what you see. Talk about what you’re seeing.”
[“Oga Doctor” — Femi Kuti]
Rath: That’s amazing, Marco, to hear that. I mean, you’re the one who turned me on to the Kútì family and their genius quite a while ago. It’s amazing to hear him following in his father’s footsteps so intensely and politically.
Werman: Yeah. I’m always intrigued, Arun, by what prompts musicians to sit down and write a song — like the local pressures that come to bear and affect artists to the point where they express themselves in music. This is just one remarkable example.
Rath: Thank you for bringing that, that’s amazing. And that’s going to be coming out soon?
Werman: That’s coming out in April.
Rath: Awesome. So, what’s next?
Werman: Let’s go to … I’m going to dial in on some of the excitement around Bob Dylan lately — the Bob Dylan nostalgia, what with all the buzz around the movie A Complete Unknwn with Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. This is “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” by Bob Dylan, but it’s sung here by Cat Power.
Cat Power is an artist known mostly for how she interprets other musicians’ songs. This is one song on an album of hers that she’s touring [on] right now. It’s called “Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert.” This was a famous show that followed Dylan’s going electric at Newport — the show where someone was so upset with the electric sound that he shouted “Judas!” at Dylan, as if he had betrayed the folk scene somehow.
In any case, I saw Cat Power last month do this track live, and she did the whole track-by-track album of Dylan’s concert in 1966 — half acoustic, the second half electric, just like his show. I saw Cat Power just a month after Marianne Faithfull had died, and Cat Power’s voice was dialed in somewhere between Marianne Faithfull and Bob Dylan. I’ve had this track on my playlist ever since.
[“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” — Cat Power]
Rath: Marco, I checked this album out because I knew you were bringing this in, and it’s so good. These are songs that I know backwards and forwards, and to hear them by someone other than Dylan in a way that still gives me chills is just … It’s amazing.
Werman: Yeah, it’s a special show. I don’t know how long she’s going to be touring for, but I highly recommend the show. I highly recommend the whole album! And, by the way, Dylan’s original 1966 show at the Royal Albert Hall is also out as a recording.
One interesting thing about Cat Power — and it was so unexpectedly delightful to see a concert this way — she didn’t have herself lit up through the entire show, so it was a really visceral kind of musical experience.
Rath: That’s pretty wild for staging a show, isn’t it?
Werman: Yeah, I’ve never seen anything like that.
Rath: Interesting. We have time for one more. What else have you got?
Werman: We’re going to end with kind of a sad story, but wonderful music. Aurelio Martinez — on March 17th, he was in a plane that crashed off the coast of Honduras. Aurelio was Honduran, and sadly, he died in that crash. He was 55 years old.
I ment Aurelio Martinez back in 2003 on a reporting trip to Central America to learn more about the Garifuna people — Aurelio is Garifuna. The Garifuna are Blacks who revolted in the 18th century against the British in St. Vincent. They were enslaved from West Africa and later banished to the remote island of Roatan — a Honduran island today. Many of those people [were] dying of illness and then settling — those who survived [were] settling along the coast of what is today Honduras and Belize.
So, Aurelio was not just a musician, but he was a cultural activist for the Garifuna people. His musical genius was composing modern songs within a traditional context that goes back to the Garifuna roots in West Africa, before they were enslaved — before they were even Garifuna with their own language and traditions. A culture, by the way, that has received protection from UNESCO because it is so endangered.
Anyway, tragically, Aurelio is gone, but his music lives on. We can only hope that young Garifuna will hold on to the traditions and culture. This is a song called “Milaguru.” It transflates from Garinago, the language, as “miracle.”
[“Milaguru” — Aurelio Martinez]
