In Congalese Rumba: Cuban Music Goes Back Home, Rebecca Bodenheimer interviews French historian Charlotte Grabli on the fascinating journey of African rhythms from the Congo to Cuba and back again.

Drumming and Singing for the Orishas is a great overiew of batá rhythms in both religious and popular music--from the Oru seco to Adalberto to the Bay Area's own Jesús Díaz y su QBA.

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Here's Tom Ehrlich's third of four galleries from this year's Monterey Jazz Festival.

Sandy Cressman

Dancers Samara Atkins, Juliana Cressman and Molly Levy

Ami Molinelli

Claudia Villela

Celso Alberti

Clay Ross

Falu Shah

Yasushi Nakamura

Clarence Penn

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Here's Tom Ehrlich's third of four galleries from this year's Monterey Jazz Festival.

Sullivan Fortnier

Kendrick Scott

Jeremy Pelt (trumpet) and Lew Tabackin (sax)

Charles Lloyd (flute) and Gerald Clayton (piano)

Angela Davis and Terri Lyne Carrington

Billy Childs

Sean Jones

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We've all been waiting for this episode of The Clave Chronicles.

The genre of Changüí is one of the great "missing links" of rhythm: like guaguancó, chachalokefún, guarapachangueo, the Oru Seco, James Brown c. 1970, J. Dilla c. 2000, Count Basie c. 1940, Arsenio from 1940 to 1952. And this week's Clave Chronicles guest, Ben Lapidus, is definitely the missing link in terms of studying this mysterious and fabulously funky genre. He's the world's leading English language source of information on the subject -- from his seminal book ...

... to his work on last year's 4-CD boxset, The Sound of Guantánamo.

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