Hassan Hakmoun

Summer is festival season, and as the warm temperatures fade into Fall, so too does the touring calendar for many international touring musicians. Luckily, Fall happens to be the time of lots of CD releases and other fun news, so the world music blogs are a-buzzin'. We're also headed into awards season, with the Latin Grammys up first. World Music Central gives us a partial rundown of Latin Grammy nominees, focusing on those categories and artists that were popular in the greater world music community, not just the Latin music world. About.com's Latin Music Site has the complete listing, if you want the total rundown. Over at Spinner.com, Steve Hochman talks to Les Triaboliques, a supergroup of sorts who fuse... well... pretty much every genre you can think of, and manage to pull it off spectacularly. They're releasing a new album called rivermudtwilight, and you can listen to sound clips from the album while you read the interview. Soundroots.org, a blog which accompanies a fantastic radio show on KAOS in Olympia, Washington, has a great bunch of pictures of Vieux Farka Toure and Delhi 2 Dublin from Seattle's giant Bumbershoot Festival. I'm a big Vieux Farka Toure fan, and though Delhi 2 Dublin have hovered on the edges of my radar for awhile now, I'm just getting to know their music... and I'm liking what I'm hearing! And finally, a fun little trivia snippet - according to DubMC.com, Moroccan musician Hassan Hakmoun is opening a restaurant in NYC. His sister will be the chef, and Hakmoun himself will perform most Saturday nights. Seriously, Moroccan food to the live soundtrack of one of the world's best musicians? Uh, twist my arm! The restaurant, called Sintir (also the name of the three-stringed lute that Hakmoun plays) is located on East 9th St. between 1st Avenue and Avenue A, just a half-block West of Tompkins Square Park in New York City's East Village. Darnit, now I'm craving tagine, and there's not even a Moroccan restaurant in my sad little city. I'll visit New York soon enough, though, and I will assuredly be found checking out Sintir as soon as I get there.