Singers and musicians are set to hold a fundraising gig on Monday, Aug. 5, for retired folk singer and OPM (Original Pilipino Music) legend Coritha, who has suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed and bedridden in her home in Tagaytay City. “Awit Para Kay Coritha” will start at 7 p.m. at My Brother’s Mustache...
Seven years ago, I embarked on a different course in my career as a jazz guitarist. From “land-based” gigs at Tago Jazz Café, Manila Peninsula, and the Philippine International Jazz & Arts Festival, I began playing aboard cruise liners. My first seaborne experience was in 2017, on the ship Seabourn of Holland America Line. Among...
(Fifth in a series) Fresh off the heady excitement of the Philippine International Jazz Festival (PI Jazzfest), which was revived in May after a six-year pause, and in which partners Jeannie Tiongco and Henry Katindig shared the stage with PI Jazz All Stars headliners and foreign jazz artists, the couple have returned to the dim...
True enough, the eight-member girl group was named after either from the first or from the last alliteration of “binibini” (Filipino word for a single woman, a young lady mostly described and alluded to a maiden), a reference to the modern Filipino woman as an independent, informed, sweet yet fierce individual. Without minding, though, the...
(Fourth in a series) At the height of the lockdown in 2021, while some were getting cozy with isolation and others were champing at the bit, popspoken.com, an independent online media outlet for art, music, and lifestyle in Southeast Asia, flagged Project Yazz as among the five “underground Filipino musicians” to check out asap. Online...
(Third of a series) Most everything can be turned into a story if one knows how. Or a song, if we ask tenor saxophonist Alvin Cornista, whose soon-to-be-released part 1 (simply called Manila) of a double album (part 2, titled 7,000 Islands, drops next year) that contains 15 tunes written over a 2-week stretch in...
Second of a series “I just want to play,” says Ronald Tomas, band leader, arranger, composer, singer, and saxophonist—arguably one of the busiest musicians today who cross over jazz, R&B/ funk/rock/soul, and pop jazz stages with enviable ease, the sort for whom music is air and water. Ronald grew up in Pangasinan swaddled by music:...
When I told my research team of millennials at the University of the Philippines that Tesa and I were going to watch a concert by James Taylor, I was met with blank stares and polite smiles that seemed to say, “James who?” So, I asked Janus Nolasco to accompany me on guitar while I sang...
(First of a series) EDITOR’S NOTE: With this piece, Jocelyn de Jesus starts a series of portraits resulting from conversations with stellar Filipino jazz practitioners—“in full bloom in their 60s and 70s,” she says, and “changing the game one gig at a time.” Mario “Tots” Tolentino’s household-name status in contemporary Philippine music is undisputed, having...
For some time it was a familiar scene: Wherever the singer Cooky Chua and Color It Red performed, her young son Joaquin Ignacio would be doodling backstage. At one point, during a break, he strode onto the stage, strumming his small guitar. Not surprisingly, Joaquin would heed the same calling years later: He picked up...
