Milo Miles
Milo Miles is Fresh Air's world-music and American-roots music critic. He is a former music editor of The Boston Phoenix.
Miles is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he also writes about music for The Village Voice and The New York Times.
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When La Lupe, the "Queen of Latin Soul," peaked in the 1960s, she was a regular at the Palladium Club and played Madison Square Garden. By the late 1980s, she was on welfare with no fixed address. Critic Milo Miles says a new retrospective album redeems the forgotten singer.
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The Australian singer recently made her American debut with her third album, As Day Follows Night. It's a cycle of songs about a love triangle, and it's performed, as Blasko says, in the direct manner of early Carole King. Milo Miles explains how Blasko escapes irony and sentimentality to refresh a well-worn subject.
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Mac Rebennack, known as "Dr. John," has been a rock and soul ambassador for his native New Orleans since the late 1960s. Although his public profile has risen and fallen over the years, the spirit of his city is a constant presence on all of his albums. Critic Milo Miles talks about how crusading for wounded New Orleans has given Dr. John a jolt of vitality.
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Afrobeat has proven to be the most durable and appealing fusion of African and American pop styles -- in spite of the death of Afrobeat's creator, Fela Kuti. Critic Milo Miles talks about how some smart, determined Afrobeat inheritors both sustain and build upon the style's foundations.
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Dedicated and curious music fans are regularly finding new chapters in rock history from around the globe. Critic Milo Miles reviews one recent collection, a series of anthologies focusing on the lively story of vintage pop in Panama. -
Congolese guitarist Franco is not well-known in America, despite being one of Africa's greatest pop artists. That might change, now that the the African guitarist and band leader's tracks have been released on two albums, Francophonic Vol. 1 and 2.
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Music critic Milo Miles reviews two new collections of tunes from the late Latin pioneers Tito Rodriguez and Tito Puente. The two were rivals on the bandstand of the Palladium, the epicenter of the 1950s mambo craze.
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Before there was Superman, other comics roamed the funny pages. The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics is an anthology of these forgotten gems, lovingly selected by famed comic artist Art Spiegelman and his wife, Francoise Mouly.
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A re-mastered, newly released back catalog of six albums by the Brit-punk band The Subhumans will remind you why people were knocked out by punk in the 1980s.
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Critic Milo Miles reviews The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics. It's Dennis Kitchen and Paul Buhle's illustrated biography of influential artist and writer Harvey Kurtzman, the inventor of MAD Magazine.
