One of the planet’s leading producers of world music CDs, Putumayo, is hosting a massive concert in New York City’s Central Park in a couple of weeks. Thanks to editor Tim Leffel for this link to Putumayo’s FREE concert, to celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary, being held in Central Park, July 27th from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

You can’t beat it. Featuring the Taj Mahal Trio (on Putumayo’s American Blues CD), the Skatalites (Jamaican, featured on The Caribbean CD), and Los Pinguos (an Argentinian band that showed up on Putumayo’s Latin Baila! CD), the concert promises to be one hopping, stomping, dancing, gorgeous frenzy of a world music celebration.

Putumayo CDs take up a good portion of my music shelves — since I can’t keep up with emerging and classic world music all on my own, I rely on Putumayo to introduce me to some of the best music from around the world. Hard to believe they’ve been around for half my life already, makes me feel old.

In honor of its 15th anniversary, the company is also releasing new CDs of African music: African Party, and African Dreamland for kids. Worth getting out my dancing ankle bangles for!

There’s a great round-up of travel stories plus book and music reviews in the latest edition of Perceptive Travel Magazine.

Rory MacLean writes about Sun–bathing with Ghosts in Cassadaga. Cassadaga is located in central Florida and while it doesn’t really sound like my kinda place, it’s fun reading about anyway.

Dave Lowe is one a different spiritual trail in Death’s Prediction and Disaster, By Way of Dharmsala.

On a lighter note, Tim Leffel wanders Western Canada Through the Eyes of a Child,  David Lee Drotar checks out Dial–a–Bird, and Bruce Northam explores the Boomerang Hieroglyphics on the Nile.

Plus a great collection of travel book and music reviews…

And don’t forget to enter the newest giveaway as well. This time you have the chance to win one of TEN Perceptive Travel Coolmax moisture wicking t-shirts courtesy of the fine folks at CoolClothingUSA.com. Five will be given away to newsletter subscribers and five to people who are just joining us. If you’re in the latter camp, send the e-mail confirmation of your sign-up (as in a fake address will do you no good) and your mailing address to remarkable [at] perceptivetravel.com. See the box at the top right of this page to sign up. We’ll pick five at random by the end of July.

Happy reading this Independence Day weekend…

If you’ve got a bit of time on your hands,  grab a coffee and click on the latest Perceptive Travel zine.

This month’s lineup includes…

Features:

Laurie Gough puts on her hiking books while trying to separate the divine from the delusional in “Sedona: Is the Whole Town Built on a Hoax?”

Edward Readicker–Henderson, on a whirlwind journey through Africa, looks at “How the Last White Rhino in Zambia Wins at Strip Passport”

Amy Rosen takes a trip to Wales and forages for food in “Don’t Eat Low–lying Berries, and Other Lessons Learned in the Wales Countryside”

Rob Sangster recounts his experiences of traveling to the remote Indian town of Leh in “Members of the Tribe”

Michael Buckley addressed the current Olympic torch controversy in “Olympic Fire and Brimstone”

Music and Book Reviews:

Tim Leffel has put to together a great selection of music and book reviews for you listening and reading plesure.

If you’re a world music devotee, there’s one radio program you should listen to religiously: Public Radio International’s Afropop Worldwide. African music, African culture, and the musical influences of African diaspora — there is no greater world music authority than Afropop and its host, Cameroon-born Georges Collinet. And its website is a treasure trove of an international music archive.

Afropop Worldwide’s most recent program featured the haunting music of the nomadic Fulani people, who can be found from Senegal to Guinea. Although the show plays on my local station at a time I’m not usually conscious, the first few minutes of flute music this week kept me from switching off the radio. The traditional flute, which looks like a cross between a Western concert flute and the wooden Native American instrument, emits a sound like a young man singing over the wail of the wind.

The program, inspired by an interview with Senegalese musician Baaba Maal, digs to the depths of what truly inspired music sounds like: the heart of wandering nomads, singing of love and loss and reminders that normal family life exists while you’re out with nothing but the earth, sky, and a bunch of cows.

For a wider reach, the Afropop Worldwide site is also currently providing links to artists featured at GlobalFest 2008, one of the world’s largest marathon one-day world-music events.

Over the holidays I was given a mini mothering vacation in the form of my father and his wife, who swept in to take my four-month-old every morning and entertain him for the day. We should all be so lucky to have helpful relatives. Since they live in Moscow, though, the opportunity won’t come often.

While watching my father’s wife chatter constantly to my son in Russian gave me a renewed determination to bring my children up bi-lingual (or tri-, if my husband sticks with speaking German to them), it also left me in a pretty tight spot when they took off to finish New Year’s in Montana.

My son, once he was exposed to the melodious, high-pitched, fast-flowing language, now only responds to Russian. I don’t speak a whole lot of Russian, not the kind you need to chatter to a baby. So imagine my frustration when I discovered this last week that the only way to bring that certain sunshine-smile to my son’s face is to recite “Humpty Dumpty” in Russian. Repeatedly. When I’m done he gives me this look like a cat watching the toilet flush. Do it again. I must have recited it a hundred times this week. It’s the only Russian nursery rhyme I know.

Today, in desperation for something different to recite (reading Dostoevsky to him doesn’t do the trick), I Googled ‘russian children’s poems’ and came up with a pretty neat Web site called Mama Lisa’s World. I went directly to the Russian children’s songs page, thinking this was just a Russian culture site, but it’s something far more interesting. Following the link to Mama Lisa’s World Blog uncovers a site that focuses not just on languages and cultures, but more particularly on children’s songs and traditions worldwide. To my delight, she has links to children’s books in multiple languages, nursery rhymes translated into more languages than I’d care to try out (and that’s saying something), folk songs, and lullabies. It’s a treasure trove for people interested in bringing their children up with multicultural awareness and exposure to languages, especially if you can’t afford to take them to every country on earth. Not only does she post lyrics to nursery rhymes and lullabies in several languages, many of them also have downloadable sheet music and MP3 files so you can hear what the heck all those funny letters are meant to sound like.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether my boy’s current favorite lullaby, sung by a mother envisioning her baby son’s harrowing future as a Cossack soldier, is really the cultural exposure I was looking for.