mr-damon/music

""Streets of Lhasa" lifts us to the high plateau of Tibet where anonymous street balladeers sell folk songs for a living and ghostly voices drift in an ambience of time forgotten. Children, birds, trains, prayers and a traditional temple activity called "bian jing" (where monks discourse about scripture and punctuate their points by clapping loudly) provide the backdrop for this disc with the folk music of the street taking center stage."

Authorities say Mitch Mitchell, drummer for the legendary Jimi Hendrix Experience of the 1960s, has been found dead in his Portland hotel room.

Erin Patrick, a deputy medical examiner in Multnomah County, says Mitchell was found dead a little after 3 a.m. today in his room at the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland.

She says Mitchell apparently died of natural causes at 62. An autopsy is planned.

Mitchell was touring with the Experience Hendrix Tour, which performed Friday at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland. It was the last stop on the West Coast portion of the tour.

Though gamelan music is still played throughout Indonesia - its collaborative rhythms can be heard at most traditional ceremonies and serenely wafting out of Bali's meeting houses - its popularity is dwindling among the next generation of Indonesians, who are more easily lured by Western rock.

Sukarna, who like many Indonesians uses just one name, is 82 years old and worried for decades that his children, who do not share his passion for gamelan, might abandon the family business.

Sukarna's youngest son, Krisna Hidayat, who is 28 and has a business degree, has, after some resistance, taken over as the workshop manager. But he says his favorite band is the American hard rock spectacle Guns N' Roses.

"My father still listens to gamelan at home," he said. "I prefer rock 'n' roll."

Similar stories can be heard from the handful of remaining gamelan instrument-makers across Indonesia. Joan Suyenaga, an American who came to Java to indulge her fascination with its traditional performing arts and married a gamelan musician and instrument maker, said she, too, had noticed a decreasing interest in the art form locally.

"Our children play in rock bands and are immersed in emo, ska, pop and Western classical music," she said. "There definitely are a few desperate attempts to preserve the gamelan tradition here in Java, but not nearly as much as there could be."

A wave of anger and shock has followed the killing this week of reggae music legend Lucky Dube by car hijackers, with politicians from across the spectrum calling for a renewed effort in South Africa to reduce one of the world's highest murder rates.

Killings for a cellphone, a few dollars or old household goods barely rate headlines, but the shooting Thursday night of Dube, 43, one of Africa's most renowned musicians, in front of his teenage son and daughter horrified South Africans from President Thabo Mbeki down.

South African police set up a task force Friday to track down the three suspects who confronted Dube as he dropped off his son and daughter at home Thursday night.

Dube recorded more than 20 albums over the past 25 years and toured extensively. Much of his work had political or social messages, including strong anti-apartheid themes. His last album, released in 2005, was named "Respect" and included songs with such titles as "Political Games," "Changing World " and "Celebrate Life."

T. I. is one of the last rap stars standing, a dominant figure at a time when record sales are falling fast and hip-hop sales are falling faster. (Last year no hip-hop album, not even "King," was among the 10 top-selling CDs.) And like just about every popular rapper since the 1980s, he is both a sign of the times and an anomaly. He is part of a wave of beat-savvy Southern rappers (many based in Atlanta) who have reimagined the genre over the last decade. But he's also an old-fashioned lyricist, obsessed with verbal density; Pharrell famously said, "He's like the down-South Jay-Z."

You might even say that T. I. has triumphed by turning Jay-Z's style inside out. Jay-Z knew how to hide sound in sense. His lyrics often sounded like plainspoken prose; it was only later that you noticed the hidden rhyme patterns and rhythms. By contrast, T. I. hides sense in sound. His lyrics often sound like singsong chants; it's only later that you notice the hidden intricacy of the words.

That approach was evident in "What You Know," a club-crushing hit from "King." While synthesizers sizzled, he used his raspy drawl to deliver a series of taunts and threats:

See all that attitude's
Unnecessary, dude.
You never carry tools.
Not even square -- he cube.

Listeners transfixed by his entertaining interjections ("O.K.?!") and exaggerated pronunciation might easily have overlooked the rigorous poetic construction. But that's a neat little quatrain: four lines, six syllables apiece, each building to an trisyllabic oblique rhyme. Somehow, T. I. delivers supertechnical raps without ever sounding as boring as that last sentence.