Felix Contreras
Felix Contreras is co-creator and host of Alt.Latino, NPR's pioneering program about Latin Alternative music and Latino culture. It features music as well as interviews with many of the most well-known Latinx musicians, actors, filmmakers, and writers. He has hosted and produced Alt.Latino episodes from Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and throughout the U.S. since the show started in 2010.
Previously, Contreras was a reporter and producer NPR's Arts Desk and, among other stories and projects, covered a series reported from Mexico on the musical movement called Latin Alternative; helped produce NPR's award-winning series 50 Great Voices; and reported a series of stories on the financial challenges aging jazz musicians face.
Contreras is a recovering television journalist who has worked for both NBC and Univision in Miami and California. He's a part-time musician who plays Afro-Cuban percussion with various jazz and Latin bands in the Washington, DC, area. He is also NPR Music's resident Deadhead.
-
A member of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras, Terry also enjoyed a long freelance career which included jazz education and a featured slot in NBC's Tonight Show band. He was 94.
-
The beloved musician had a slight frame, an almost feminine voice and a late revival after a promising start and years of neglect.
-
Though you may not know him by name, you certainly know his work: Mitchell produced a string of hits by Al Green in the early to mid-1970s.
-
Americans are increasingly using hand-held devices to access the Internet and for texting, sending e-mails, playing music and instant messaging. A large number of those hyperusers are young Latinos and blacks, who crave the convenience of staying connected wherever they go.
-
Ken Burns has drawn criticism in the past for omissions to his PBS series on baseball and jazz. Now the documentary filmmaker is drawing fire for leaving Hispanics and Native Americans out of his 14-hour World War II story.
-
Lorraine Gordon is the keeper of New York's historic Village Vanguard. Recently, Gordon published a set of memoirs, the recollections of a woman who was married to two famous men of jazz.
-
The nation's largest Spanish-language media company has been sold. A consortium of investors has agreed to pay about $13 billion to acquire the company, which reaches into the homes of about 98 percent of Spanish-speaking households in the United States.
-
Bids are expected to top $11 billion in the sale of Univision, the dominant Spanish language media outlet in the United States. But the network's next owners will face big challenges. There is more competition than ever from newer Spanish media. To keep its dominance, Univision seeks to attract and keep, younger, bilingual Latinos.
-
Alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, who mastered Charlie Parker's style of bebop and went on to become an early advocate of the free jazz movement of the 1960s, has died. McLean's career spanned more than five decades.
-
Last year no fewer than eight bands from Monterrey, Mexico, were invited to play at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. Some have called Monterrey the Seattle of Latin Alternative music, in reference to Seattle's role in the early 1990s as the incubator of grunge rock.