November 11, 2008

MoJo Audio: Ozomatli

Ozomatli band member Ulises Bella talks about what it’s like to be an international cultural ambassador for the US.

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To hear the audio podcast of MoJo‘s interview with Ulises Bella, click below:

 

This October, the US State Department sent Ozomatli, the Los Angeles-based, 9-piece Latin band, on a tour of South Africa and Madagascar as “cultural ambassadors.”

The two-time Grammy Award-winning band has opened for Carlos Santana, played on the Late Night With Conan O’Brien show, been featured on Austin City Limits, and performed at Coachella. The band hosts a music show on 98.7 FM in Los Angeles.

In 2007, the State Department sent Ozomatli to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Nepal, and Tunisia. A performance in Nepal drew a reported 12,000 people. On their recent tour of South Africa and Madagascar, they performed live shows, hosted music workshops for local youth, and visited AIDS clinics and orphanages.

Before their trip, Mother Jones spoke with Ozomatli band member Ulises Bella, who plays saxophone, the requinto jarocho, keyboard, and melodica, in addition to providing background vocals for the band. Bella has been a member since the band formed in 1995.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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