Jazz has long operated with something like an open-door policy, absorbing influences from classical, folk, rock, and beyond. Turkish-American composer Mehmet Ali Sanlikol extends that tradition in a particularly personal way on The Electric Oud Man Speaks and You Listen…, a five-track project that brings Turkish makam, jazz improvisation, and rock energy into a shared musical language.
Sanlıkol’s musical background reflects that synthesis. Raised in Istanbul by a classical pianist mother, he grew up surrounded by Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin before discovering jazz — a turning point that led him to study the music more deeply and eventually attend Berklee College of Music. Boston is now his home…
Category: world
L8 Antique have been winning converts on the Johannesburg circuit since the mid-2000s.
Usually performing with just four people on stage, the group’s rhythm section wove such tight polyrhythms that it gave the feel of a larger ensemble. This sound blended well with the soulful approach of former lead singer Phumla Siyobi, who was an iconic presence. With the emergence of a new lead vocalist, Itumeleng ‘Manyanga’ Mothomoholo, the band has reorientated itself. Manyanga’s style is elemental, drawing from Balobedu cosmology, with lyrics subsumed by melodies and chants that sound channelled. While the group’s original cross-rhythms remain, in this, the group’s debut, they sit within a more dramatic sound, featuring brass choruses,…
Is there more than mere semantics to the difference between remodeled and remixed? A remix takes the components of an original track, breaks them down and puts them back in a different order. A remodel may also include new components. AGATE is a set of “material refined through repeated performance.” The more Meitei performed pieces from his Kofū trilogy, the more he refined their sound, a process akin to the formation of agate. Three pieces survive the transition from Kofū; one crosses over from Kofū II; and two are remodeled from Kofū III, only six out of thirty-four tracks, plus a new piece that launches the set. The final product extends the discussion on whether there is ever a definitive version of a track; for Meitei, the music evolves with the performer.
Alan Bishop’s latest album seems at first like a showcase of his music at its most rocking. But it’s also steeped in psych, folk, and desert blues, making good on Sun City Girls’ exploratory rep.
The long career of Arizona’s trio Sun City Girls went in every direction you could imagine, and many you probably couldn’t. Starting with a blast of hardcore-adjacent DIY cassettes, the band expanded its palette quickly, planting big, muddy footprints all over tons of styles and genres, some inherited and some invented. Mixing cross-cultural influences, sharp instrumental chops, and pranksterish jokes, Sun City Girls’ music (and insanely prolific release schedule) could make you wonder not only how they did it, but what exactly “it” was—and whether even they knew.
Five years ago, Michael Cavanagh, long-time percussion expert for psych-rock powerhouse King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, made his solo debut under the CAVS moniker with a self-titled effort.
The ten-song drums-only effort was an exercise in the drummer’s ability to capture a listener’s attention with exclusively drum patterns, resulting in a groovy, atmospheric effort that ultimately didn’t catapult CAVS into the solo spotlight like similar artists of his ilk. The difficult transition from band member to lone musician is a bumpy, often misdirected endeavor that rarely seems to go well for the artist who dares undertake it. Still, in traditional Lizard Wizard fashion, Cavanagh wasn’t discouraged with the difficulties of his debut, but inspired.
Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, is U.S. Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo’s debut for Smithsonian Folkways. In the album’s liner booklet, she relates her initial inspiration for assembling music with poetry: Her mother sitting at the kitchen table writing songs on an Underwood typewriter. Her mom was “inspired by the poetry she heard in the two-room schoolhouse that she attended in rural Arkansas and the music she heard in Tulsa dance halls and on the radio.” She is this album’s Muse; Harjo offers tribute in a version of her mother’s song “My Guy,” that was discovered by Harjo’s sister. This recording was produced and arranged by bassist/ vocalist Esperanza Spalding. Harjo’s saxophones and flutes, are also accompanied by guitarist…
Right now, this dour world needs a heavy “feel good” dose of Angélique Kidjo’s infectious joy, her get-up-and-dance attitude, and her ability to bridge cultures. The Benin (West Africa) artist that the former Newport Jazz Festival Artistic Director, Christian McBride, described as an entertainer tantamount to James Brown and Prince, gives it her all on this double album, HOPE!!
This is an album loaded with high-profile guests making a big statement, and it doesn’t matter that some songs are not sung in English. Genre is as fluid as a Kidjo performance. AfroBeat, Afro-pop, and highlife meet American R&B and jazz like congenial, like-minded strangers shaking hands or sharing a warm embrace.
Few, if any, can bring the unbridled joy that…
Emerging from Cairo’s experimental underground, Mi3raj is a duo comprising poet/vocalist Mohamed Tarek Moussa and producer/muti-instrumentalist Abdelrahman Shaat. Their hypnotically immersive album, Callings of the Owed, centres on six poems written in contemporary Arabic by Moussa, which ventriloquise the thoughts of characters drawn from Cairo’s fringes.
‘I write to the locusts / whistle into bare air,’ claims one. ‘Pluck the fog from my joints’, pleads another. ‘At my naming feast / widows intoxicated me,’ another confides. The texts are rich and full of mystery, brought to life by Moussa’s dramatic delivery, using multiple overdubs to suggest a Babel of voices: at once pleading, declamatory and ritualistic. Shaat’s accompanying…
Active as a DJ since 2015, Colombian-raised, Mexican-based DJ Rosa Pistola has big credits to her name — performances at MoMA PS1, Glastonbury, Sonar, and Primavera Sound, among others, along with credits as an executive producer for music documentaries for NTS and Resident Advisor. A key figure in bringing the rhythms of Latin America’s underground to global stages, she has yet to make a bad record.
Perhaps aided by her background in experimental and noise music, Rosa Pistola often pushes the boundaries of club music, incorporating niche genres and fostering collaborations with underground musicians, resulting in fantastic hybrids like the reggaeton-meets-Mobb-Deep Tributo a la Mulata, the cumbia…
Gamelan has long been a fascination for the headier end of the electronic world, whether it’s Plaid asking a 26-person Balinese ensemble to open for them at Le Poisson Rouge, Aphex Twin emulating the genre in his more acoustic experiments, or Björk using it as a template to create her own customized instruments. The two forms make a surprisingly logical pair: Both dance music and the ancient Indonesian style are based around repetition, exploring the gradually evolving frictions in rhythm and melody that can suck the listener into a state of hypnosis. It’s not that it’s a brand new concept for the Russian producer Hoavi to incorporate gamelan into his music, as he does on his latest album; rather, it’s the way he subsumes the style into his very logic that feels…
Singer-songwriter Dorea cites the sea as inspiration for his sophomore release O Que Mais Você Quer Saber De Mim. More specifically, he draws on his experience as a lifelong resident of Salvador, on Brazil’s Atlantic coast.
It’s a place he loves, one that has clearly shaped not only his thoughts but the forms in which he expresses them. That’s a long way of saying that Dorea here sounds like the sea: alternately gentle and rough, always moving, and unpredictable. At the same time, there’s a true intimacy to this album. The ocean may be vast, but what we’re seeing is specifically Dorea’s view of it, and it’s the details he offers that are truly precious.
Dorea frames his album with a question: “What more do you want to know about me?”
After decades spent shaping the sound of southern Madagascar, Damily returns with Fanjiry, his most intimate and focused record to date. Recorded and mixed in just three days at Studio Black Box with analog sound engineer Peter Deimel, Fanjiry reduces tsapiky to its essence: a single guitar and a single heartbeat.
…At a time when truth and authenticity in music seem more elusive than ever, this album feels like a gift. Long considered a central figure in southwest Madagascar’s tsapiky tradition, Damily here retreats from the hurtling speed and intoxicating trance of the sound he helped create – and popularise both within the Indian Ocean island and beyond – and, like a sonic alchemist, distils it into something that offers solace to all within earshot.
South Africa’s BCUC – Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness – have been channeling the spirit of Soweto for over twenty years. Indigenous funk, hip-hop consciousness, and punk rock energy fused into something utterly original and deeply rooted. The road is never easy is BCUC’s fifth album and their debut on Outhere Records. The album was largely recorded in Munich, Germany during tour breaks over two sessions, each three days long. It took place in a small studio located in a German WW II bunker converted into rehearsal spaces. The songs were recorded in one take altogether in one room, with only a few overdubs added, mainly backing vocals, by BCUC at Fourways studio in Johannesburg.
…Its ten new songs are rooted in the unique…
In parts of Southern Italy, the separation between music and everyday life has only grown, as traditions have been flattened and “folklorized” into postcard versions of themselves. On their self-titled debut, Palermo collective Lero Lero push against that logic. Drawing from 20th-century Sicilian sound archives, they treat this material not as something to safeguard, but something to work through, asking what it means to inherit a tradition that has been interrupted or distorted.
Alessio Bondì, Donato Di Trapani, and Fabio Rizzo pull from agropastoral songs, laments, lullabies, and canti di sdegno, holding onto their emotional weight while driving them into new terrain. Though their process starts at the source — learning the songs, the shapes of the melodies,…
Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, the eight-piece collective Fauna offer up a colourful tapestry of sounds in which Eastern instruments and styles interweave with psychedelic guitars, atmospheric effects and electronic beats. Swedish compatriots Goat are an obvious point of reference, though Fauna’s focus is more firmly rooted in the dancefloor. The band are at their best when they slowly build up a blend of musical layers.
‘En Munfull Sand’ begins with tribal drums and circling Anatolian rock guitar riffs before ritualistic flutes, darbukas and chanted incantations create a deep, trance-like groove. ‘Bland Träden’ opens with swirling vocal atmospherics before deep rumbling basslines and tabla beats underpin a slowly unfurling blend of electronic…
Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh established himself not only as a true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh but one of the groundbreaking voices in contemporary Iranian music.
After the critically acclaimed releases Scattered Memories (his international debut, released on Karlrecords in 2019), I May Never See You Again (2021) and last year’s Temple of Hope, his new album Rituals of the Last Dawn unfolds as a deeply meditative dialogue between tradition, experimentation, and the present moment. The Iranian composer and kamancheh virtuoso — widely recognised for bridging classical Persian heritage with avant-garde sound — crafts…
Montreal-based Chadian producer, singer and guitarist Caleb Rimtobaye, aka Afrotronix, fuses ancestral African tradition with future-facing electronics. KÖD expands his exploration of the sounds of his homeland – weaving tama and other hand percussion, sampled Chadian call-and-response singing, and more, into his ear-grabbing electronic compositions. The album balances the familiar, from desert blues guitar licks to Sahelian polyrhythms, with outlandish and experimental programmed elements.
Opener ‘Incertitude’ kicks things off in fine fashion with treated vocal samples, hand percussion and squelchy synth refrains. The addition of a clutch of guest vocalists mixes things up and adds even more colour to proceedings.
The excellent quintet WÖR utilises violin, bagpipes, accordion, guitar and saxophones to reimagine 18th-century tunes from the Flanders region of Belgium. Swedish women’s self-styled ‘Folk’appella’ quartet Kongero honour the folk traditions of their home region, Jämtland, in northern Sweden, in a similar manner.
Here, these two ensembles combine for a tantalising project. The sonic landscapes on display are beautifully produced and virtuosically played. ‘Var är du?’ rolls with bucolic wonder, the instruments of WÖR blending perfectly with the voices of Kongero. ‘Schoon Lief’ is a wistful, soft and gently evolving number evocative of winter mists and bright, clear skies, while ‘Ridder & Jungfrun’ presents a drifting…
Less than a year after her luscious solo debut, Pacífico Maravilla, Nidia Góngora returns, this time as the frontwoman of Nuevos Ríos. Alongside her are members of her longtime group, Canalón de Timbiquí, and Toulouse-based Reco Reco, an ensemble that focuses on plugged-in renditions of South American styles. Together, the collective perform lively, electrified versions of music from Góngora and Canalón de Timbiquí’s finely honed repertoire, continuing to bear witness to the traditions and lifeways of the Pacific coast of Colombia for audiences worldwide.
Nuevos Ríos’ self-titled debut is nothing short of astonishing, a clear continuation of the work Góngora and her compatriots have long been doing, and yet something that feels wholly new.
From joyful dancefloor productions to funky Afro-pop, reggae and gorgeously melancholic numbers, David Walters’ new album is an expansive affair. With a gang of guest producers including Captain Planet, Blundetto and Art of Tones onboard, the Franco-Caribbean multi-instrumentalist continues along the vein of his 2023 Soul Tropical album: a maximalist channeling of eclectic Afro-Caribbean themes, so brightly coloured that it often masks the personal burdens carried in his lyrics.
Always a great collaborator, Walters is joined by Fatoumata Diawara, Keziah Jones and Philo, who add their wonderful vocal talents to standout songs. However, the soul of the record remains Walters’ clear voice and guitar, the full-bodied production never obscuring how…