Kadialy Kouyate is a superb kora player from Kolda in south Senegal. Now based in the UK, he’s involved in numerous projects, including releasing solo music, such as Toña, meaning ‘Truth’, his ninth album.
…The opening track, ‘Kana Cumbo’ (Don’t Cry), based on a lullaby, begins with a surprise. One expects to hear Kouyate’s kora first, but it begins with the deep sound of a plucked double bass. Then, Kouyate’s instrument arrives, as well as his vocals, and together with the double bass they create a lovely track. There’s an ebullience throughout and an enjoyable range of musical guests, including Josh Middleton on accordion, Al MacSween on keyboard and Mamadou Sarr on percussion. ‘Kanou Foro ka Di’…
Category: world
Singer and kora player Jali Fily Cissokho comes from a long line of West African Mandinka griots – Seckou Keita is a nephew – and has lived in the UK since the noughties.
Kunung Tilo is his sixth release, and one that sees him take a break from his larger, more contemporary Coute Diomboulo group to create a striking solo set.
The focus is upon Fily Cissokho’s voice and kora. Its 11 often extended pieces are mellifluous in the extreme, opening with the title-track, a flourish of notes scattering like blossom from the start of the song through to its conclusion.
‘Homage’ was written for the late kora maestro Toumani Diabaté, a tribute played out through the harmony of strings and voice, with…
Kuntari – multi-instrumentalist Tesla Manaf and percussionist Rio Abror – hail from West Java, Indonesia, and they call their distinctive, eclectic but hard to categorize music “primal-core” – so let’s just call it that. What is primal-core? Its most obvious characteristics are feverish percussion and the haunting, almost abstract howling sounds made by a folk instrument called a hulusi, which is made from a gourd and bamboo pipes. On the page, it doesn’t seem as if that would be especially musical, but although it’s rarely melodic, the sound that Kuntari makes is extremely flexible, and there’s something deeply affecting and human about it, too. It feels genuinely timeless, sometimes related to various forms of modern popular music, sometimes almost primordially…
Meet Hekate, a vocal trio that have already cast a spell over audiences with their chilling and thrilling brew of the powers of darkness mixed with traditional Norwegian dance tunes and songs. At the heart of their music is slåttetralling, a vocal-improvisation tradition perfect for this cauldron of Norwegian tunes infused with spine-tingling sounds from the dark edges.
It’s Hekate’s solid grounding in traditions based on foot-tapping dances such as springar and springleik, fiddle tunes and fragments of ancient psalms, together with their mesmerising vocal qualities, that makes the trio’s vocal improvisations so convincing. They lure us on to an other-worldly dancefloor powered by Hekate (the goddess) herself as she guards the moon…
Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo and Venezuela’s Rawayana, two award-winning Latin pop power- houses, have combined forces in ASTROPICAL. What began as a collaboration on a single expanded to become a full-length eponymous album. ASTROPICAL contains two members of each: Bomba’s Li Saumet (vocals) and José Castillo (keys), and Rawayana’s Beto Montenegro (vocals, guitar, bass) and Andre “Fofo” Story (drums). Saumet called Montenegro to collaborate on a single, and he agreed. After he sent her the demo for the first single, “Me Pasa (Piscis),” she finished it in six hours. They booked a small Miami studio and cut three more songs. Impressed, Montenegro traveled to Saumet’s house in Santa Marta, where they wrote the remainder of the album…
Pantsula dancing and kwaito go hand in hand. Both emerged from the townships of Johannesburg, and both were forces of joy and genius during desperate times. When kwaito landed on the global main stage around the turn of the millennium, star acts like TKZee, featured pantsula dancers in their hit music videos like the brilliantly upbeat “Dlala Mapantsula.”
Mahlubi “Shadow” Radebe and Zwelakhe “Malemon” Mtshali were two dancers from the township of Tembisa, in northeastern Johannesburg, who decided to transition from the shuffling and low movements of pantsula to singing over kwaito’s laidback hip-hop-meets-house swagger. But to do that, they would need to upgrade from their beat-up cassette player to an actual,…
At first glance, it may have seemed odd when dub-techno legend and Basic Channel co-founder Mark Ernestus first trekked to Senegal to bury himself in the country’s regional sounds. For one thing, the optics were sketchy: Here was a white German musician seeking ways to absorb West African traditions into his own music.
Equally unclear was what an artist steeped in solid-state technology could do with the earthy, unquantized rhythms of mbalax music. The answer was Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, an extension of the mbalax group Jeri-Jeri, and a project that showcased the skills of the local players more than it highlighted Ernestus’ specialties as a producer. Their 2016 album Yermande was dubbed-out mbalax heaven,…
In a time of disembodied digital-only releases, luxuriously well-crafted albums like Catina DeLuna and Otmaro Ruiz’s Lado B Brazilian Project 2, with physical disk, album notes, lyric translations and evocative graphics, can really be the balm.
The project was born in 2015 with the release of Lado B Brazilian Project, which received a Grammy nomination in 2016. The idea was to interpret what we might call Great Brazilian Songbook — classics by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Chico Buarque, Dorival Caymmi, Ivan Lins, Ary Barroso and their ilk — but focusing mainly on B-sides rather than greatest-hits and giving them an infusion of LA jazz.
Raised in São Paulo, DeLuna was gigging as a solo pianist at age 16 and went on to become a busy jingle pianist and singer.
There’s something transcendental about this time-bending collaboration between Copenhagen-based composer Jan Kadereit and Balinese gamelan orchestra Salukat.
For those unfamiliar to gamelan music: it’s performed by groups of musicians on drums, xylophones, gongs and various other percussion instruments. It contains unique rhythmic and tonal qualities, which have long fascinated Western composers such as John Cage, and is strongly associated with religious ritual in several faiths across Indonesia. The rhythms and melodies here seem to shift tempo and energy like altering states of consciousness; sometimes busy and sudden, elsewhere slow and elongated.
Here’s Kadereit on the thinking behind Áshira:…
Ecuadorian singer Grecia Albán’s first UK release Nubes Selva, which loosely translates as ‘Cloud Jungle’, reinvents traditional Ecuadorian, and South American, musical modes.
Albán does that by, as she puts it, “honouring tradition by embracing change.” From a family of anthropologists based in Cotopaxi province, Albán’s voice rings out over a panoply of rhythms, beats and colourful ensemble flourishes. Some of the music builds using shifts in time signatures to create surprise and emphasis.
Key to the compelling result is Albán’s vaulting between Spanish and the indigenous Kichwa, which has evolved from the indigenous Quechua language. The set’s first single ‘Virgen y Volcán’ combines melodies and unusual…
Listening to Prefaces’s Acqua Marina is like attending an eclectic international film festival wearing a blindfold.
The second album by the Beirut-based trio doesn’t just feature evocative instrumentals, it’s overtly influenced by library music — the stock soundtrack recordings that were licensed to film and TV productions back in the day.
And while some of the styles that make their way into Prefaces’s mix are indigenous, Acqua Marina sources ideas from all over the globe. Stirred together, those ingredients become a summery cocktail perfect for a breezy beach hang. That seaside feel is underlined both by the album’s title and by the band’s quirky decision to name all the tracks after regional varieties of fish.
East of West, a world jazz trio based in Brisbane, Australia, has a new record, Pastorale, where they infuse each of the six tunes with pictorial vividness. Featured on piano here is Australian pianist Romano Crivici — also a contemporary classical violinist and leader of the Elektra String Quartet — who adds a gorgeous touch to the jazz-meets-Balkan/Mediterranean influences of the trio, led by Bosnian-born bassist and main composer Goran Gajić. Oud player Philip Griffin and percussionist Malindi Morris complete the lineup.
“Where Is Your Accent From” sets an inviting tone, opening with an oud introductory section before an arpeggiated piano riff and ‘singing’ bass lines substantiate the whole through colorful layers. Crivici digresses, subtly accompanied…
A beautifully curated collection of music, Pōpoloheno: Songs of Resilience & Joy doubles as a powerful moment of acknowledgement of a largely unknown part of African and Hawaiian history. The album addresses the presence and history of African people in Hawaii via traditional mele inoa (name songs), songs of love, songs of heritage and, perhaps most importantly, songs of tribute when it comes to the longevity of the African experience. Pōpoloheno, named after the pōpolo (a black-coloured berry found in Polynesia; also used as a pejorative term against people of African descent), is a compilation of songs and stories that reclaim the term, highlighting the vibrancy and legacy of this community.
Notable creative visionary Māhealani Uchiyama…
Over the past two years, Kaique Vieira, AKA DJ K, has been crafting a new sound of São Paolo. Influenced by local favela street parties, the 24-year-old producer takes the distorted bass, Afro-Brazilian rhythms and vocal melodies of baile funk – a dance genre that originated in Brazil in the 80s – and adds a darker palette of reverb-laden vocal lines, rave sirens and buzzing synths to create a style he calls bruxaria (witchcraft). Vieira’s 2023 debut Pânico no Submundo was a 15-track introduction, harnessing the sound of blown-out speaker cones. Radio Libertadora! moves into even bolder and louder territory, developing his nascent genre into a source of dancefloor chaos.
Opening with a sample of a 1969 radio speech by the revolutionary Carlos Marighella, which…
A prominent custodian of traditional Solomon Islands culture, Natty Dolaiasi hails from the Adegege people of Lau, on the island of Malaita.
His personal mission is to maintain the ancient chants, stories, poems and rhythms of his ancestors, while also making them relevant to a wider world.
Dolaiasi has represented the Solomon Islands internationally for many years; back in 1995 he was involved with the groundbreaking project Siva Pacifica, and he has appeared at the Pacific Arts Festival, WOMADelaide, the Melanesian Arts Festival and the 2023 Pacific Games ceremonies.
On his debut album, the title-track (which translates as ‘Journey’) chronicles the ancestral seafaring migrations of his forefathers across…
This is the end — the final recording from arguably the greatest of genre-busting bands. A celebration, not only of Shakti‘s 50th anniversary tour in 2023 but of an entire career — one that began in 1973, when John McLaughlin and Ustad Zakir Hussain first jammed in New York’s Greenwich Village. By embracing Indian Carnatic and Hindustani traditions — fused with McLaughlin’s jazz DNA — Shakti broke down musical boundaries, and by extension, cultural and social boundaries as well.
Cherry-picked from multiple shows, these six tracks are also a tribute to tabla maestro Hussain, who passed away in December 2024. Shakti had survived loss before, when ‘Mandolin’ U. Shrinivas died prematurely in 2014, but Hussain and McLaughlin were the heart and soul…
Close your eyes. Imagine the dawning of the earth: the sun rising slowly through a soft mist, spreading warmth, light and hope across an undulating landscape of jagged mountains, lush foliage, free-flowing rivers… Then conjure a soundtrack. The morning ragas of Indian classical music, perhaps. Or indeed, Nilam, the second album by celebrated New York City-born, South India-raised singer, experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist ganavya, the owner of a voice so profound, so intimate and spiritual, that it seems double as a reminder of why we are here.
Technically speaking (although to do so is to detract from the beauty), ganavya’s melodic manoeuvres are to be marvelled at. The inclusion of the ancient, formerly extinct Tamil harp,…
…Samantha e Adrian is more than just an album — it is the story of a profound artistic connection between Brazilian actress/singer Samantha Schmütz and American composer Adrian Younge.
This record is the intersection where Rio and Los Angeles merge into a lush, cinematic, and deeply personal experience created by two musical soulmates.
Produced and recorded at Younge’s Linear Labs, an all-analog studio, Samantha & Adrian is a grand, orchestral, and soulful record. It’s a bridge between Brazil’s MPB tradition and the elegance of 1970s LA soul. With sweeping string arrangements, rich harmonies, and undeniable grooves, the album conjures the feeling of a lost classic—music that takes the listener back to a ’70s…
In his sixth and latest album New African Orleans, released by ENJA and Yellow Bird, bass guitarist and composer Alune Wade explores the multiple junctions between his native West African rhythms, the Afrobeat and juju rhythms from Lagos and the brass band repertoire immortalized in New Orleans. “I’m exploring a world that goes from my roots to the lost branches on the other side of the Atlantic,” explains the musician from Senegal.
…The 11 numbers, both originals and standards such as Herbie Hancock’s ‘Watermelon Man’, Fela Kuti’s ‘Water No Get Enemy’ (taken at a simmering slower pace), Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child’ and Dr. John’s ‘Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya’ exploit the talents of guests like New Orleans drummer Herlin Riley, Cuban percussionist Pedrito Martinez…
Born in Istanbul, Turkish ud virtuoso Baha Yetkin has cultivated a busy career as a performer and composer over the course of 25 years, with London eventually becoming his adopted home. Yetkin’s dedication to his instrument has also led to his reputation as an educator, with countless students, popular workshops and a plethora of educational content shared on his social media.
Recorded in single unedited takes, The Makam: Oud presents six taksim improvisations exploring different makam (modes): Hüseyni, Nihavend, Hüzzam, Kürdilihicazkâr, Hicaz and Kürdi. Each performance beautifully extrapolates the character of its respective makam, while also showcasing Yetkin’s flawless phrasing and technical versatility. Yetkin also uses three uds in…