Tucked into the Caribbean Sea are the islands of Guadeloupe, Dominica, and Saint Lucia. Guadeloupe is an overseas department of France, while Dominica and Saint Lucia are independent nations. All three boast volcanic beaches, high mountain peaks, and lush tropical landscapes — coral reefs, palm trees, and sapphire blue waves make them instantly mesmerizing. The island’s cultural histories, shaped by the displacement of native Arawak peoples, centuries of colonial conflict between Spain, France, and Britain, and the enslavement of West Africans, continue to shape their musical output. Today, modern mixtapes (largely circulating on YouTube) pulse with intercontinental influences such as Angolan kuduro, Portugal’s batida, and trap, to name a few.
Category: world
Sikh founder Guru Nanak’s retinue included a Muslim rabab (Afghan lute) player. Inspired by this, Sangat makes a pitch for music as a force for coexistence, between religions and beyond.
Sonny Singh’s bright trumpet melodies combine with the earthy twang of Qais Essar’s rabab to lend their explorations of Islamic and Sikh musical traditions an indie-folk flavour.
‘Lal Meri Pat’s exaltation of a 12th-century Sufi mystic evokes Sufjan Stevens through its pure-toned brass.
With similar verve, ‘Khabaram Raseeda Imshab’ deploys neo-soul stylings in support of a 14th-century ghazal. There is a freshness and confidence in this fusion of musical and poetic traditions with modern musical modes.
…Tsapiky! is named for a musical style that’s been popular in recent decades in the Africa-facing southern corner of Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean. It’s the preferred soundtrack for extended celebrations that people there throw around transitional events.
If you’re getting married or buried, it’s common to have a band hoist some loudspeakers onto the roof of your truck and get the outdoor party rolling. Heard for the first time, it sounds a bit like Congolese soukous being played through a megaphone. It has that style’s open-ended dance grooves and sprightly melodies, but it’s decidedly lower budget. A typical tsapiky band will have a drum kit, a bassist laying down bulbous, intermittent pulses and an electric…
As opening statements go, you can’t get much more gloriously emphatic than ‘Diyanye Ko’ which kicks off the fourth album from California-based African psych-rockers Orchestra Gold.
The hypnotic Bambara vocals of Mariam Diakite soar dramatically, Erich Huffaker peels off cosmic guitar licks like a cross between Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen and Mali’s Lobi Traoré. The saxophones of Patrick Cress and Luis Andrade surge with an unquenchable funk and the rhythm section grooves like a steamy night in Bamako. There’s no let-up in the intensity on the other eight tracks, either, ranging from the trance-like rhythms of ‘Baye Ass N’Diaye’ and ‘Abarika Kanuna’ to the heavy psyched-up blues pounding of ‘Djama Ko’. Like Cheikh Lô, Diakite is…
Across the world, cassette tapes have often carried far more than music, serving as tools of defiance, memory, and belonging. In Somalia and Somaliland, songs recorded on battered tapes crossed seas and borders, keeping scattered communities connected through poetry and melody. In Palestine, revolutionary anthems slipped through checkpoints and broadcast the sound of resistance where radio could not reach. In Afghanistan, banned voices lived on in bootleg cassettes passed hand to hand, their melodies vehemently resisting the silence imposed upon them.
In Iran, too, the cassette has been used as both a weapon and a refuge: First used by Khomeini to spread his revolutionary sermons, it was reclaimed by Iranian pop artists fighting to…
If you’re worried that you’re a latecomer to the work of uncategorizable Chicago musician Ben LaMar Gay, take solace in the certainty that you’re not alone. Gay’s new album, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, supposedly draws from seven of his previous records, with curious names like Grapes, Benjamim e Edinho, and Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks. But when you start googling, not one of these albums surface. In this age of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, the cornetist, composer, and vocalist recorded seven albums in seven years but never let anyone outside of his inner circle hear them. Instead, he worked with jazz and experimental artists like Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, Nicole Mitchell, Jaimie Branch and Bitchin Bajas while…
Originally formed in 1983 as a duo, Australian band Not Drowning, Waving was created by classically-trained keyboardist-composer-producer David Bridie and guitarist John Phillips.
Quickly growing to a sextet, the group’s moody art-school ambience developed a niche national following, with their ’80s albums all receiving high praise. But after travelling to Papua New Guinea in 1989 and meeting PNG star George Telek, NDW changed direction, with 1990’s excellent collaboration Tabaran seeing them becoming part of the then-new genre of ‘World’ music, where the exciting live combination of NDW and Telek – along with percussion-driven PNG/Pacific musicians – proved extremely popular, gaining them many international listeners.
Traditional South Asian music blurs the lines between composition and improvisation. The Persian dastgah is a looser structure than ragas in the Hindustani or Carnatic lineage.
Where the Rain Is Stored, a new album from a quartet of Toronto-based musicians, is a natural step from those styles to an even freer, more contemporary form of improvisation.
The foursome consists of three members with ties to Iran and a fourth to India.
Vocalist Neda Mohamadpour is trained in the Persian classical style, and her improv stays largely inside those lines. The chordal instrument here is a setar (four-stringed lute), played by Mehdi Rostami. Isa Farah, on cello, alternates between melodic counterpoint and bass figures.
Egyptian-born oud player and composer Mustafa Said is one of the most illustrious names in Arabic music today. Born blind, he learned music through Braille. He’s led the Asil Ensemble since 2003, a fine band of traditional players on various sizes of oud, qanun zither, nai flute, tanbur, violin, viola, cello and various percussion. Said was awarded an Aga Khan Music Award in 2019.
This is his first album since then, although his fifth with the group. It opens with a short solo performance of sung Sufi poetry, written by Maymunah al-Asheqah, an 11th-century female poet who is said to have been able to walk on water. It’s followed by a substantial instrumental suite for the whole orchestra in ‘Maqam Segah’, gradually increasing in tempo and…
Egypt’s “official” popular music throughout much of the 20th Century was a complex form of art song steeped in tradition, well-loved by the middle and upper classes, and even accommodating to certain non-Arabic influences. It was highly structured by professional musicians working an established industry centered in the capitol, Cairo.
However, far from the bustling cosmopolitan center of Cairo, north and northwest, in towns like Tanta and Alexandria and extending across the Saharan Desert to the Libyan border, dozens of fully marginalized artists were developing a raw, hybrid shaabi/al-musiqa al-shabiya style of music, supported by smaller upstart, independent labels, including the short-lived but deeply resonant Bourini Records.
Bandonegro is a Polish tango quartet. Over the course of their 15-year career, they have developed a style that, inspired by the legacy of Astor Piazzolla, combines elements of jazz and classical music. This formula has already won over audiences in Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Switzerland and Japan.
This album, the group’s sixth, was recorded in Buenos Aires. The birthplace of tango, with its vibrant concert and dance hall scene, provided an unbeatable setting for its recording. Of the ten pieces included, nine were composed by double bassist Marcin Antkowiak.
Tanuevo (the title a play on the tango nuevo genre) features prominent musicians from the Argentine jazz circuit: guitarist Lucio Balduini…
It is now 16 years since the unique voice and performances of UK-based Sudanese-Italian singer Amira Kheir first emerged onto an international stage, and 14 since the release of her debut album View from Somewhere.
Seven years after album Mystic Dance, Kheir returns with a fourth album that celebrates everything vibrant and vital about Sudan. The lyrics on Black Diamonds – in Arabic, English and Italian – explore loss, yearning, the fragile sparkle of love, and offer a poignant, though unspoken, reflection on the ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Kheir’s own compositions frame carefully selected classic songs by Sudanese greats, plus a cover of Italian group Matia Bazar’s ‘Ti Sento’, rendered in a classy ’90s-style jazz-soul,…
Cruelty Bacchanal, the second release from guitarist Matt Hollenberg’s group Shardik, is a ferocious statement of intent. Years in the making and issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, the album presents a volatile and politically charged fusion of modern classical structure, metal intensity, and free jazz unpredictability.
Hollenberg’s compositions are marked by intricate rhythmic architecture and an uncompromising sonic vision, alternating between explosive virtuosity and dark, layered atmospheres.
Executed with surgical precision and blistering intensity, Hollenberg’s playing veers between soaring lyricism, dense harmonic structures and searing improvisation. The result is a tightly coiled set of compositions that challenge…
For more than 40 years, Kaabi Kouyaté’s career has spanned theatre, traditional Guinean music and Mandinka jazz. Now this extraordinary singer, who fuses griot tradition with contemporary music, has released this tribute to his father, the celebrated Sory Kandia Kouyaté (1933–1977). Kandia was known as ‘The Voice’ of independent Guinea and this project was prompted by the director of the award-winning documentary, La Trace de Kandia, in which Kaabi returned to Guinea to retrace his famous father’s footsteps.
For the album, Kaabi Kouyaté recruited a distinguished ensemble of musicians including Ballaké Sissoko (kora), Makan Badjé Tounkara (ngoni) and Lansine Kouyaté (balafon), as well as his father’s backing vocalist, Aminata Camara.
Camila Meza offers one of her most sonically creative and personal albums with 2025’s Portal. Her first album since 2019’s Ambar, Portal was recorded following the birth of Meza’s first child, an experience that informs many of her songs. Rather than mix covers alongside originals, here Meza has for the first time written every song, lending the production a deeply intimate, handcrafted quality. These are flowing songs that find the Chilean guitarist and vocalist singing in both Spanish and English. She is equally as fluid stylistically, and much of the album has a cross-pollinated sound, bringing together her adept fusion and post-bop jazz chops with her ear for sun-dappled Brazilian and Latin pop traditions. Joining her is a cadre of equally gifted…
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Jasdeep Singh Degun when he decided to put Raag Jogkauns on record: how to keep it on a single LP. In the Hindustani tradition, ragas can run two hours or more. The structure of a piece gives the performer immense amounts of freedom. Both vocalists and instrumentalists explore that freedom at length.
Degun, for all his respect for the tradition, is not your typical raga-playing sitarist. At age 34, perhaps the best young sitar player in Britain, he has written for orchestra and collaborated with a string quartet. This is his first proper Indian classical recording.
The clash of civilizations is audible. It starts with Degun’s most fundamental choice. Jogkauns is a fairly modern raga, dating back to…
…Lebanese-born singer and oud player Lamia Yared unveils her third album, From Minho to Euphrates, a profound musical journey that interlaces sacred and secular traditions from Iberia to Mesopotamia. Joined by Spanish multi-instrumentalist Efrén López and a distinguished ensemble of international musicians, Yared breathes new life into ancient repertoires that span languages, religions, and centuries.
To say that this album explores medieval religious music from around the Mediterranean undersells it. The record subverts our sense of time and place. Centuries-old hymns are arranged to sound both antique and innovative. The repertoire also explodes simplified assumptions about where certain religions should be rooted.
Philadephia-based drummer and arranger Tom Cohen uses groups of various sizes from trio to octet recorded over a ten-year span to tailor an elegant musical “love letter” to Brazil and its iconic dance music, the bossa nova, on Embraceable Brazil, an album whose charming melodies and vibrant rhythms represent the best that picturesque South American country has to offer.
Of course, Antonio Carlos Jobim is here, as would be true on any survey of Brazilian music, with “Brigas Nunca Mais,” “Look to the Sky” and the ageless “Girl from Ipanema,” the last sung by Barbara Mendes with support from one of Philadelphia’s jazz legends, tenor saxophonist Larry McKenna. Mendes also sings (quite well) on “Brigas Nunca Mais” and the album’s…
Forgotten and supposedly ‘lost’ albums rarely remain forgotten for long in the digital age, as they eventually find their way back into the present through some wormhole in the World Wide Web. Inzovu Y’imirindi by Bizimungu Dieudonne, a Rwandan civil servant with a passion for music, was discovered by musicologist Matthew Lavoie almost by chance during research.
In the late 1980s, Dieudonne self-released the tape, achieving a degree of local popularity. He plays guitar and sings together with his wife Agnes Umbibizi, while friends and family members provide the accompanying instrumentation.
The songs are deeply shaped by traditional African rhythms and melodies, even though the musicians make use of Western instruments.
Welcome to life in a rambling house in Oslo where Gabba hangs out, parties, barbecues or just jams in the backyard. Their vibe is driven by the voice of John André Eira who sits in a corner while his søringa ‘southerners’, as he calls them, join in on percussion, guitars, trumpet or harmonium. The music’s spirit, though, comes from over a thousand miles further north, where John was born in the village of Mazé, into a family where Sámi traditions go back several generations.
John is one of many young Sámi musicians passionate about their heritage and the different Sámi languages. His voice is rich with the resonance and ornamentation of the wide-ranging joik vocal traditions, here expressing grief, the life of a newborn, or the realisation…