Ghanaian singer Lamisi’s Let Us Clap combines a fierce activist message on women’s rights with thumping production that features traditional Ghanaian folk rhythm and electronics.
Two of Ghana’s biggest music names, Lamisi and Wanlov worked on the project once a week for several months, while the buzz surrounding their collaboration grew louder. No wonder: here was an icon of jazz and pop, and an icon of roots and hip‑hop, coming together to create raw, unapologetic music for a young, engaged audience — music that bridges the gap between West African music fans and music fans everywhere.
Lyrics, for the most part, were written in Kusaal, the mother tongue of Lamisi’s Kusasi ethnic group (Wanlov speaks Twi, the language of…
Tag Archive: Real World Records
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…
Guitarist Louis Campbell and fiddle player Owen Spafford started playing together as teenagers in the National Youth Folk Ensemble when Sam Sweeney (of Bellowhead and Leveret) was its director. They released their first album, You Golden, three years ago. It featured audacious musical extrapolations from Playford’s English Dance Master – also a key source for Sweeney’s Leveret – and with an emphasis on ensuring an abundance space, rather than notes, in the playing.
Since then they’ve mounted multi-media solo shows – Spafford’s music and art installation Welcome Here, Kind Stranger at the Royal Academy of Music, and his Here Comes I folk opera about the Christmas Mummers play, while Campbell’s elegant, tasty guitar work has…
Rizwan and Muazzam Ali Khan were never meant to be musicians. Although they are the nephews of the Qawwali great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, their father was keen for them to focus on their education. It was only when a local Sufi shrine in Lahore invited them to perform that he discovered that the boys had been winning singing competitions at school and regionally.
The brothers were then taken under the wing of their uncle. Like him, they made a mixture of traditional albums and collaborations with western producers and musicians — Jah Wobble adds dubby bass to 2001’s People’s Colony No 1, their most sonically innovative recording.
At the Feet of the Beloved sees the brothers return to Real World after several decades, and revives…