world music
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s nomadic monthly round-up of the latest brilliant intercontinental sounds includes Frippertronics from São Paulo, Indian classical electronica, Vietnamese jazz and Ethiopian nostalgia. It features great new releases from King Ayisoba, Blue Beast, Orchestra Baobab and some terrific compilations, notably from the late, great Nashville master songwriter Guy Clark.The show was recorded at the enterprising MusicBoxRadio UK’s spanking new studio in Farringdon, London. Since being posted on Mixcloud the show has already gone to number two in Mixcloud's Latin chart and Afrobeat chart, Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's a monstrous cliché – all too often laden with problematically patronising overtones – to describe African, Caribbean, or Afro-Latin music in terms of “sunshine”, with all the carefree holiday brochure imagery that brings. But damn, the music of the Garifuna people of the Caribbean coasts of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua makes it hard not to.In particular the Honduran Aurelio Martinez, the most prominent exponent of Garifuna music since the 2009 death of the Belizean star Andy Palacio, has a guitar style which combines the lilting arpeggios of West Africa with the tremolo- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Erasmo Carlos got his break in August 1965 when the TV show Jovem Guarda (The Young Guard) began its run. Filmed before a live audience in São Paulo and broadcast nationally, it was pop as never seen before in Brazil. On screen, Roberto Carlos and his unrelated songwriting sidekick Erasmo Carlos – born Erasmo Esteves – presided over a frothy, energetic mix of singers, song, fashion and lifestyle tips which confirmed to Brazil that its pop music was as vital – within the county, anyway – as the internationally lauded Bossa Nova. The roots of MPB – Música Popular Brasileira – reach back to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Tinariwen are one African band you don’t dance to. It’s not that kind of music. They emerged from refugee camps, guerrilla camps and nomadic desert camps through the Eighties and Nineties, and since reaching a global audience via The Festival of The Desert, they have released eight consistently fine albums (the recent Live in Paris is particularly good).Their music is internal, meditative, sombre, political, philosophical, poetic, and returns again and again to the long line of troubles besetting the Tuareg region of Saharan Mali, riven by Islamists – a former friend of the band ended up Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Another peripatetic global music update from theartsdesk's Peter Culshaw, hosted by Music Box Radio. This edition features forthcoming album releases from hard salsa revivalists La Mambanegra, a remix from heroic desert rockers Tinariwen and electro Tunisian stars Bargou 08. We go to Brazil for the adventurous Sāo Paulo singer Luisa Maita and preview new jazz tunes from Brad Mehldau and E.S.T. There’s a new track from rebel star Manu Chao. Out this month is the new album from Aurelio, already in various music to-look-out-for-in-2017 lists. His cool take on garifuna music from Beliza and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A welcome antidote to the mood of a time which seems hell-bent on closing borders and building walls, The Music of Strangers is about a unique musical collective that breaks through division and reaffirms the potential of culture to unite. Subtitled “Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble”, Morgan Neville’s film is about the band that came into being at the beginning of the millennium on the initiative of the great Chinese-American cellist, giving us snapshots from its history, as well as the stories of some of its many and varied members.It focuses on the lives of these individuals of diverse Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A couple of years ago I saw an extraordinary outdoor concert where a rapper called Muslim (great name if you want to be hard to find on Google) performed at the Timitar Festival in Agadir in the South of Morocco to 80,000 delirious fans. The song which everyone knew was “Al Rissala" (The Letter) which called out corruption and ignorance in high places. The Festival acts as a kind of safety valve for dissent.“It’s a good way of letting off steam,” Reda Allali, the lead singer of Moroccan rockers Hoba Hoba Spirit, told me backstage. The festival was “a step in the right direction anyway – Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
She calls it “dirty samba”. Elza Soares, The Woman at the End of the World - to use the name from her last album - sat on a throne like a warrior from a fantasy sci-fi film at the back of the stage. Her regal, mythic aura has been earned in an epic life story and a series of albums that started in 1960.She has had hits in every decade - in that sense she is like Cliff Richard, an evergreen. Except while Richard is currently touting a tame retro rock 'n' roll album, Soares (pictured below) is still energetically pushing artistic boundaries at the age of 79. If Elza Soares was a little Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
After a hiatus, theartsdesk Radio Show is back with a new partner, Music Box Radio, hosted in their studio at the Market House in Brixton. Peter Culshaw’s global round-up of new and newly re-released discs jumps from Brazilian psychedelia to synth funk from Capo Verde and assorted exotica. There’s new jazz from Michael Wollny and Vincent Perani and new tango-tinged systems music from Steve Reich, and West African grooves.One track was donated on a USB from a taxi driver in Fes in Morocco. Fifty years after the Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows", we bring you the Indonesian gamelan version from Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Four headliners, one bill – Sam Lee, Debashish Bhattacharya, Songhoy Blues and Mariza: it was an impressive line-up at the Barbican for a Monday as the world and folk music magazine Songlines hosts its annual awards bash. Now, these are readers’ awards, with nary an expert in sight when it comes to choosing the winners. As such, we are talking the same kind of democracy that Corbynistas go on about, and in the year when the cogs of Hard Brexit (sounds like a porn category) started turning, one wonders how the cultural/political frame around what we call world music will change as England Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Qawwali music is amongst the most soulful, passionate music in the world. Many people have discovered it through the legendary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was one the greatest singers of the last half century. Seeing him perform at an early WOMAD was a revelation - he was scheduled to perform for 90 minutes and kept singing for hours. No-one seemed to leave the tent to catch the headliners. In fact, they say for Qawwali to have its real impact, the performances should last at least a couple of hours, as opposed to the shortened schedules of modern western concert halls and festivals. I Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nestling amid the area in the woods where they have the gong baths and the kora-makers and back massages was an art installation by Graeme Miller - basically, you lay back on a trolley while an intern/elf pushed you through the woods while you ponder the underside of leaves and the sky. WOMAD does give you a different perspective anyway - a welcome respite from post-Brexit, pre-Trump xenophobia - and as a live celebration of global musical treasures it remains unmatched.There was a sense, though, of things you had taken for granted, having added relevance. When the virtuoso Vishwa Moham Bhatt Read more ...