Music... It means the world to us!
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“Vaga” came out of a London heatwave: a baião rhythm from Northeast Brazil, a maracatu-inspired groove, and a lift that recalls Sérgio Mendes. Lead vocalist Claudia Marques sings over a core of drums and keys, framing love as a boundless, constant current meant for everyone, with a roots-style female chorus behind her and flute lines over the top. Flautist Rachel Hayter weaves melodic lines…
The ruins of Pompeii, Buffalo mozzarella from Caserta, the switchback drop of the Amalfi Coast, a sfogliatella still warm from the oven, just after a pizza. Now add thirty years of the Ariano Folkfestival to the list, because apparently once Campania gets good at something, it doesn’t stop. Set eight hundred metres up in the Apennine hills, the hilltop town of Ariano Irpino transforms every August…
“Berani” means “the exile”, and it follows someone who leaves home in search of freedom and a better future. Rabie Houti made that move himself, leaving Oran, the Algerian city where raï took shape, for Montpellier around 2014. “Berani” is the second single from his upcoming album, after “Rwahou“. A violinist and singer, Houti leads the Rabie Houti Band, drawn from Montpellier’s cross-cultural…
Teranga is a Wolof word for hospitality, the welcome extended to a guest. Wau Wau Collectif named their third album after it, and after years of building songs remotely, this is the record where the band finally met in person. “Oh Africa!” is the second single from it. The Swedish-Senegalese project runs on files traded over WhatsApp. Karl-Jonas Winqvist in Sweden and Arouna Kane in Senegal…
It is Monday morning, checkout time at Grand Hotel Viljandi, and a German festival goer with his wristband still on hands back his room card and asks what a double costs. Not for tonight, he specifies, for the same weekend next July, when Viljandi Folk comes round again, and preferably the very same room he has just spent four nights in. The receptionist explains that the system will not take a…
There is a certain tenor a WOMAD stalwart comes to expect: a practiced routine, a beaten track past well-known landmarks, a familiarity akin to coming home. Sometimes it’s good to mix it up a bit. This July marked the festival’s first edition in a new location just up the road from Charlton Park, its much-loved site for 17 happy years before taking a break in 2025. Organisers have been quick to…
“Natural” moves at walking pace, a lovers rock groove kept soft under Clarence Bekker‘s blues-trained voice as it eases across the rocksteady sway. The new single from his Barcelona band is a plain love song from a singer with a long, loud history behind him. Bekker carries an unusual CV for a reggae singer: a UK chart entry in the 1990s as CB Milton, seven world tours, and a spell fronting the…
Jabulile Majola sings “Baba Wethu” as a dove worn down by its journey, “Ngijuba elifuna indawo yokuphumula“, crossing hills and gullies through steady rain in search of somewhere to rest. When the bird’s strength gives out it calls up to heaven, the same cry each time over a marching chant, “Ulaphi sekonakala“, “where are you when things fall apart”, to the Father the isiZulu title names. The bird…
This week’s trip starts in Paraiba, NE Brazil, with Luana Flores and her futuristic take on the traditions of the Nordeste on “Cria do Sol Quente”. Then we go down to Salvador da Bahia with O Mundo Dá Voltas Dando Voltas Pelo Mundo, reinterpretations of BaianaSystem‘s repertoire by producers from around the glove. From the Atlantic we go to the Caribbean, to the Guajiro desert in northern…
Benga runs on interlocking guitars and a rhythm that does not let up, the sound that owned Kenyan pop for forty years. Winyo has spent twenty of those years playing it his own way, guitar in hand, singing in Luo and Swahili in a voice his countrymen named after a bird. He plays The Jago in Dalston on Sunday 9 August, a room of a couple of hundred, and most of the set is an album he has not…
