Tag Archives: world music

Saz’iso’s At Least Wave Your Handkerchief At Me

This is a momentous collection of folk music. Not least because it’s the first project produced by the renowned Joe Boyd in 17 years (and also apparently resulted in his getting married to one of the participants). This album of … Continue reading

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Anouar Brahem’s Blue Maqams

There’s a moment a couple of minutes in to the title track of Anouar Brahem’s exquisite new album Blue Maqams that is the kind of moment I long for, like a thirsty person in the desert longs for a cool … Continue reading

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Björn Meyer’s Provenance

The energetically strummed funk of a tune called “Squizzle” is more or less what I expected when I approached an album of solo bass guitar music. It’s a quick in-and-out of a tune, just the electric bass and some subtle … Continue reading

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Saffron Ensemble’s Will You?

I can’t get enough of the music made by Shujaat Husain Khan and Katayoun Goudarzi. Fortunately, they make a lot of music, whether as a duo or in ensembles with other musicians. The thread that runs through their music is … Continue reading

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Coyote Oldman’s Tear of the Moon, Compassion, Floating on Evening: Songs from Otter River

I learned a very important concept about making art in a dance class, studying butoh, the contemporary Japanese dance-theater that is at once highly abstract and fundamentally impressionistic: evocation. Our movements were not to describe an action, but to evoke … Continue reading

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Perry Silverbird’s The Blessing Way; Tokeya Inajin’s (Kevin Locke) Dream Catcher; Mary Youngblood’s The Offering; Bryan Akipa’s Mystic Moments: Dakota Flute Music

As I listen to more traditional music and more music from non-Western sources, I begin to realize that the blithe use of the word “traditional” is tantamount to making your own noose and putting it around your neck. This was … Continue reading

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Ustad Shahid Parvez’s Magnificent Melody: A Tribute to Dulal Babu (Raga Darbari, Raga Shahana)

Shahid Parvez began studying the sitar at age four, and gave his first performance at age eight. He belongs to the seventh generation of the Etawa gharana, a tradition begun in the early nineteenth century by Sahebad Khan. In Shahid … Continue reading

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Various artists’ Uzelli Psychedelic Anadolu

This vinyl and digital release is a sampler of sorts for a new project by the German-based Turkish music label Uzelli. The Uzelli brothers started the label out of their Frankfurt import shop in the 1970s, releasing cassettes of all … Continue reading

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Various Artists’ Afghanistan Untouched

I have to admit to a certain feeling of helplessness when faced with a collection like Afghanistan Untouched: it is, much more than entertainment, an ethnographic document, as much as a study of northwest Australian wangga or a collection of … Continue reading

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Vieux Farka Touré

There were, in the middle of the last century, over 1,000 languages spoken in Africa, grouped into four large families, not counting creoles and pidgins (estimates have actually ranged as high as 3,000 altogether). This does actually have something to … Continue reading

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