World music matters: Recent Episodes
RFI
Electric Vocuhila combine the spirit of free-jazz legend Ornette Coleman with driving urban guitar rhythms like tsapiky from Madagascar or Congolese sebene. They masterfully sew them together on their pulse-raising third album, Palaces.
"I had a long time love for African music and the repetitive motifs used in bebop and free jazz," the band's saxophonist and composer Maxime Bobo told RFI just ahead of the Palaces release party in Paris.
The album is an electrifying patchwork of rhythms like tsapiky, sebene, sungura and benga.
They got into tsapiky after meeting France-based Damily, the king of this fast, electric-guitar led genre which he developed in Tuléar in the 1970s.
"We started to use its grooves and forms," Bobo said. "But doing it our own way, trying to get closer to this kind of 'dancey' feeling and fluidity, but using the saxophone and with the way we interact and compose together." The saxophonist as a voice The band went to Madagascar, saw how the professionals did it, and came back inspired.
But their command of other rhythms like Congolese sebene or sungura from Zimbabwe has been garnered "mainly through the internet and YouTube," Bobo admitted.
Together with the other band members: Boris Rosenfeld (guitar), François Rosenfeld (bass and guitar) Etienne Ziemniak (drums), they weave these rhythms together rather seemlessly.
They are all guitar-led, and yet Bobo plays saxophone.
"I’m much more attracted to these kind of guitar players or singers, the voices in tsapiky, of African styles," he said.
"I connect with this more than with contemporary saxophone players. I guess I’m trying to use the saxophone and to put somewhere between the voice, singing a song, and guitar riffs." Back to the roots of jazz Bobo has found inspiration in sax player Ornette Coleman, the father of free jazz. Not so much because of his renowned harmolodics, but his "voice" and the way he let his band members express themselves.
"I loved his music when I heard it in my 20s. His playing is really open with very melodic lines, always rhythmic and warm. It has the feeling of a human voice."
Like many members of the free jazz movement, Coleman looked to the African continents for the roots of jazz.
"He played with the Masters of Joujouka from Morocco. There's one song on the Dancing On Your Head album," Bobo said.
But it was Ed Blackwell, one of the first drummers in Coleman's quartet, who was more connected to Africa and spent more time there. As did Archie Shepp.
Electric Vocuhila make no claim to ...
Admas, a quartet of young Ethiopian musicians living in exile in Washington DC, had a ball recording an album of synth-heavy, funked up versions of Ethiopian classics. 'Sons of Ethiopia ' was soon forgotten but became cult among fans of ethiojazz. Now reissued by Frederiksberg Records, it reflects happier times from a generation that "just escaped" the worst of the Derg.
Some records are far more than the sum of their parts, and Sons of Ethiopia is one such.
The seven tracks were recorded in 1984 by the band Admas: Henock Temesgen, Abegasu Shiota, Tewodros “Teddy” Aklilu and Yousef Tesfaye.
Like so many Ethiopian expats in the U.S. at the time, the four young men had fled the Derg: the military junta that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. As the White Terror gave way to the Red Terror, over a million people died in the violence.
Aklilu, the band’s keyboard player, left Addis in 1977, aged 15, just before the worst of the Red Terror began.
“It was so sad, kids killed each other,” he told RFI on the line from Addis. “I went to the U.S. and basically closed my ears for the next two or three years.”
Aklilu closed his ears to the horror, but opened them to exciting new music.
When bass player Henock Temesgen, an old school friend, arrived in Washington DC in 1980 they began playing together.
“It was a very dark time but we found our cocoon, our own friends, playing in each other’s houses. We tried to create our own group, our own happy times,” said Temesgen. The need to experiment The two friends played in a band called Gasha and took up residency at the Red Sea, a lively Ethiopian restaurant in Washington.
They would open for big Ethiopian names like Aster Aweke, playing instrumentals to audiences of expats, many of whom had lost friends and family in the civil war.
While they enjoyed traditional Ethiopian music, they immersed themselves in the sounds of their new home with its go go funk, jazz, highlife, samba and roots reggae.
Brazilian jazz fusion band Azymuth, The Crusaders and Spyro Gyra were big influences, they said.
“In DC you got to hear a lot more of what the world has to offer, than in Ethiopia, and it’s very natural that when you hear something you want to experiment with it,” Aklilu explained.
What’s more, there were new tools like Moog keyboards, synthesisers and electric guitars to play with.
Joined by drummer Yousef Tesfaye and ...
Italian composer Ennio Morricone was famed for his film scores but his work straddled jazz, pop, psychedelia as well as the avant-garde, influencing bands as diverse as Air and Metallica. Ennio Morricone left behind some 500 scores for both film and television. The theme tune to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is undoubtedly one of the most renowned.
“Just 10 seconds into one of Morricone’s soundtracks, you know it’s him, you know which film it’s from, you can see the pictures,” said French composer Jean-Michel Jarre in the wake of the Italian composer’s death on 6 July.
To recreate this feeling of the American far west, Morricone added on drums, some flute, and of course the "cry" of a coyote.
The trademark whistling came courtesy of Spanish guitarist and whistler Curro Savoye, who now lives in the south of France.
The two men never met, but Savoye was "the" whistler on the vast majority of Morricone’s work.
The film soundtrack also includes “Ecstasy of Gold” – a stirring three-minute orchestral bonanza with drums to set you galloping into the sunset and wordless vocals by Edda Dell’orso with whom Morricone regularly collaborated.
The music is so stirring it became a fetish piece for U.S. band Metallica. Since 1983 they’ve played it to open all their concerts.
They recorded their own version of “The Ecstasy of Gold” for their tribute album to Morricone in 2007, and performed the song themselves for the first time at a 2009 concert in Copenhagen.
Metallica frontman James Hetfield said something special happened when they begun using the piece as their intro music in 1983. “It set us up for the night and the fans got excited.”
In a tribute to Morricone on Instagram, he said the music had become “part of our blood flow, deep breathing, fist bumping, prayers and band huddle pre-show ritual ever since”.
'Elevated every film he scored'
Morricone wrote scores for six of Sergio Leone’s westerns. Their last collaboration was in 1984 for Once upon a time in America.
It was customary at the time to write the soundtrack before shooting the film, but still, Morricone’s music was so evocative that the director played it on set to conjure up the right atmosphere.
Sergio Leone’s westerns helped make Morricone a household name but the composer’s artistic reach knew no bounds.
Here in France, his biggest hit is the violin-heavy “Chi Mai” which famously featured in the 1981 film “The Professional” starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Morricone was ...
"Everyday I walk in this city, I know I walk alongside death," singer Hacaaluu Hundessaa said just days before he was shot dead in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on 28 June. We hear how the 34-year old protest singer became the voice of the minority Oromo ethnic group. "He was the soundtrack of the 2018 revolution that brought change to Ethiopia" Awol Allo told RFI.
Inspiring speeches are great, but a song can travel and connect people like nothing else. After the tragic death of George Floyd, musicians are helping to bring issues of police violence and social justice to the fore. Beyoncé, queen of R 'n' B, and the young gospel singer Keedron Bryant have just released songs with a strong 'Black Lives Matter' message.
After exploring Zoroastrian chants on her 2016 album “Gathas, songs my father taught me”, mezzo soprano Ariana Vafadari puts femininity to the fore with the heart-wrenching “Anahita”, inspired by the Persian prophet Zarathustra and the goddess of water. Ten deeply spiritual songs set to Oriental maqam scales, tracing a path from despair to resolution.
French-Iranian Vafadari has a successful career as an international opera singer, but remains deeply attached to her Zoroastrian roots.
“I’m from two cultures,” she said. “I love opera more than anything but a part of me needed to express the origins, the music of Iran, the Oriental music.”
She learned Gathas - Zoroastrian prayers dating back some 3,700 years - from her father.
“Gatha means song but we have no idea how it was sung at that time,” she said. “Just the prayers were kept and now the priest chants them. I wanted to compose music on it and make it more alive.”
She did just that for her 2016 album "Gathas, songs my father taught me".
“It was something I gave to my father, I think it was my father’s side, my more masculine side: knowing, understanding, finding the way."
The album "Anahita" was inspired by the legend of the Persian goddess of water, fertility and wisdom. The story was introduced to Vafadari by Leili Anvar, a specialist in Persian literature who wrote the lyrics for seven of the songs.
Anvar's adaptation involves a modern day Iranian young woman whose village is plagued by drought, forcing its inhabitants to flee. She is visited by the goddess in a dream and goes on a quest to find the source of water.
Vafadari said the legend spoke to her in a world dominated by the over-exploitation of the world's resources. "It's a world of grabbing land, producing more; the masculinity is so powerful that I felt a lack of femininity in my own world and in myself."
In addition to original compositions, Vafadari sings three prayers from Zoroastrianism’s holy book known as the Avesta.
“The three prayers are the way Anahita finds her own femininity, the link to her ancestors and to earth and to water.”
Vafadari has surrounded herself with superb musicians from France, Turkey, Morocco and Iran: Julien Carton (piano), Driss El Maloumi (oud), Leila Soldevila and Nicolas Deutsch (double bass), Habib Meftah Boushehri (calabash, bendir, daf).
“It’s important to show that our generation is a mixture of cultures, all these musics have to stay alive and stay together."
Follow Ariana Vafadari
Purchase the album
There are big names in The Eddy, a Netflix series about a struggling jazz club in Paris. But the real star is jazz. And since coronavirus is depriving us of the thrill of live music, the jazz sessions recorded with its own six-piece band provide music lovers a much needed fix. Composer Glen Ballard and saxophonist Jowee Omicil talk about the joy of putting music first.
All the songs in The Eddy were written by award-winning American composers Glen Ballard and Randy Kerber.
The series began with a song and an idea back in 2007.
“Ive lived in Paris off and on all my adult life," Ballard told RFI. "And I’ve always loved the fact that Paris still had jazz clubs, still had young people going to the clubs, listening to music being played live.
"So I had this concept of a club that I called The Eddy: a perfect jazz club where you could go and have the greatest band in the world and a great singer, and you could find some kind of connection with that music and work out some of your own problems.”
That “greatest band” is the Eddy Cast Band - formed especially for the series with Ludovic Louis (trumpet), Damian Nueva (double bass), Jowee Omicil (saxophone) Randy Kerber (piano) Lada Obradovic (drums) and Joanna Kulig on vocals.
“It’s a truly international band showing that jazz is an international language now,” said Ballard. “We have a drummer from Croatia, a sax player from Haiti, a bass player from Cuba, a piano player from the U.S., a trumpet player from Paris and a singer from Poland. But they all share the same language which is jazz and it’s really high musicianship.”
“It was an honour to play with all of these musicians, it’s truly an 'All Star' band,” said Paris-based Jowee Omicil who plays Joey the saxophonist.
The first two episodes of The Eddy were directed by Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle. He insisted the jazz sessions in the club be recorded live.
“We’re playing for real so if you’re messing up it's gonna show,”Omicil recalled. "There were many ‘one takes’!”
Glen Ballard meanwhile wanted the music to be easy to listen to, but difficult to play. Omicil said they succeeded.
“I was telling Randy Kerber and also Glen: ‘I feel like I'm back at Berkeley, 19 years old in 1997 and I gotta learn how to play to play this music, this tradition of music, but from today’. They evolved the music, we ...
When Swiss beatmaker Flexfab was doing a set in the coastal town of Kisili, Kenya, a young Kenyan rapper Ziller Bas grabbed the mike and delivered his "Swengflow". The chemistry was immediate and six months later the two artists are set to release their debut EP Mugogo! A dancefloor must.
Pablo Fernandez, who's been working under the moniker Flexfab for a decade or so, likes to work outside his comfort zone. He's lent his beatmaking skills to Kenya's Muthoni Drummer Queen, Batuk from South Africa, rapper Rozzma from Egypt, Malaysian singer The Venopian Solitude...
In August 2019, a Swiss music non-profit, Flee, invited him to East Africa for a series of exchanges with local musicians. During a gig in Kisili, some 70kms north of Mombasa, Baraka Shujaa, an MC going under the name Ziller Bas couldn't resist joining in.
"The beats were so good, I was so excited I had to jump in," the 25-year old rapper said on the line from Kisili.
"This freestyle session with Zilla Bas was magic, the kind of moment that only happens a few times in your life," Flexfab said. He found a way to return to Kisili in January this year with a mobile studio. In just two weeks they recorded 14 tracks, a documentary about their story and three videos.
Their EP Mugogo part 1 has four tracks for hot club nights.
Ziller Bas lays down his vocals in his very own Swengflow: a mix of Swahili, English and his native Giriama.
The title track Mugogo has a hypnotic beat, with traditional percussion from shakers known locally as kayamba which Flexfab recorded live when doing the final mix.
"I didn't sample music, all the songs are original," he said. "There's some synthesizer, a lot of electronic things but a big part of the job I did at the end of the project was to add some live percussion."
"Mugogo means great, like the king, someone magical, noble, with dignity," Ziller Bas explained. "It's derived from a leader here in Mijikenda called Karissa Maita."
Maita was a former tourism minister and an MP from Mombasa's kisauni area known affectionately as "Mugogo, wa pwani": Mijikenda for "Big Man of the Coast". He was a popular politician who defended the interests of coastal peoples, encouraging them to speak out about the politics of exclusion.
The track Sawa Sawa means OK in Swahili: an upbeat, positive song "about feeling good," Ziller Bas said.
Vituko meanwhile is "very poetic and more political. It talks about challenges in the ...
When musicians Amadou Diagne and Cory Seznec had a chance encounter in a bar in Bath in 2007, they knew one day they would record together. Thirteen years later, after many "touki" (journeys), they've embarked on a new musical adventure with a debut album Right of Passage. They talk to RFI about making new roots music with kora, banjo and guitar.
“It was a fortuitous meeting of like-minded kindred spirits,” said Seznec, a French-American singer-songwriter, guitarist and clawhammer banjoist who’s honed his sound through travels on the African continent.
He was playing in a bar with his band Groanbox when Diagne showed up with his djembe after a day of busking and the two men began improvising together.
“The energy was fantastic ... some really simple connection happened back in 2007," said Seznec.
They played gigs from time to time, Seznec bringing Diagne on board “for his percussive and harmony prowess” but it took more than a decade for them to form the duo Touki and get into the studio.
“It was always in the back of our minds that we should do something, but life took us in different directions,” Seznec continued. "And then finally the stars aligned.”
When Diagne secured a grant from the Arts Council of England, he immediately thought of Seznec.
“It my dream for a long time to do something with him,” said Diagne, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer-songwriter from near Dakar and who settled in the UK in 2004.
“I just tell him ‘hey man, come on, this is the time now, let’s do it’!”
The two musicians rehearsed in Paris and recorded 13 tunes in Peter Gabriel’s World Circuit Records studios in southwestern England.
Diagne, who was born into a Griot family of drummers and praise singers, sings in Wolof and dug deep into his own personal history for inspiration on several songs.
Yaye Bouye is about his mother dying when he was a young boy, while Tirailleurs draws a parallel between his difficult beginnings in the UK and the Senegalese Tirailleurs who fought bravely alongside French troops in various world wars. Diagne’s own grandfather, Mass Mboup, was decorated by the French for his bravery in WW2.
Two songs, Yaen Yalay and Machallah are influenced by Seznec’s three years in Ethiopia and feature Endris Hassen on the one-string bowed lute known as masenqo.
“Yaen Yalay means ‘thank you’ in Eritrean. It’s a sort of banjo percussive, instrumental track, a nod to Ethiopia and Eritrea,” said Seznec. “It has ...
When N'Djamena-based electro band Pulo NDJ found themselves stranded in Abuja with no chance of returning to Chad because of the coronavirus, they made their way to Lomé, set up a home studio and recorded a song about living in lockdown. Their story is one of friendship and remaining creative through the crisis.
Since the release of their acclaimed debut album Desert to Douala in March 2019, Pulo NDJ has spread its inventive blend of traditional Chadian rhythms with an electro beat around West Africa.
In March they were invited by the Institut Français in Abuja to head up DJ-ing workshops and give concerts in Nigeria.
But the coronavirus stopped them in their tracks. With borders shut, they found themselves stranded in Abuja, unable to return to N’Djamena.
“The concert was cancelled and we had to return to Chad but Chad closed its border," said guitarist Stingo. "We got help from friends."
The band headed to his home country of Togo and found shelter at Luc’s (aka Lord Kossivi), a member of the HAPE Collective which produced the Desert to Doula album.
They were introduced to the French filmmaker, Marion Poizeau, who was also locked down in Lomé. Together they turned to music as a way of pushing back the walls.
“Luc lent them his home studio, Walid (the keyboard player) had his computer, Stingo his guitar and I lent them a mike,” said Poizeau. “We made do with what we had.”
They began writing and one song - Confinement - talks of what it feels like to be in lockdown.
It’s a pensive cream-pop song with a universal message: ‘We’re all here together, we’re stuck, we’re in lockdown,’ Poizeau sings.
“The idea was to express what we were feeling being stuck together in a house,” said the filmmaker turned backing vocalist.
“Making music was also a big help during this time, to make the time go faster and more enjoyable," she added.
Poizeau made a video for the song showing the five of them trapped inside the house, set against backgrounds of the ocean, grasslands, and an array of untrammelled wild animals.
Making music has allowed them to remain positive and break the feeling of social distancing.
“We did this to share what’s happening here and to share the way we met and created together," Poizeau said. "So even if it’s a crisis we can still be creative and produce something positive. I hope we can share our positive idea of keeping making music with the rest of the world.”
Lockdown is having a devastating impact on musicians, not least in Lomé where the night-time curfew ...
Djibouti is better known as a strategic outpost than a hotbed of music but Groupe RTD, the country's national radio band, are one of its best kept secrets. By day they play at official ceremonies, off duty they let rip their love of American jazz, Indian Bollywood, Jamaican reggae and Somali funk. For the first time ever an independent label, Ostinato Records, was allowed to capture that sound and release it to the outside world on the upcoming Dancing Devils of Djibouti album.
Since Djibouti gained independence from France in 1977, its music industry has been controlled by the state, its bands run like national enterprises.
And none more so than Groupe RTD, the official band of national radio Radiodiffusion-Télévision Djibouti (RTD), whose job it is to perform at official ceremonies.
Its music has always been recorded in RTD’s studios, conserved in its extensive archives, but has never had international release.
Vik Sohoni, producer and curator with Ostinato Records, met the band by chance in 2016 when tracing author’s rights for its compilation album of Somali music, Sweet as Broken Dates.
He found Groupe RTD at the radio’s recording studio jamming “off duty”.
“We quickly realised this was not just some national, ceremonial band, this was a very raw, gritty, tough, funky band,” he says.
“A lot of these guys were old legends and there was some young talent too. Everything that was happening in that studio was world class musicianship and we were really blown away.”
Among the older talent is saxophonist Mohamed Abdi Alto, a self-taught musician who Sohonie says deserves to be “right up there” with the world's greatest jazz instrumentalists. “He’s a national treasure, the best saxophonist in the country and possibly the most unheralded saxopohone virtuoso in all of Africa.”
Alto emerged as part of the east African scene in the 1970s as did the band’s guitarist Abdirazak Hagi Sufi “Kaajaa” and bass player Abdo Houssein Handeh.
New talent includes vocalist Asma Omar, who joined Groupe RTD after winning a youth talent competition, and Hassan Omar Houssein, also a singer.
The band performs Somali music, in Somali. But there’s a “distinct Djiboutian twist,” which comes partly from the country’s geography and history as an important trading post at the mouth of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Many cultures - but above all the Middle East and India - have left their mark on the country and its music.
“What’s incredible about Djiboutian music is not only its ability to take in all the different ...
Sarah McCoy is undoubtedly one of the most exuberant and talented singer-songwriters around, unafraid to bear her heart and soul in her music. "Honesty is important," says the 35-year old American. "If I were just singing about how it's sunshiny all the time, well some people can do that, but it's my job to sing about when it rains."
McCoy was picked out by a French researcher singing and playing piano in clubs and bars in New Orleans. After a few years on the road, living rough, she moved to Paris in October 2017 where producers Chilly Gonzales and Renaud Létang helped produced her debut album Blood Siren. Listen to the podcast to hear her story, along with songs from this remarkable record.
Official website here.
Follow McCoy on facebook and instagram
Olga "Olgha" Nkweti is a singer-songwriter from the English-speaking part of Cameroon. She began singing professionally aged just 17 and has made a name crafting covers of popular songs into Pigdin English, but also writes her own soulful afro-pop compositions. She talks to RFI about composing the song Cold to draw attention to the innocent victims caught up in the Anglophone conflict.
"I decided to write Cold to create an awareness about what has been going on in the English speaking zones of Cameroon," she tells RFI's Laura-Angela Bagnetto when the two women meet in Douala. "We've had a crisis for the last three years or so, and it doesn't seem to be letting up.
"I realised there was a lot of pointing of fingers and everybody was trying to blame the other party for starting it. But there was not enough information about the victims. So I wanted a song which was going to focus on the fact that we are losing on both sides: we are losing family, we're losing friends, we are losing children and old people and helpless people. So Cold is a story about that kind of loss."
Listen to the podcast to hear how Olgha used her own experience of conflict to bring the video for Cold alive, and how the crew came face to face with the trauma so many families are facing on a daily basis.
Olgha Nk is signed to Bimmac Sounds, a Cameroonian label based in the U.S. whose aim is to discover and develop young talent.
Follow her on facebook and instagram
Seb el Zin founded the surrealist rock band Ithak in 2005 and it somehow manages to straddle hardcore, metal, psychedelia and traditional Turkish music with equal ease. He talks to us about why metal is ethno music, his love of dystopia and science fiction, and finding lyrical inspiration in the odd mushroom.
Seb El Zin (Seb the beautiful!) has many strings to his bow: composer, singer, musician and producer, he's frontman and guitarist with ethno-psychic punk band Ithak. Their second album, Black Nazar Corporation (2016), is not exactly easy- listening world music, but el Zin says it's just a question of opening your mind.
"We attempt to mix industrial punk rock with some other traditional musics," he says. "In the West we have many labels like metal music, reggae, hip hop, and so on, and then all the rest is world music.
"But I consider that every music is ethno actually. Even metal is ethno music from white people from the beginning of the 90s. So in the end, there is no reason why they shouldn't be mixed with any other kind of music, maybe with Indonesian gamelan, or whatever. We all live on the same earth. Be open and see what works."
From 2011 to 2016 El Zin lived in Turkey where he learned to play a flute known as the ney and the Turkish lute known as saz, so they get thrown into the musical mix.
Before that he spent some months at Ircam (French institute specialising in avant garde electro-accoustic music) as an engineer, where he broadened his musical tastes, discovering composers like György Sándor Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis... "major composers who're aren't mainstream but who have influenced my music".
Writers like J.G. Ballard meanwhile nourished his interest in dystopia.
"I'm a big fan, he inspired all the new wave generations, Joy Division, all those bands back in the days."
El Zin also heads up the hip-hop noise cult project Anarchist Republic of Bzzz (feat. Arto Lindsay, Marc Ribot, Mike Ladd and Sensational) and has toured the U.S. with his solo album Grand Bazar.
On 5 March he'll push his boundaries that bit further, joining Franco-Algerian mandolin maestro Hakim Hamadouche in concert at the Arabofolies festival at the institut du Monde Arabe. Hamadouche played with Rachid Taha for more than 25 years.
"Hakim is a super open-minded person. He plays rock, blues, jazz as well as his traditional Berber chaabi music. So it wasn't complicated to have common vocabulary, we just let it happen."
Seb El Zin's ...
Singer-songwriter Piers Faccini's latest opus is a four-track EP Hear My Voice. And what an original voice it is. He chats to us about his artisan approach to making nourishing music, doing it his way on his record label Beating Drum and how unpleasant years at Eton public school probably helped forge his unique musical identity.
Anglo-Italian singer songwriter and guitarist Piers Faccini launched the Hear My Voice project in 2018 as a way of giving a platform to talented artists with distinct and somewhat atypical voices.
His label Beating Drum has released three vinyl EPs: Neapolitan songwriter GNUT, Tui Mamaki and Trinidadian poet and singer Roger Robinson aka Horsedreamer.
"They have very distinctive voices," says Faccini. "And that's the notion of Hear My Voice, it's about using Beating Drum to put out and highlight the kind of voices that might not always be heard.
"Newt, for example, is a singer-songwriter who decides to sing in the Neapolitan language as opposed to Italian. Twi Mamaki is a New Zealander, but she fell in love with Bulgarian music and traditions. Horsedreamer, Roger Robinson, well we're super proud to have worked with him because he just won the T.S. Eliot poetry prize. So he's kind of the new big thing in poetry in the UK."
The fourth Hear My Voice release is Faccini’s own. And while previous albums "I dreamed an Island" (2016) and "Songs of time Lost" (2014) with cellist Vincent Segal, explored songwriting without borders, the Hear My Voice EP is more inspired by British and North American folk.
"I wanted to go back to my first inspirations in terms of songwriting. So the songs are very much coming from the African-American blues traditions and English folk music."
Faccini's characteristic broken falsetto voice soars on the song Hope Dreams.
"The idea of hope dreams was simply the take on the idea that when someone's desperately hanging on to love and to a broken relationship, it's just completely hopeless. There's a sort of addiction to the idea of hope.
"I love canto flamenco and that whole very dramatic, nostalgic way of singing about love that you hear in the Mediterranean and also in southern Italian music. So I'm sort of taking that kind of language but using it in English."
Vintage Faccini, the song offers comfort even as you drown your sorrows.
Faccini was an artist before he became a musician so in addition to recording and mixing his music in his home studio in the Cevennes ...
"Some tracks have 300 different layers of vocals and most of them are me," says Ala.ni about her new album Acca. The London-born, Paris-based singer with a rare four-octave range beguiles us with her voice. The record is mainly her, a capella. With a bit of Iggy Pop.
She talks to us about how her great uncle the singer Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson "black and bisexual in the 30's" gave her a lot of courage to be herself and "do things differently".
We chat about how Iggy Pop took a shine to her and ending up doing vocals in French on the song "Le Diplomate" inspired by a real-life encounter with ... a diplomat.
Following the success of her debut album "You and I" she's grown a lot in confidence and now feels happy speaking her mind on a whole load of subjects.
"I’m all for calling people out right now whether it’s about sex, race or whatever. I’ve not been allowed to have an opinion for many years as a black female, this is a new thing for me. I'm like 'wow, I can talk, people listen'.
"My mum didn’t have this. She doesn't want me to talk but I will talk. So here I am."
Listen to her, in the podcast.
Follow Ala.ni on facebook and twitter
Check out the album Acca
On her latest album Lucid, Nigerian singer-songwriter Asa explores the many colours of love: warm, dark, brilliant, somber, the joy, the longing, the wanting. But also the violence that can seep into a relationship and destroy lives.
As the world wakes up to the reality of sexual violence against women, Asa's song Murder in the USA, the opening track on the album, couldn't be more pertinent. She was fully aware that femicide was getting a lot of media attention, but personal experience also pushed her to write the song.
"I grew up in Lagos seeing my parents having this problem, especially my Mum, and wondering why she would have to allow herself go through that.
"I think murder in the USA is really about being aware of the signs and leaving. I feel like my Mum saw the signs but she thought society expects you to be married, to be with your husband, with the children, to stay.
"Now I’m like 'no I don’t have to go through that', to buckle under the weight of society...things are changing now."
Lucid is Asa's fourth album and comes five years after Bed of Stone; five years during which she began and ended a toxic relationship. "It was a big deal in my life," she says. But she's come out stronger.
"I've come to a stage of lucidity that I don't have to stay in a relationship if I don't want to. I think I love myself more and need to invest more in that idea. I have to go against what everyone expects of me."
Asa is on tour in Germany and France. Check out dates here
Follow Asa on facebook
La Mòssa are a five-piece band of female vocalists who excel at polyphonic chant. They've just released their debut album A Mòssa and talk to us about reinterpreting folksongs they love in a free and playful way in the spirit of Nina Tirabouchon, a 1920s Italian cabaret artist with hip swing to die for.
La Mòssa means movement in Italian. Listen in to find out why that suits the women so well.
La Mòssa: Lilia Ruocco, Emmanuelle Ader, Sara Giommetti, Gabrielle Gonin, Aude Marchand
Upcoming concerts: Le petit Duc in Aix-en-Provence, 5 March 2019; Jardin de Verre in Cholet, 26 March 2019; Peniche Spectacle in Rennes 27 March 2019.
Follow the band on facebook
La Mòssa are a five-piece band of female vocalists who excel at polyphonic chant. They've just released their debut album A Mòssa and talk to us about reinterpreting folksongs they love in a free and playful way in the spirit of Nina Tirabouchon, a 1920s Italian cabaret artist with hip swing to die for.
La Mòssa means movement in Italian. Listen in to find out why that suits the women so well.
La Mòssa: Lilia Ruocco, Emmanuelle Ader, Sara Giommetti, Gabrielle Gonin, Aude Marchand
Upcoming concerts: Le petit Duc in Aix-en-Provence, 5 March 2019; Jardin de Verre in Cholet, 26 March 2019; Peniche Spectacle in Rennes 27 March 2019.
Follow the band on facebook
Sona Jobarteh comes from a long West African tradition of Griots and kora players from Mali and The Gambia. She's become one of the rare women in the world to master the 24-string instrument which is traditionally reserved to men. She talks to RFI about working within the tradition to be better able to expand it.
Sona Jobarteh's grandfather was Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, an oral historian and hereditary praise singer from the Mandinka people of The Gambia. Her cousin is Mali's Toumani Diabaté. Her brother began teaching her to play the kora when she was just three, but when she decided she wanted to make a career out of it, she turned to her father Sanjally Jobarteh.
"I always had a very natural connection with the older repertoire," Jobarteh explains as we sit at her hotel before a concert in Paris's New Morning early November. "That's why I really wanted to study with my father because he is very much an expert in that style of playing."
Her father was a demanding task-master.
"He told me that he will teach me as his child, not as his daughter, not as his son but as his child which is no gender. And also he told me that the one thing he wanted in return for teaching me is that I aim to be just a good kora player not a good female kora player."
"He said if someone listens to you they shouldn’t be able to say it’s a girl or it’s a boy it’s just a good kora player."
Jobarteh has gone on to become a very successful and respected kora player, vocalist and instrumentalist, demonstrating to her own and fuutre generations that "you don't have to conform to outside influence to be successful in the music industry. You can actually represent your tradition, you can even sing in your own language without having to bend to pressure not to do so."
She did just that in 2011, sinigng in Mandekan on her album Fasiya.
"Fasiya was all about my heritage and I saw it as a risk or a challenge because I’m no longer singing in English, I’m no longer playing any European instruments, and it’s traditional.
"I was not sure if I would get any audience, but I made the conscious decision to prefer to do what means something to me and have very few people follow than try to conform to something that is not true to ...
Emmanuel π Djob started out singing gospel in his native Cameroon and is building a successful career blues-soul career in France. He heads up the six-piece AfroSoul Gang, but it’s performing alone with guitar that his gravel-rough baritone voice, raw emotion and soul really shines through. We caught him performing live on RFI's Musiques du Monde.
Emmanuel π Djob started out with Bayembi’s International, a pan African gospel formation popular in Cameroon in the 1990s.
After settling in France, he helped to revive and renew the gospel tradition, performing with the Black & White Gospel Singers and Gospelize it!
He released his debut album, Seven Minutes, in 2008, drawing on the blues, pop and rock to explore the theme of the death penalty.
He went on to record a series of albums called Terrassa’s Conversessions in 2010.
In 2013 he created a storm on the TV music talent show The Voice singing Ray Charles’ Georgia on My Mind.
“Ray Charles, Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Hugh Masekela, they were my musical foundations,” he says. “It was normal that I sing one of Ray Charles’ songs.”
“That song meant a lot to me because I’m in exile here and it’s a song about love and exile."
In January 2016 he packed the huge Zenith concert hall in Montpellier with his band AfroSoull Gang, accompanied by the 500-strong Afro Soul Mass Choir.
He’s taking this ensemble to Cameroon in December “to Yaoundé and to Douala, just to show to people that Cameroonians can sing together, even if we have problems".
π Djob’s latest album Get on Board ! is resolutely afro-soul. The stand out track is Sons of Lilith, Daughter of Kham on which he weaves the legend of a demonised woman and cursed man into an allegory of how he sees the world.
His live rendition of the song on Musiques du Monde is a treasure: the sound of a singer-songwriter possessed by the need to sing and communicate about his dispossesed African ancestors.
Emmanuel π Djob in concert in Pessac 7/8 December 2019, with AfroSoull Gang in Montpellier 29 February 2020.
Follow him on Facebook
A decade after their acclaimed album Tweet Tweet, Abraham Inc. return with Together We Stand, using their eclectic mix of klezmer, funk and hip hop to show that different religions, ages, sexes and races get along. David Krakauer, Fred Wesley and Socalled talk to RFI about how the U.S. president’s “Muslim” ban got them back in the studio making great music.
“The band is kind of crazy mix of just about anybody you can imagine,” says Socalled, a Canadian beatmaker who’s been working with Krakauer on reinventing klezmer for over a decade.
“Men, women, black, white, brown, Latino, Africans … we have basically Jewish culture and Yiddish culture meeting African American culture. And on the song Together We Stand we invited an Arabic percussionist Mohammed Raky, so there’s Arabic percussion.”
The title track was written by Fred Wesley, master funk trombonist and James Brown's former musical director.
"Together WE stand is also the peoples of the world," Wesley says, “all races and all nationalities and all religions of the world standing together in the name of peace.
"If we all could stand together, could listen to each other we would find out we have more in common than we have differences.”
“I’m a black man and you’re a white farmer, let me just tell you what I go through and you tell me what you go through.. and it’ll be the same thing you know,” he continues, in reference to some of the hate speech that's come out of the woodwork since Trump's election in 2016.
Lullaby for Charlottesville
Socalled wrote the song Lullaby for Charlottesville in tribute to Heather Hever, killed at a white supremacist rally in 2017.
“It’s an ode to the memory of Heather Hayer, the young woman who was murdered by someone from the white supremacist movement that Donald Trump said “there’s good people on both sides”. It sort of paints a story in music of voices coming together to pay homage to that tragic moment in American history.”
The Hippies were right, weren't they?
Krakauer wrote the song The Hippies Were Right. Though he was only a teenager at the time of Woodstock, he “marched against the war in Vietnam" and hung out in East Village, an old Jewish quarter of NY popular with hippies. He was inspired by the fact they believed they could change things.
“They were protesting the Vietnam war, they were talking about defending the environment, about love among people and I thought this makes sense.
"Politically ...
Nick Gold has been at the helm of World Circuit Records for close to three decades. The label has produced some of the best world music around: Buena Vista Social Club, Ali Farka Touré, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté, Cheikh Lô ... and most recently Trio Da Kali and Fatoumata Diawara. The London-based producer has a nose for talent but maintains being allowed to work with such artists makes him the lucky one.
In 2018, World Circuit merged with BMG and together they recently released remastered versions of four of their cornerstone albums: Ali Farka Touré's Savane, Omara Portuondo's Buena Vista Social Club Presents, Radio Tarifa's Rumba Argelina and Guillermo Portabales' El Carretero.
Gold reflects on three decades of helping to get great music from West Africa and Cuba to western audiences even if the musicians in question didn't need telling it could travel!
He also talks to us about the magic of recording Buena Vista Social Club in Egrem studios in Havana in 1996 and driving Oumou Sangaré's pink car on the streets of Bamako.
Listen to what it's like being a leading world music producer and extracts of the great music he's helped get out there in this week's podcast.
Check out World Circuit Records on facebook
Raashan Ahmad is an American DJ, MC and hip hop artist with a big heart and a sharp mind. A thought-provoking rapper whose latest album The Sun explores joy and pain, hope and despair: the loss of his mum, the birth of his son. "Balance is something I've strived for... I can never get out of my mind how beautiful things are at the exact same time that they’re horrible."
"Do you know what it feels like to be a black person?" asks American comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory on the opening track No.
Ahmad does and it hasn't always felt good.
"The song's inspired by the police killing of black Americans in the United States," says Ahmad, "that’s pretty much it and my experience with it. I speak about being pulled over with my father when I was about seven and that was my first experience with the police."
He raps over a bed of free-jazz inspired saxophones.
"I love the Sun Ra Arkestra, Sony Rollins, Yusef Lateef ... these American jazz musicians who were playing this type of frenetic type of energy and I felt like that was very relevant to how I felt about what’s happening now."
How do you not turn to hate when you're being singled out just because your black?
"I'm not sure how to get over that. I see the trauma and how it affected me and affects countless other black Americans. And these things are not taken into account, no one speaks about them really. You just have to bury and put it somewhere."
Ahmad has put it into his music. The song Breathe reflects on how to cope with the physical stress that "holding in" can cause.
"Music has always been a therapy for me and I think for most musicians. And a place that feels the safest in a lot of ways."
One of his heroes is Nina Simone, a hugely talented but troubled soul if ever there was one. He does a version of her great song I Got Life.
"I love this song, she talks about the things she doesn't have, and then she goes into all the beautiful things that she is and that she does have. It’s always touched me that song because it doesn’t leave out a part of emotion, you’re not just a happy person, not just a sad person and you can give thanks and be terribly saddened by a lot at the same time."
The experience of feeling ...
Dubbed "the golden voice of West Africa" Pat Thomas embodied the glory days of Ghanaian highlife in the 60s and 70s alongside the great Ebo Taylor. The music fell out of fashion in the 80s but Thomas never stopped singing. He made a much-praised comeback in 2015 with the Kwashibu Area Band thanks to Ghanian musician and producer Kwame Yeboah and together they've now released another gem: Obiaa! (Everyone).
Listen to Thomas and Yeboah, two generations of highlife, discussing their love of the music, where the "high" in highlife came from and how the younger generation is discovering the importance of this music, the precursor to Nigeria's afrobeat.
"They themselves realise you have to go back to the roots," says Thomas. "We're doing lots of collaborations and it's working out good."
Obiaa! is out on Strut Records.
Pat Thomas and the Kwashibu Area Band are on a European tour. You'd be a fool to miss them live. Check out their facebook page for details.
Natacha Atlas began exploring jazz and Middle Eastern melodies on her 2015 album Myriad Road with Franco-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf. She goes one step further on Strange Days, co-written and produced with British-Egyptian jazz violinist Samy Bishai. An accomplishment for the vocalist at the height of her talents. But who says she's learned so much from working with Bishai.
Collectif Medz Bazar is a six-piece 'urban diaspora band' based in Paris. With roots its Armenia, Turkey, France and the US, they draw on the rich traditions of all those cultures, and sing in all four languages. But the blend of Turkish and Armenian musical cultures, based on deep friendship, adds to band's originality. Their third album 'O', meaning love, is testimony to that.
The band formed in 2012 following a jam session on a barge in Paris.
"I’m sure it's no concidence that we met," says double bassist Shushan Kerovpyan. "As Turkish and Armenians I think we were thirsty also of meeting each other and exchanging. But we never thought 'OK we’re gonna do an Armenian-Turkish band and we’re gonna have this discourse of fraternity and stuff'.
"It’s a friendship first of all and actually it’s also a form of love and that’s what drives us."
Their new, third, album is called 'O' which in the band's invented language means love. It includes bluegrass and rap as well as arrangements of Turkish and Armenian folksongs and their own compositions.
"We are very focused on music," says percussionist Elâ Nuroğlu and maybe we want to change it with music, not with our discourse about the music."
Nuroğlu plays a two-sided drum called the duvul, and much of their percussive-heavy music and songs are dancefloor friendly.
"When you hear the music, the language, you start to dance and enjoy it," says the 29-year old Turkish percussionist, "you can share something with someone else who doesn't have the same history or origins. That’s it."
Collectif Medz Bazar are:
Ela Nuroğlu: percussions, vocals Ezgi Sevgi Can: clarinet, saxophone, vocals Marius Pibarot: violin, cuatro, double bass, vocals Sevana Tchakerian: vocals, accordion, shvi, percussions Shushan Kerovpyan: double bass, vocals Vahan Kerovpyan: vocals, percussions
Follow the band on Facebook
Abdou Mboup's skills as a percussionist and kora player have led to collaborations with the likes of Johnny Clegg, Claude Nougaro, Nina Simone and Michel Pettruciani. After 25 years in the U.S. he's returned to France to build his career in Europe. He talks to RFI about his new album African Lullaby and the role of the tami (talking drum) in his native griot culture in Senegal. "I like to call it our cell phone," he says.
Mboup grew up in a griot family in Kebemer, north Senegal, playing the drums in the courtyard from the age of three "like every griot kid”.
The tami (talking drum) was used to spread messages from village to village.
“Whatever the rhythm people could understand [whether] it was about a wedding, death or a snake biting someone. That’s why I’ve always said it was our cell phone.”
His uncles were master drummers, his grandmother an accomplished singer, and he went on to join Xalam, Senegal's top band in the 1970s.
“I was the first musician to incorporate the African percussion into mbalax [a popular dance music]," Mboup remembers. "I composed the first hit in the history of mbalax," it was Daida, with Xalam," in 1975.
The need to explore other music
Mboup didn’t want to restrict himself to one genre and in 1995 he left for the U.S. where he ventured into funk, fusion, jazz and world music.
“I don’t want to repeat myself, I have to go and explore other music,” he explains. "Some people called my music Afro-fusion, others called it Afro-jazz, my way is to mix everything together.”
His openness, inventiveness and sheer energy when drumming has led to collaborations with an array of top singers and musicians: Claude Nougaro, Nina Simone, Johnny Clegg, Michel Pettruciani, Harry Belafonte, Jon Hassel.. but to mention a few.
He was percussionist with French jazzman Eddy Louiss for a decade, and made two albums with French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.
He also played percussion on Scottish rock band Simple Minds' 1989 Album Street Fighting Years.
Mboup recognises working with such a broad range of people has expanded his own musical culture, but why did they turn to him?
Nougaro described Mboup as "a percussion genius"; Johnny Clegg was impressed by the many ways he expressed rhythm. After frosty beginnings in concert with Nina Simone in 1972 in Paris, even she came to appreciate his talent.
Perhaps his griot ancestry is part of the explanation.
“Before, only the griots could play music, now everybody can play ...
Congolese guitarist and singer Kiala Nzavotunga has played with Fela Kuti's Egypt 80 band, founded Europe's first Afrobeat band Ghettoblaster in Paris, and recorded with avant garde bands in Japan. He's now released his first solo album Money withThe Afroblaster. He talks to RFI about some memorable moments in his 30-year career.. including being helped and insulted by Fela.
"Afrobeat is like reggae, you have to send a message. You have to be politically, ideologically [aware] if you want to do Afrobeat."
Kiala Nzavotunga, now 66, was born to Angolan parents and grew up in Kinshasha. He spent his early years as a musician playing with "big guys" like "Le Grand Kalle" in Africa Jazz and joined the soukous rumba band Negro Success.
But he left Kinshasa when he "got tired of playing for Mobuto" and headed for Nigeria in 1974.
Poor and without contacts, he sold his shoes to pay the ticket to Lagos with the sole aim of asking Fela for help.
"He gave me 50 naira, in those days that was 50 dollars, I left and went to start my new life."
He finally joined Egypt 80 in 1981.
It was a difficult beginning. Fela asked him to play Cross Examination and counted him in.
"Fela shouted 'stop, motherfu**er," this is not an African beat,' my heart start to beat like a drum," Kiala recalls, his eyes popping at the recollection of it.
He wanted to leave but stayed and learned to play Afrobeat guitar in a more percussive way. It worked, he stayed with the band two years and recorded the album Original Suffer Head.
They use us
Kiala's first solo album Money recorded by The Afroblaster (with French percussionist Cyril Atef) features an honorable cover version of Fela's Sorrow, Tears and Blood.
And the song They use us is very much in the spirit of Fela's Pan-Africanism.
"I’m talking about Europeans, the white people that came to colonise Africa. I say 'they use us, now they don't want us'. They don’t want immigrants to come here, they forgot what they did.
"When I was a little boy I didn’t know anything about life, and in school we were learning history, geography of the Europeans and I ask myself why not African history. I didn’t know about Africa when I was at school, we learn about Congo, about Belgium, the king, but I didn’t know the continent."
Kiala admits he owes a lot to Fela.
"He made me understand being African you have to know your roots before thinking of another ...
Ibibio Sound Machine is an eight-piece London-based music collective blending West-African funk and disco with shades of post-punk and electro. Lead singer Eno Williams talks to RFI about the band's latest album, Doko Mien, and singing in Ibibio - the language of her Nigerian roots.
Lead singer Eno Williams sings mainly in Ibibio, a language from the southern part of Nigeria.
"A lot of the stories that I tell on the record are stories I got told as a child, growing up with the Ibibio language. I felt it was very important to keep the story-telling authentic," Williams told RFI.
Not only have the stories inspired her songwriting, but Williams also found the "very rhythmic" Ibibio language blends well with the musical roots of her fellow bandmates who come from Ghana, Brazil, Trinidad and Australia.
"I call it 'The United Colours of Music'. All that mixture is what makes the sound."
Ibibo Sound Machine picked up a big following in France after performing at the Transmusicales festival in Rennes, western France, in 2013 shortly after forming.
Their third album, Doko Mien, translates as Tell Me.
To find out what she has to say, listen to the podcast by clicking on "PLAY" above.
Ibibio Sound Machine is Eno Williams (vocals), Alfred Kari Bannerman (guitar), Anselmo Netto (percussion), Jose Joyette (drums), Derrick McIntyre (bass), Tony Hayden (trombone, synth), Scott Baylis (trumpet, synth), and Max Grunhard (saxophone, synth).
In concert: Village Underground, Lisbon, 14 September, then touring in UK. Dates here.
Follow the band on facebook
When Erick Iglesias Rodríguez discovered the power of groove, he quit medical school, went to Havana and morphed into Cimafunk. His 2017 album Terapia (Therapy) aims to make you sweat it out on the dancefloor. It worked in the Americas. Now he's determined to set Europe alight. Starting with France.
This is the therapy Cimafunk proposes at his concerts: "It's about having fun, it’s about dance, it’s about getting some people close to you, it’s about sexuality, friendship and dance and sweating. It’s all human, it’s about meat".
No surprise then that Billboard dubbed the 29-year-old singer and composer Cuba's revelation of 2018 and his showmanship has drawn comparisons with James Brown.
Rodríguez' sound is based on Afro-Cuban rhythms fused with American funk music. That basically takes him back to his African roots as a descendent of cimarrones, the Spanish word for African runaways who hid in the forests to escape enslavement. Hence the moniker Cimafunk.
"African music is in every piece of my work because I make danceable music," he told RFI. "All the groove we have in Cuba, most came from Africa. We have the sound of Pilón, mambo, cha-cha-chá. All this musical style in the beginning came from African drums."
People in Havana have been soaking up Cimafunk's therapy since 2017, scaling walls to try and sneak into his late night concerts. Such is the enthusiasm he's begun adapting his sound and changing the songs in relation to the way the public reacts.
The song Me Voy (I'm going) is basically an everyday story from the streets of Havana: "You look at the person and the person looks at you and you both know that you wanna meet each other". It's a kind of 'your place or mine?' song about living the moment.
"What I’m trying to do is make you go to my concert and forget your troubles. You just have one or two hours of the show, of dancing, to figure out what you’re gonna do with your body."
For anyone lucky enough to catch the young singer, composer and producer in action, then do!
If you want to hear more about funk in Cuba, the impact internet has had on his rapid rise to fame (lots), the origins of the album (ski station in France) and of course listen to the music, then check out the podcast.
Cimafunk play at Parc Floral as part of the Paris Jazz Festival on 25 Juillet 2019.
For other tour dates, follow Cimafunk on facebook
The official website here
Franco-Algerian singer Souad Asla grew up in Béchar in south west Algeria listening to, and loving, the region's traditional repertoires. While women have played a role in passing on that musical culture, they rarely perform in public. Asla has changed that. In 2015 she formed Lemma the first all-female ensemble from the Saoura to tour internationally.
"Women have always been part of the musical heritage of the desert. Women have sung, danced and played percussion for centuries. But behind closed doors."
Saoud Asla has brought these women out of the shadows and onto the prestigious Institut du monde Arabe in Paris to perform at the Arabofolies festival where we chat before the soundcheck.
Lemma (meaning union or gathering in Arabic) goes back to 2015 when Asla set out to try and preserve and promote the rich musical heritage of her native Béchar.
"I brought these women together to play and above all preserve the vast and rich oral heritage from this region because it’s dying out," she explains.
Musical genres, both religious and profane, like malhun, gnawi, zeffani, hadra are traditionally performed at weddings and funerals but are also shared between women at informal gatherings where they meet to "discuss and support one another".
Asla brought together nine women, aged 20 to 79, all from the region of Béchar where she was born. With the exception of Hasna El Becharia, the now famous gumbri player and vocalist, the other singers and percussionists were unaccustommed to the limelight.
"I had to go and convince their husbands, their brothers," she explains. "I set up residencies over there, kidnapped them and locked them up in a house in the desert for 10 days."
The women had music running through their veins but were unused to arrangements or using headphones.
"They’ve worked very hard, and they’ve become a lot more professional," Asla says proudly.
The women sing, dance and play percussion.
"Before going on stage, the women pray and put on their veils but they’re brightly coloured and shimmering," says Asla, They dress up, put on make up, they’re beautiful, they’re happy with themselves. That’s the Islam I grew up with."
The ensemble defends that tolerant, open Islam on stage.
"Our message is obvious when you see us performing in public: freedom of expression, freedom for women, a real place for women in music around the world, whether in Algeria or here in France.
"Because even here, it’s difficult to get our music heard. As a Maghrebi woman, I don’t know what’s happening, but doors ...
A-Wa sing electronic-infused versions of Yemenite folk songs in Arabic. They proudly defend their Israeli Yemenite identity on their second album Bayti Fi Rasi, inspired by the story of their great-grandmother Rachel, a Jewish refugee brought from Yemen to Israel in 1949 as part of Operation Magic Carpet.
Tair, Liron and Tagel Haim came to fame with their 2016 debut album, Habib Galbi, on which they set traditional Yemenite songs to pulsating electro beats.
But Bayti Fi Rasi is a 14-track album of original compositions, based on the life and times of their great-grandmother, Rachel.
"On this new album Bayti Fi Rasi we talk about the notion of home and is life a matter of luck or fate," says Tair, the eldest of the three sisters, as they prepare to perform at Paris's Café de la Danse. "These are the themes and issues that our great-grandma Rachel dealt with.
"Bayti Fi Rasi means my home is in my head. Whenever she was asked in Yemen why she travelled from one place to another she said 'I can't stay in one place, my home is in my head'."
As a Jew and a single mother, Rachel suffered discrimination and wasn't allowed an education.
"She didn't know how to read and write, she couldn't express herself freely," Tair continues, "this is why we care about letting her voice be heard. It's really important for us in this album."
"We really felt she was present in the studio," says Liron, "it was very challenging and emotional to blend our voices with her voice."
On the video for the song Mudbira (a colloquial word for unlucky or miserable) A-Wa dress up as fiesty shepherdesses, delivering a strong feminist message to men who might dare to mess around with their goats.
Rachel's problems continued once she arrived in Israel in 1949, along with some 49,000 other Yemenite Jews.
"Where will I stake a home? You have a tent for now. Or at least a small shack. Along with four other families," A-Wa sing on Hana Mash Al Yaman (Here is not home).
"They were placed in tent camps, they couldn't work and had to use coupons for food," Tair explains. "The country was young and couldn't include everyone. It was sort of a mess."
"And you can't really disconnect the person from his or homeland and culture," Tagel adds.
Pride in Mizrahi culture
A-Wa are proud of their heritage but resolutely anchored in the present, mashing up traditional Yemenite headdress and costumes with sneakers.
They feel much more at ease ...
JS Ondara began writing songs as a kid in Nairobi, obsessed with American artists like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. His dream of following in Dylan's footsteps became reality when, in 2013, he reached the U.S. He released his acclaimed debut album Tales of America in February this year.
JS Ondara would appear to be living the dream. After releasing a remarkable debut album recounting the tales of living as an immigrant in America, he opened for Neil Young on his US tour in May.
"It's a bit of a dream, I still have to pinch myself," the 26 year old self-taught musician told RFI at a recent sold-out concert in Paris's Nouveau Casino.
"I'm essentially a folk musician, I have a wandering heart and a wondering mind and that's why I'm here now. I'm in Paris playing folk songs."
He talked to us about the difficult beginnings, grappling with the complexities of the American Dream and why, for the moment, he has "said goodbye" to the boy from Nairobi.
Listen to the podcast at the audio link and read some of the highlights below.
On his place in President Donald Trump's America
"There’s definitely some kind of growing intolerance towards immigration in his era and I’m sort of trying to navigate that space and trying to shine some light through living out the American dream and show that’s something that can still be achievable. Maybe my place in Trump’s America is to succeed as an immigrant and show that it is possible and that there is a place for immigration and for immigrants, that there’s value in it still.
On questioning the American dream
Writing the whole record, it’s a juxtaposition of what the dream is and how sometimes it turns into a nightmare once you’re in America ... the romance with firearms that America seems to have and there’s racism obviously and lots of other things that trouble America. But despite all that it still ends up becoming this place that people look up to in some way. So "that dream but not really" is what I was trying to convey in some fashion.
On his family back in Nairobi
My family is mostly puzzled, they didn’t really know this was a version of me that could exist in the universe. They had no way they could conceptualise that because of how we grew up and because of what was around us. They’re largely puzzled but they’re happy for me. Music wasn’t really part of culture back home, ...
French avant garde jazzman Michel Godard is one of the world's leading players of the serpent, a Renaissance wind instrument, ancestor of the tuba and which was first used to accompany Gregorian chant. The instrument's connection to the sacred is wonderfully rendered on his latest album Awakening recorded with Azerbaijan's Alim Qasimov.
Godard started out as a classical tuba player and joined the Radio France Philharmonic orchestra aged just 18. His love of early classical music pushed him to look for an instrument he could play it on properly.
He discovered the serpent and "completely fell in love with it".
Made from wood and covered in leather with a mouthpiece made of cow horn, it has a softer sound than the tuba, closer to the human voice.
"The serpent is a sacred instrument," says Godard. "Like most religions, [the Catholic Church] had a wind instrument to make the connection between earth and heaven. And the serpent had this role."
Godard has worked with scores of musicians and singers from both the jazz and classical music world and his latest adventure, Awakening, is with renowned Azerbaijan singer Alim Qasimov.
The serpent offers a counterpoint to Qasimov's soaring maqam, his variations on Azeri poetry and traditional chants. With enchanting results.
"Being on stage with someone like Alim Qasimov, you immediately feel when he’s singing that it’s not him, there is something coming to him, that passes through him," Godard explains.
"He is completely connected with something else, you can call it what you want: it can be God, energy, creativity, something is coming through him, this is absolutely sure, and to be on stage with him is wonderful. I never felt this so strong."
Listen to the full interview to hear about how Godard and Qasimov met, worked together and the fascinating history of the serpent: its French origins, fall from grace and revival thanks to a British trio.
Michel Godard and Azim Qasimov play at the Morgenland festival on 14 June 2019.
Awakening is out on Buda Musique
After a third album I don't dress fine in tribute to American blues singer Bessie Smith, French jazz singer Sarah Lenka has released Women's Legacy. Her subtle rendition of work songs and prison songs convey the suffering and resilience of several African American women in the early 20th century.
Since her 2008 debut album Am I Blue, Lenka has had a thing about the tragic lives of some women singers.
"From the beginning of my career I really was touched by women, how they’ve been abused," she says.
"It started with Billie Holiday and then later on came Bessie Smith. I really like the way she sang her story. Whether it was horrible or beautiful, she really opened her mouth and [accepted] what she was."
Delving into Bessie "Empress of the Blues" Smith's repertoire, Lenka fell upon No More My Lawd, a prison song that had been recorded by American ethnomusicologists Alan and John Lomax. During the 1930s and 40s they travelled widely in the Southern States recording work songs, spirituals and folk tales sung by prisoners and former slaves.
The songs were not meant to be sung to the public and Lenka was struck by their raw energy.
"I was really blown away by the fact it was not songs but just chant, just words with a melody."
She does a heartfelt but far from maudlin arrangement of The story of Barbara Allen, a traditional 17th century Scottish ballad Alan Lomax recorded at the women's dormitory at Raiford penitentiary in 1939. It was sung by African American inmate Hule "Queen" Hines.
"She was just singing whatever came through her head," says Lenka. "That really touched me, you're just saying what you lived through...in a very intimate way."
Lenka's album begins with Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around. This stirring spiritual became a kind of anthem for the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s and was famously recorded by Sweet Honey in the Rock.
She does justice to the bluesy Trouble so hard, famously sampled by American electronic musician Moby on Natural Blues in 2000, but originally written and performed by American folk singer Vera Hall in 1937 and again recorded by Lomax.
Women can relate to each other
There's humour on the song Oh Death - a "conversation" with death first recorded by American gospel and folk singer Bessie Jones.
"Oh Death walked up to the sinner's gate, Said I believe you have waited now a little too late, Your fever now is ...
Omo Bello was born in Nigeria but trained and found success here in France. She's recorded a solo album of Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, was nominated for a Victoires de la musique award, and most recently performed in the presence of President Macron to mark the abolition of slavery in France. She talks to RFI about making her way up and using her success to develop classical music back home in Lagos.
"Looking back I realise how hard it was, I didn’t realize while climbing because I was carried by this huge need to sing, to make music, this passion. It’s looking back that I realised oh my!"
Omo Bello laughs heartily as she recalls arriving in France in 2005 to study at the Conservatoire in Paris after she was spotted by the Institut Francais back in Lagos.
She came alone, didn't speak the language, armed simply with a passion for singing and an iron will to succeed.
She was colourblind at first and despite often being the only black face on stage or in the audience, she tries to keep that naivety.
"If not, it makes it too hard to express the beauty, the joy, the love that you feel when you want to make music.
"You can chose to look and say 'oh dear lord this is terrible there should be more colour equality' or I personally chose not to see. I just see human beings, I see people making music, loving to make music."
Second album
Bello's first album was chamber music, lieder by Mahler, she's performed Haydn and loves Bellini. She says her ideal second recording would be opera arias with an orchestra.
"I love Italian music, bel canto, and I also love French romantic operas, so that means for me a good mix of French and Italian opera arias. An orchestra would be "l’idéal" for a second album."
Becoming a role model
In 2017 she returned to Lagos to perform at Muson, the Musical Society of Nigeria, and was amazed by the reaction.
"I wasn’t expecting the reception in terms of awareness of what I do, who I am, because opera, obviously is not well known in Nigeria."
She hadn't counted on the powers of social media.
"What I realised was that a huge community of classical music lovers had formed online through social media and many got to know me on youtube, facebook etc.
People came to her with "emotional stories of how they’d encountered classical music" and it had changed their perceptions. It ...
Inspired by the huge scope of traditional music in Chad, DJs Nickodemus and Djbuosis began working with musicians in N'djamena in 2018. They talk to RFI about helping them record their first album From Desert to Douala: a subtle compilation of life-affirming songs with an electro beat.
The album was recorded in a pop up studio in N'djamena in 2018: the latest episode in the inspiring Hape Collective initiative, founded by djbuosis in Havana in 2016, now active in 10 countries.
"It aims to connect the dots between musical industries and music talents" djbuosis tells RFI "and there's a lot of talent in Chad".
But it's difficult to produce and record music in the country so "many musicians go abroad". He cites Afrotronix, currently Chad's biggest musical export, but who works out of Canada.
Hape supports talent on the ground.
In N'djamena, Djbuosis met musicians Yaya Idriss (Chad), Samy aka Gari Boy (Cameroon), Stingo (Togo) and Wahlid (Cameroon) among others.
New York DJ and producer Nickodemus, founder of Wonderwheel Recordings, then brought along state of the art equipment and decades of experience on the dancefloor to run DJing and electronic workshops in the capital.
The band, Pulo NDJ, was formed and From Desert to Douala is the fruit of their unique, leaderless collaboration: a celebration of a rich traditional musical culture and the wonders of modern technology.
Listen to the two DJs sharing their love of the project and country as they introduce us to some of the 11 original compositions.
From Desert to Douala is available on Wonderwheel Recordings
After his 2017 debut album Chanting, largely inspired by indigenous kanak culture in his native New Caledonia, Marcus Gad continues to enrich roots reggae on his new EP Enter a Space, with a meditative strain verging on the liturgical. Recorded with Parisian beatmaker Tamal, the six songs draw heavily on India's Advaita Vedanta philosophy in which life is transient, the important stuff is elsewhere.
Gad grew up with reggae on the island of New Caledonia in the Pacific.
"We listen to island music," Gad told RFI, "but also the kanak people of New Caledonia, tribal people, they have a really strong resistance and rebel culture so Jamaican music was really a vector for rebellion in the '80s."
On a visit to Ethiopia at a time when he was "looking for some kind of discipline [...] and direction" he found the roots of rastafarai. "This spirituality became my directive, I thought it was plain, simple and natural."
India has also opened his mind and "the whole lyrical part of [Enter a Space] is really influenced by the Advaita Vedanta philosophy.
"It says you're not this body and you're not this mind, so the whole philosophy is based on how to separate yourself from the illusion that you are the body. You're a soul and cannot be influenced by any physical experience."
The video for the song River was shot in the Indian holy city of Varanasi.
"The song River is really a metaphor speaking about the pathway of the soul from birth to death in this life and it’s comparing the human soul to the water of the river."
The video for Live up to the day was filmed in both Delhi and the Himalayas, and features Youssouf Diabate on n'goni, a three-stringed lyre popular in west Africa.
"Tamal likes to incorporate lots of world music instruments, it’s something we like to do because I feel that reggae music can accommodate a lot of outside influences."
They continue in that vein on the song Inna Nature featuring Burkinabe griot Losso Keita.
"A great, amazing singer," says Gad, "the song has this really spacey feeling. It’s a style we’re not used to playing so this is why we invited Losso and he’s really got this unique voice. If people get the occasion to hear him singing it would really be a blessing for them."
Marcus Gad is on tour with Enter a Space. Next concert 27 April, 2019, at La Bifurk, Grenoble.
For further ...
Zakouska is a Russian hors d'oeuvre you knock back with a glass of vodka, but the band serve up a meatier dish. Their mastery of the violin, lyra, accordion and guitar, coupled with great complicity as a quartet, means they can take sounds from the Mediterranean, throw in some country guitar and clucking hens, and it makes perfect sense and exciting listening.They share their third album La Criée.
Elodie Messmer (violin), Arthur Bacon (accordion), Aline Haelberg (violin/Cretan lyra) and Fabien Bucher (guitars) are classically-trained musicians. They met and began playing together a decade ago in Strasbourg, nurtured within the Assoce Pikante collective.
Their first album, Musique Roumaine Amoureuse, was largely reinterpretations of Romanian gypsy music; on the second, A Dos de Géants, they wove the occasional original melody into music from the Balkans. La Criée (Fish market) is, you might say, their coming-out album: original pieces inspired by their travels in Mediterranean ports in Crete, Corsica, Marseille, Athens and Istanbul.
Aspasia is a tribute to a woman bar owner in the south of Crete and gives pride of place to the lyra: a beautiful pear-shaped three-stringed lyre similar to the violin but which you play with the back of your nails rather than fingertips. Haelberg fell in love with it but admits "it's quite difficult," to master.
La Valse des Vagues (waltz of the waves) is a wonderful guitar and accordion two-hander, inspired by "a Greek-Turkish mode called saba but played in a more western way with influences from gypsy jazz and musette," says its composer, Bucher. "It's a sort of meeting between a musette accordionist and Greek buzuki player in a bar in Athens."
Lautari gypsy music, heady rebetiko blues, jazz... Zakouska revel in experimentation giving full vent to their desire for both slow, wistful melodies and more frenetic, turbo violin.
They have a wicked sense of humour too. A few appreciative hens found their way into the mix and make a notable contribution to Cowboy. Click on the photo above to listen to the hens and much more.
Zakouska official site here
Follow the band on facebook
Glen Hansard wrote his 4th solo album, This Wild Willing, on a residency in Paris. The city was an inspiration for the Irish-born Oscar-winning singer-songwriter. He tells RFI about feeling new freedom and anonymity in Paris, working with Iranian musicians and words of wisdom from Joni Mitchell.
In the summer of 2017, Hansard found himself in a city he didn’t know, surrounded by people and language he didn’t understand and far from the sea and mountains of his native Dublin which have been a constant source of inspiration. Paris allowed him to reconnect to the grime of urban life, to stop milking the idiom of the sea.
“The sea has been a huge part of my vernacular as a songwriter but you can draw on the same well too much,” he says.
“Paris is sitting in its juice, there’s so much history, you can really put your hand into the sky and pull out a line.” He pulled out many.
A year later he returned to record the album and in yet another chance encounter of "the Paris experience" ended up working with the Khoshravesh brothers from Iran whose sounds seemed strangely familiar - he explains why in the interview - along with a couple of experimental rock musicians.
“I knew I was dealing with a band I knew not how to control and that excited me.”
The juices flowed and This Wild Willing is the result of those largely improvised sessions: an edgy album, heavy on electric guitar, more resonant of his early years as lead singer with The Frames.
I've looked at clouds...
But the sea and weather vernacular are not dead and buried. Praise be. He describes the sound of the daf frame drum used by the Persian musicians “like clouds coming in”.
And the last track on the album Leave a light (he plays it live on the programme) is in tribute to his friend Danny Sheehy who died at sea shortly after they and two other musician friends completed a five-week journey along the Bay of Biscay. A magical trip on which “nobody showed a passport and the rules were no money, no beds, no complaining".
Music has been Hansard’s obsession since he left school aged 13 to try and make a career out of busking. In 2008 he won the Academy Award along with Czech Markéta Irglová for Best Original Song for 'Falling Slowly, he's starred in Alan Parker's 1991 film The ...
Senegalese-born singer Julia Sarr has become one of the most sought after backing vocalists in France. Salif Keita, Youssou N’Dour, Lokua Kanza and Francis Cabrel figure among the big names who’ve called on her powerful yet delicate mezzo soprano voice. With two solo albums and a third in the making, she’s building a successful solo career too, blending jazz and traditional percussion with her native Wolof. She talks to RFI about breaking the codes, working with her icon Miriam Makeba and the big break she got playing at Carnegie Hall in 2005.
Sarr is working on a third album with French pianist, composer and percussionist Fred Soul. She promises a similar jazz vibe with piano and percussion, but also some “sophisticated” Senegalese mbalax.
Prayers, the album’s first release, is out today.
“It’s about being in Europe or anywhere in the world, far from family,” she tells RFI, “and especially far from my mother who is getting old; I couldn’t really take care of her. So the song is really a social question for every migrant, everyone who goes abroad.”
“I don’t write happy songs,” Sarr says with a smile after singing Djelima (prayer) from her second album Daraludul Yow at RFI. Watch her in the video above.
“It says ‘there’s hair on my head, but inside there’s my spirit’. It’s a song about keeping faith even when life is really hard sometimes.”
The song Adjana (heaven) was inspired by the feeling of loss at the death of her sister and Sentoo (waiting for a child) “is about a woman taking legal action against nature” when she discovers she’s infertile.
Breaking the codes
Sarr partnered with French guitarist Patrice Larose for her debut album Set Luna (so I’ve observed) and was given a huge break when Youssou N’Dour invited them to play at Carnegie Hall in 2005 for his “Fresh Face of African Music” concert.
For her second album, Daraludul Yow, she was accompanied by five different pianists. It was described, quite aptly, as "a vision of the piano in the savanna".
She defends her mix of Wolof, traditional percussion and the quintessentially western piano.
“Africans can be allowed to do another music, not specially folk or traditional [...] it's much larger than what people can imagine.
"I try to casser les codes [break the codes], it’s really important not to think that Africans should do this music and not something else, it’s not fair.”
Julia Sarr is in concert at the festival ...