Sounds with an unmistakably Arabian and Middle Eastern flavour, the sort of music that passionately involves those who hear it. There are masterpieces that germinate far from the great circuits of the music business and pop up where you least expect them. This is the case of Fleuves de l’Âme by the Tunisian musician Houeida…
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Everything was against her. Aminata Gaye – Mina ‘the veiled one’ is her stage name – was raised in a traditional Senegalese family, when she realised that music made her a self-confident person, she knew there was no way back. She started to fight for her dreams and for a better society. “I cannot be…
Read moreCapable, beautiful and full of positive energy, the Egyptian soprano Fatma Said with her formidable voice has won her place on the most prestigious lyrical venues. Her success is also due to the efforts of her family who supported her every time the burden of prejudices and common places seemed to suggest she place her…
Read moreThe South African musician and composer was active both in music and in politics. At the cost of exile. Together with Hugh Masekela, a reference point for jazz enthusiasts. He died on 23 January, the same day on which, in 2018, Hugh Masekela passed away. The South African trombonist Jonas Gwangwa was just eighteen months…
Read moreThe Ghanaian band Santrofi demonstrates that Highlife music is still a rich and vital force. Artistically speaking, Highlife is the music of modern Ghana; a mix of pop and jazz not without ethnic influences imported from Nigeria in the first decades of the nineteen hundreds and exported to the world after the end of the…
Read moreThe New York music house Ostinato Records recently released a Groupe RTD album – a Djibouti band composed of civil servants – the first to take modern music beyond the borders of the country in the Horn of Africa. The international diffusion of modern music in the Horn of Africa came late on the scene…
Read moreThe head of a musical movement that is both cultural and profitable, Michael Kwesi Owusu Addo, known professionally as Sarkodie, achieved this position due to the stylistic ductility and the quality of his texts in the Twi language. With the international emergence of modern African music, in the eighties, a number of stars of that…
Read moreEvocative music, blending ancestral melodies and pop rhythms. “I hear our ancestors encouraging us to find our Promised Land and challenge injustice.” The Shona People of Zimbabwe love the mbira, a Sub-Saharan musical instrument. The mbira is a small wooden tablet (often about the width of two hands beside each other) on top of which…
Read moreHis name is Steven Umoh but in the world of music, he is known by all as Obongjayar. One of the rising stars of new African music, he is one of the best-known personalities on the contemporary Nigerian scene. His style ranges from funk to electronic, mixing melodies, rap and talking, modernist soul and Afrobeat.…
Read moreHis eighties hit Yeke Yeke made him one of the prime artists of nascent world music. The singer and musician Mory Kanté has died aged seventy after a long illness. Originally from Guinea, he was known all over the world especially for his hit, Yeke Yeke, launched in 1987. That piece of music, containing ethnic…
Read moreA victim of the Coronavirus, in Paris, on 24 March 2020. The Cameroonian saxophonist and composer, best known for his soul/funk single, ‘Soul Makossa’, Manu Dibango left his mark on a long period of Afro Music. On his arrival in Marseilles in 1949 as a sixteen-year-old, the new music of the African continent was still…
Read moreA mixture of Anatolian pop and oriental folk, gypsy resonances and western sounds. A committed voice denouncing the incoherences of its land. Anatolia is a peninsula that forms part of modern Turkey. What the ancient Romans called Asia Minor has been the cradle of a number of civilisations, from that of the Hittites to those…
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Two young leaders from the A’i Cofán community of Sinangoe in Ecuador led a movement to protect their people’s ancestral territory from gold mining. Their leadership…
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Because there was a famine in the land, the spider and his family grew thinner and thinner and hungrier and hungrier. In his desperation, the spider…
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Leaving the Church does not mean abandoning the faith; moving away from the faith does not mean giving up one's spirituality. Even though they are leaving…
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