The 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…
Read moreOmar Sosa and Gustavo Ovalles. Two great musicians, two different stories often merging in a most striking artistic association. Omar Sosa, a Cuban of class 1965, is a pianist of the school of jazz. He began with the marimbas – a typical Caribbean instrument – while still a small boy, and then moved on to…
Read moreAfro-Maghrebian percussion, ngoni, chants and choreography, driven by infallible and colorful arrangements make it possible to create a rare and beautiful music. A perfect dialogue among Western, African and Oriental instruments. Gabacho Maroc is one of the most popular music bands in present-day Mediterranean Africa, a land where the sun sets among the dunes, where…
Read moreDeeply rooted in the land and culture of his ancestors, Achinoam Nini, known in the world of art as Noa, is still sending out a message of peace that involves all of us. The western world came to know of her when, in 1994, with her own special grace and simplicity, she performed her own…
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She played a key role in a campaign that challenged a corrupt waste trafficking scheme between Italy and Tunisia, resulting in the return of 6,000…
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The Black and white swallow flew high up in the clear, blue sky, wheeling and diving, his fast, pointed wings carrying him at a great speed. Swallow…
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Welcoming, listening and guiding. Some characteristics of Pope Leo with the youth During the years when Father Robert Francis Prevost was pastor of the church of Our…
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