Identity With Herbs and Spices Listening Post 276. Pull back the curtain, peel the skin, peer into the microscope, much of the human quest for understanding involves looking beneath the surface of things. Sauljaljui doesn’t actually veil her mystique—outside she’s a...
The Long and Windy Road Listening Post 275. Quebec’s Route 132—stretching 1,000 miles (1,600 km), up the St. Lawrence all the way to Gaspé but skirting major cities—is a good metaphor for the journey of Erik and Sonny Caouette, who specialize in folk songs about...
Musicalité, Égalité, Sororité Listening Post 274. Music is a leading indicator of equality—or at least it offers a taste of what a better world might be like. Jazz, rock & roll, flamenco and cumbia are just a few examples of sounds that integrated cultures, even...
Bluegrass & Big Shoulders Listening Post 273. A week after it began broadcasting from Chicago on April 12, 1924, radio station WLS debuted National Barn Dance, one of the pre-eminent country music programs of its day; over the decades it hosted leading stars—Gene...
Roots & Routes Listening Post 272. The name of Réunion, France’s Indian Ocean department, commemorates the union of radical and bourgeois forces during the French Revolution. So it’s ironic that for much of the twentieth century authorities in Paris prohibited...
Loving Melancholy Listening Post 271. As a boy during the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-96) Damir Imamović took advantage of confinement and learned to play guitar. He didn’t envision a music career, but after earning a philosophy degree and landing a job in publishing,...
Forest of Dreams Listening Post 270. Nani is a dreamscape of overlapping civilizations, emotions, epochs and realms, merged into songs as delightful to hear as they are stimulating to map. Start with Emmi Kujanpää’s sterling voice, soothing kantele (Finnish zither),...
Forest and Trees Listening Post 269. The Sani people are part of China's ethnic landscape but the fine detail of their culture is often obscured behind mythology and rock. The rock is from the Stone Forest: Sani villages dot the area around its spectacular limestone...
Here & Now Listening Post 268. The singer-composer Oum clearly intended her fifth album to be poetic, spiritual, optimistic and instructive but it’s unlikely she realized how prescient it would be. Released several months before coronavirus emerged, its message...
In the Balance Listening Post 267. Siberia is renowned for vast panoramas and extreme temperatures but it is also rich in sound. Over the past 15 years the folk trio Vedan Kolod has been introducing world audiences to the region’s acoustic qualities, from whistling...
My BFF And/Is Me Listening Post 266. From David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust to Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce, from Philip Roth’s Zuckerman to Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy, the alter ego has an honored place in creative art. But the Portuguese singer Cristina Branco molded...
Digging for Treasure Listening Post 265. Malinky’s sixth album is a 20th anniversary gift—or handsel—to the award-winning ensemble’s legions of fans and to the Scots-language folk tradition its members faithfully serve. Co-founder Steve Byrne sums up the band’s ethos:...
Beauty in the Dark Listening Post 264. Dawn is inevitable but some nights are longer than others. The eight songs of Nelia Safaie’s debut solo album are suspended in the fog between night and day, winter and spring, sadness and happiness. She sings gently, often with...
Transcendental Orchestration Listening Post 263. Aditya Prakash describes his Los Angeles childhood as “socially American and culturally Indian” and observes that growing up the two aspects of his life were largely separate. He began studying Carnatic music—the...
Fabric of Humanity Listening Post 262. Individuals merge into families, families into communities, communities into nations and the generations turn. One way we make sense of life’s fabric is through art, distilling human possibility and experience into memorable...
Corner of Bitter and Sweet Listening Post 261. In physics, politics and romance, poles apart tend to come together. Les Cowboys Fringants are not the only musicians who explore humanity’s darker reaches with comedy and cynicism, let alone with harmony and...
Women, Water and Song Listening Post 260. Global and local are like yin and yang for the duo Zäpämmät. Though partners Marjo Smolander and Pauliina Kauppila are both deeply rooted in Finnish folk tradition and have degrees from Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, Smolander...
Close Encounters Listening Post 259. Pandemic isolation can evoke images of The Little Prince, alone on his asteroid, testing the limits of confinement as he imagines transcending space. Similar fabulous journeys are at the heart of Bab El West’s second album,...
Lost and Found Listening Post 258. Joyce’s Ulysses, Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Hugo’s Les Misérables—often a nation’s most critical and loving assessments come from its children abroad. Add to this roster DNA, the fourth album that Brazilian singer-songwriter...
One for the Record Book Listening Post 257. Measured by awards, chart listings and critical acclaim, Garifuna artists have a high profile on the world music scene, even though their community numbers less than one percent of the population in the Central American...
Destined to Dare Listening Post 256. Louisa Lyne’s art is inserting Yiddish songs into unexpected contexts. On her third album she and her band put the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews into creative dialogue with Spanish, English, Hebrew and her native Swedish;...
B.A. in Bluegrass Listening Post 255. Joe Troop doesn’t so much play fusion as embody it: Since his North Carolina childhood, every sound he ever heard seems to have become part of his music personality. At 14 he was inspired when he saw Doc Watson perform, but as...
In Perfect Balance Listening Post 254. Many elements go into Eneida Marta’s songs, but her voice carries such an elegant sense of balance that everything seems like one thing: Music that links traditional sounds of her country, Guinea-Bissau, with contemporary styles;...
Of Lions and Moss Listening Post 253. Everyone loves a love song, which explains why nobody composed What the World Needs Now is Responsibility Sweet Responsibility. Everyone touts diversity, yet there is Rolling Stone’s list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All time”...
Two Cultures, 26 Strings Listening Post 252. “Pity the nation,” wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “that knows no language but its own.” Far more satisfying than pity is listening to Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn, who know one another’s languages and express their familiarity...
Tipping Toward Joy Listening Post 251. Dickens was right in concept but exaggerated the singularity of his age: It is always, in every era and every land, the best and worst of times. Great art often emerges from hard lessons, but sometimes songs written before a...
Desert Dream Listening Post 250. On the poignant album cover a girl in ballet shoes and a tutu poses against the backdrop of a refugee camp. Aziza Brahim’s enchanting desert blues are yet to come but the singer-songwriter has already riveted our attention to the story...
Home Away from Home Listening Post 249. Iko Iko is a much-covered song about the collision of two Mardi Gras Indian tribes. On their second album, the Haitian ensemble Lakou Mizik reworks it as Iko Kreyòl, leaving the cryptic chorus intact but applying new verses...
Hallelujah 2020 Listening Post 248. At 14, Erza Muqoli has already led an eventful life, her success framed by a dramatic family backstory. The heart of her biography is her incandescent voice, at once floating and penetrating, girlish and mature. She burst on the...
Outbound, Homebound Listening Post 247. The singer-musicians of Kaumaakonga are outliers because their ancestors traveled far. Their two small islands—Mungava and Mungiki, from which they derive Avaiki, the name of their Polynesian culture and language—occupy a corner...
