Tailwinds and Headwinds Listening Post 305. More than anything else, her voice—soaring, soulful, charismatic, bluesy, passionate—explains why Mónika Lakatos received the 2020 World Music Expo (WOMEX) Lifetime Achievement Award, becoming the first Roma artist to win...
Of Routes and Roots Listening Post 304. Migration is a universal story: All humanity came out of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Voluntary or involuntary, migration is constant, driven by push-pull factors like dreams, exploration, climate change, conflict, hunger and...
Provincial Classic Listening Post 303. A freedom-fighting poet named Perucho Figueredo wrote La Bayamesa, Cuba’s national anthem, on horseback in 1867, after Spanish authorities surrendered to pro-independence forces in Bayamo. More than 150 years on, the city—located...
A Way With, And Without, Words Listening Post 302. The Teacups have etched a high profile on the United Kingdom’s folk landscape these past ten years and the a cappella quartet’s third album is an epic journey that adds to their stellar reputation. The collection’s 19...
Roots & Wings Listening Post 301. Nakany Kanté’s third album evokes a place where disparate cultures and experiences harmonize, each home displays artifacts reflecting the owner’s origins and precious pieces acquired on journeys of discovery, and each soul is...
Moral of the Story Listening Post 300. The 14 songs on Kezeren Koiht (Ancient Custom) have everything required of first-rate folk tales: Dreams and journeys, peril and gore, omens and clairvoyants, love sagas that end well and badly. But where the Brothers Grimm had...
Agony & Destiny Listening Post 299. The voice—low, flowing, passionate—belongs to Amira Medunjanin, renowned for interpretating songs from her native Bosnia and Herzegovina. But as the title of her ninth album indicates, she sings for three: Him and Her are...
Virtuous Circle Listening Post 298. Leyla McCalla stands enigmatically on the cover of Vari-Colored Songs, her dress pattern suggesting the solution to a puzzle: Connect the dots. On the album she sings eight Langston Hughes poems that she set to music, five...
Lyrics After All Listening Post 297. Over a career spanning 40-plus years and more than a dozen albums, Beppe Gambetta has steadily added talents to his repertoire. From a young acoustic guitarist channeling Italian and American folk and bluegrass into a signature...
Triple Play Listening Post 296. From their name choices you might not guess that the women of Trio Bacana are French, residents of an ancient walled town in Brittany. Bacana is Brazilian Portuguese slang for “cool,” and the awesome trio’s 2017 debut album was an...
Sterling Voice from a Silver Land Listening Post 295. The heart exerts its own form of gravity: The farther it travels, the more it feels the tug of home. When 18-year-old Delfina Cheb arrived at Boston’s Berklee College of Music she recalls drinking in the global...
Son, Disciple, Troubadour Listening Post 294. On his fourteenth album Francis Cabrel exhibits a striking mix of freshness and nostalgia, reminding fans new and old why his voice, pen and ever-expanding canon of folk-blues-chanson remain so central to the soundtrack of...
Rhythmic Pairs and Geophysics Listening Post 293. Continents separated by geological forces are knit together again by human movement. But the case of Brazilian singer-songwriter Jabu Morales is exceptional: When she landed in cosmopolitan Barcelona she entered an...
Nature’s Live Streaming Listening Post 292. Air, time, energy, life, blood, words, water: They all flow and they all play roles in the trances, mysteries, ancient rituals, sharp insights, drama and delight of Siostry Rzeki (River Sisters), the third album by the...
Headwaters of Identity Listening Post 291. The Zimbabwean ensemble Black Umfolosi takes its name from a river in South Africa’s Kwa-Zulu Natal Province, whence the group’s ancestors migrated almost 200 years ago. And though the zigzagging riverbed has been mostly dry...
All Over the Map Listening Post 290. Travel far and discover yourself: The idea has inspired literary figures and works from Camus to Kerouac to Cloud Atlas. The twist Carla Pires offers on her fourth studio album is assimilating the distant horizon not only into...
Wings Listening Post 289. Any artist who mixes traditional and contemporary music navigates between old and new worlds but few, if any, bridge gaps as wide as Tio Bang. The multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter divides his time between modern Melbourne, Australia,...
The Namesake Listening Post 288. Mother Nature showers humanity with gifts but she gave Ila Paliwal a little more—her name. “Ila” is Sanskrit for “Earth” and on her second album Paliwal, a classically trained Indian vocalist, songwriter and producer, celebrates her...
A Man for All Seasons Listening Post 287. Just as we remember Bach and Beethoven, future generations will surely know Pete Seeger (1919-2014). From McCarthy-era blacklisting to performing at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, with an ebullient tenor and wielding a...
Tripartite Fairy Tales Listening Post 286. Three women who present themselves as pixies, mixing real and mythic realms. Three pillars: Smart theatricality; venue (a biodiverse marsh); and group name (Sen Svaja), from an Old Prussian term meaning “with family,”...
Carpe Diem Listening Post 285. Every lyric has three dimensions: Surface meaning (often the only facet listeners discern); an artist's background inspiration and context; and new interpretations that come from projecting songs onto future landscapes. On its face Aire,...
Water Music Listening Post 284. In poetry and prose, flowing water is a common metaphor for life and history, constancy and destiny. But there's nothing common about Strømmen (The Current), which meanders with calm majesty through timeless landscapes. Helene Blum and...
Mother Nature’s Daughters Listening Post 283. Civilizations through the ages have paid homage to the Earth, but today planet reverence at best coexists with environmental abuse. And while the debut album by the Portuguese trio Maria Monda sounds like traditional...
Hidden Figures Listening Post 282. There’s a lot in play on Ásgeir’s third album and at any moment some features are prominent while others are concealed. The songs are constant in tone but richly layered: Musically a mix of traditional folk and folktronica with...
Renaissance Project Listening Post 281. The seed for Bërbili (Nightingale) was planted in 1999 when a professor asked musicology student Dina Bušić to research and record music representing her heritage. On her mother’s side she is Arbanasi, descended from Albanian...
Bringing It All Back Home Listening Post 280. They met at a fiddle jam in 2007 and married three months later; they live outside Horsefly, British Columbia, a village of 1,000 souls in the foothills of the Cariboo Mountains, where they build and sell banjos and raise...
Fire on Track Nine Listening Post 279. The singer-songwriter Cris Gera recorded his latest album, Music In Me/Nziyo Dziri Mandiri, in 2016, but more than three years passed before its release. The eight-track collection is a lively Afro-jazz/pop/R&B mix about...
A Blazing Grace Listening Post 278. Paradox or simple fact, the greatest expressions of freedom often emerge from landscapes where it is conspicuous by its absence. Having grown up in a nation that prohibits public singing by women, the Iranian vocalist-musician Mahsa...
Amadeus Goes to Sea Listening Post 277. They are zany, surreal and buoyant, bathtub mariners and virtuosos who sweep through a composition like a storm, leaving behind a perfect mosaic of disparate elements. Five guys from Barcelona who have never gone to sea, El Pony...
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...
