May 1, 2023
Exile Amplifies Insight Listening Post 370. Art takes us deeper into headlines and history: We wouldn’t have the same understanding of the Spanish Civil War without Guernica; Les Misérables is a lens on the trials of nineteenth-century Parisians. Like Picasso and...
December 7, 2022
High Tide Listening Post 362. Like water, music flows; like music, water heals. Souad Massi may not be the first artist to link these two essential life forces, but on her seventh studio album she combines them in spectacular and oracular fashion. Sequana takes its...
September 1, 2020
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...
November 13, 2016
Magic Carpet Listening Post 73. Weaving is an apt metaphor for the disparate strands of Oum’s music—North African Gnawa, Hassani, Sufi, jazz, gospel, Afro-beat, R&B, bossa nova and Cuban trova—which converge like winds in a magical desert. The Moroccan...
August 29, 2016
Remastered Poetry Listening Post 62. Dylan and Marley, Fela Kuti and Ramy Essam— musicians can move the world. Likewise Souad Massi, Algeria’s greatest female singer, who grew up on American music, relocated to France following death threats earned in a political rock...
