Known for playing with County Joe and the Fish and for her experimental sound band The United States of America, Dorothy Moskowitz came back in 2023 with United States of Alchemy and their well-received release, Under an Endless Sky. In collaboration with avant-garde composer and filmmaker Francesco Paolo Paladino, and poet and music writer Luca Chino Ferrari, their second release, Songs of Compassion, is eleven songs containing subversive and at times beautiful music, and richly evocative lyrics

Antoine Dougbé was a song-conjurer whose mode of musical transfer was slapping his legs in a rhythm known as Cavacha, a groove created by drummer Belobi Meridjo, who was inspired by a train cadence that he worked into a pattern that ultimately spread like a 21st century California wildfire throughout Congolese pop music in the mid-1970s. Dougbé, known as the “Devil’s Prime Minister,” was also a practitioner of vodun who inspired fear in any musician he felt was unsuited to play his music, which is how he landed on working exclusively with L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou, as he felt they could nail what he wanted in ways other bands couldn’t. His recording career was brief - 3 albums and a few singles - but, as this collection shows, it was potent.

Tako Toki are like desert island musicians who, castaway without their instruments, were forced to construct their own. Lucky for us, they are as skilled in making instruments as they are in creating original songs with which to show off their handicrafts. Un Dimanche á Monaco celebrates our universal love of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic sounds and the varied, wonderful ways cultures have organized that love in what we call music.

Really, I'm not talking today. Just the music, no chatter. More shows at Race The Sky.

Sometime in 1986, perhaps in a Paris café, Dominique Cravic, a singer, guitarist, and musical archivist, met Robert Crumb, an underground cartoonist, banjo and mandolin player, and jug-band aficionado. Over a few glasses of marc, to continue to speculate, they conjured up the idea for Les Primitifs du futur. Since then, they have recorded an impossible-to-categorize series of albums, with cover illustrations by Crumb, of which Les Crimes du Mussette is the fifth. Weird and wonderful, it sounds like they rooted through an attic full of 78 RPM records, scribbled down some arrangements, and then played them on a collection of instruments they found in another attic.

Tiny Sun creates tiny songs that give off light and heat well out of proportion to their size. Composed, performed, and produced by Martina Sorbara, Jonathan Goldsmith, and Don Rooke, the record is vaguely Americana, with pristine vocals, plucked guitars and ukuleles, chiming keyboards, and the lonesome slide of the guitar. Vanishment contains eighteen sparkling miniatures - that take a scant 34 minutes to negotiate - notable for their economy of arrangement and the subtle directness of the lyrics.

After the extra-terrestial explorations of the previous recording by Norway's Camilla Hole Trio, Langs is rather more earthbound. But the quest to look beyond their own country's folk music continues… Camilla Hole's main instrument being the soprano sax, the influence of jazz is unsurprising, with Egil Kalman and Knut Kvifte Nesheim providing rhythmic support on double bass and drums respectively, with overdubbing of Kalman's modular synth and Nesheim's vibraphone adding color… While remaining true to the integrity of the musical traditions at the heart of all the tracks, the Camilla Hole Trio continue their mission to give the music a more open, freer context.

In August 1819, thousands of working men and women gathered in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England to hear the politician Henry Hunt speak. Hunt was a famed orator, a man on the side of the people, able to stir and inspire with his voice... The crowd terrified the magistrates, who panicked and imagined an uprising, although the gathering was peaceful. They sent in half-trained dragoons, the cavalry, who rode down, slashed and killed without compunction or compassion. In the end, 18 died and up to 700 were wounded. Sean Cooney revisits that day in Peter’s Field, with guitarist Sam Carter, fiddler/singer Eliza Carthy, multi-instrumentalist Ben Nicholls, and the industrial ballad singer Jennifer Reid, who doubles as narrator.

I want to personally direct you to a remarkable piece of music titled "Two Views of a Prayer," composed and written by David Dzubinski as part of the Prism Quartet's new series of collaborations called 'Unlocking Your Inner Composer.' If you have listened to my radio programs, you are probably familiar with the quartet’s ground-breaking, genre-blurring music. If not, there's no better introduction than this collaboration with Tyshawn Sorey, Ursula Rucker, and Carlos Santiago. - Cliff Furnald, editor

Here is the recording from the Danish trio GuldGanger, led by one of the folk scene’s outstanding and experienced vocalists, Mia Guldhammer. Their self-titled EP offers five tracks, with Guldhammer, Morten Musicus and Christian Mohr Levisen bringing their own perspectives to mostly traditional music. There’s a lovely ancient, creaky mood throughout.

Live at Rockpalast 1999 documents a command performance at the Loreley open-air amphitheater by Malcolm “Mac” Rebennack Jr., aka Dr. John. Rockpalast is a live-music TV show broadcast since 1974 by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), the archival source for this CD-DVD package, and coincidentally a remarkable cultural institution on its own terms. The show was taped at the height of Dr. John’s international popularity and features a setlist of some of his best loved songs.

Króta features Swedish fiddler Mats Edén and Norwegians Tellef Kvifte on flutes, and drummer Knut Kvifte Nesheim. The trio offers a far from conventional take on the traditional tunes they have chosen. While dance tunes may be the source of most of the material here, this feels more akin to chamber music; not that it is remotely classical in style, but in the sense it conveys of three players engrossed in a musically intimate conversation. This is a performance that should be seen as an exploration of the hidden potential in the old music.

Racing into the big muddy. We go down to the river and into the swamps on today's show, with music from Dr John, Nikki Giovanni, Jake Blount, Eric Bibb, Pete Seeger, Javon Jackson, Dorothy Moskowitz & Retep Folo, Rinde Eckhert, Levon Helm & Mavis Staples, Steve Earle & The Dukes, Luiza & Edgar Valente, Johnny Cash, Paul Simon, Jean-Luc Thomas Quartet, Tiny Sun, Martha Mavroidi, Compagnie Chez Bousca, Gaelle Bagot & Juan Manuel Nieto, Klakki, Maria Kalaniemi & Pekko Käppi, Saly Kouyate, Baba Yaga, Farmer's Market, and Iduema Quartet. Hear previous programs at www.RaceTheSky.com

True to a Monk-inspired commitment never to play the same thing twice, Cuban pianist and composer Omar Sosa’s new solo album is the vivid invention of a pensive, restlessly creative, evolutionary artistry.

As with all Sosa’s work, Sendas is the fortunate product of serendipity. In 2021 he was invited to record at the Fazioli Pianoforti Concert Hall, annex to the renowned Italian piano manufactory in Sacile, Pordenone, about an hour northeast of Venice… An unscripted solo improvisation in the empty concert hall provided the raw audio, later to be flavored in the mix, sparsely, with voice clips, percussion, loops, field recordings, found sounds effects that Sosa has collected over a career spanning four decades.

The editor’s note: When this set of recordings came to me, I was at a loss as to how to share it. It's not music, in any traditional sense (although there is some freestyle rapping), and a 'review' of such an artifact of reality seems superfluous to the content. Instead, I asked sound recordist Ian Brennan if I could simply use his own brief commentary and the recordings he made on the street in Chicago to present this sound documentary to you.

After nine previous albums and a 25-year career at the forefront of world music, Lucas Santtana is fluent in the many genres of Brazilian music. His new project, Brasiliano, is a musical exploration of the languages of Brazil. With songs sung in Portuguese, French, English, Spanish, Occitan, Cape Verde Creole, and Tupy-Guarani, a Brazilian native language, Santtana has assembled guest lyricists and vocalists representing a range of musical and linguistic influences. The result is a warm and compelling musical treatise on the diverse cultural history of Brazil, expressed through the Brazilian variant of Portuguese, best described as Brasiliano.

A little before the end of the last century, a revelatory compilation appeared, seemingly from nowhere. From Where I Stand: The Black Experience In Country Music opened a window on something so many didn’t even know existed to show that country music had never been a white preserve. That album was a few years before the Carolina Chocolate Drops burst on the scene, reclaiming the Black heritage in country and string band music, plus a great deal more. Genuine Negro Jig was their third release. This expanded 15th anniversary edition marks a good time to look back at the band’s mix of Piedmont string band and traditional music, nestling beside early 20th century blues, and a few original and modern pieces.

My Journey with the Silkroad Ensemble
“In 2026, I was invited to join the Silkroad Ensemble, the international collective directed by Rhiannon Giddens, as a musician (frame drums, violin, and voice) and contributor of new arrangements and compositions. Following an initial workshop and preview performance in New York in January 2026, the project will unfold through a North American tour in March 2026, featuring nine concerts alongside workshops and community outreach activities across the United States, as part of the new program Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual.”

The newly released album from Malian musicians Neba Solo and Benego Diakité is the outcome of a project which began in 2013 when Solo and Diakité, playing balafon and n'goni respectively, were recorded by a Bamako producer. He played the result to another record producer in the UK who was completely taken by what he heard and together they decided to work on the recording to produce a finished album…

A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking, released as a double CD, is very much an album of two halves. The recordings made in 2013 of the two musicians playing together were transformed over time into ensemble arrangements with the addition of other musicians playing strings, mellotron, guitar and percussion, plus overdubbed vocals from Solo and three female singers. The second presents the original recordings from 2013.

Vida, the third release by Dani Jané (Spanish guitar, loops, synthesizer, composition), is a lyrical, rhythmically driven title that combines elements of flamenco, Catalan folk, classical music, jazz, and Catalan and U.S. poetry. A graduate of the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu (Barcelona), Jané pursued further study (classical, flamenco, jazz, tango) elsewhere in Spain, and in Germany, France, Italy, and India. With this new album, he gives voice to a new generation of conservatory trained Catalan artists for whom flamenco is but one among myriad influences.

How do you celebrate 50 years of music by a band that blazed trails for the charged, hypnotic pizzica sound, breaking it out of its homeland in southern Italy? How do you look afresh at a sound that’s changed and broadened its appeal without ever abandoning its roots as a new generation took over the instruments? It’s a challenge, but what Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (CGS) have done is reframe some of the pieces from those earlier decades through the lens of those playing and singing the songs now.

In a world that loves to dance, this is dance music with depth and power that explodes out of the speakers. It honors the material from the past while keeping its eyes firmly fixed on the future, clasping hands across the generations. Il Mito (The Myth) pays homage without ever being slavish. There’s a real, urgent energy to the music-making here.

It’s been a lengthy wait for the fourth album from Finnish accordionist Teija Niku, but she’s hardly been idle over the last few years. Between the pandemic, giving birth, and the death of her mother, her time has been filled. But the long pause makes this return all the sweeter, with its joyful exploration of the places where the music of her homeland intersect with her deep love of Balkan music on Tovi.

This collaboration between the five-piece Belgian instrumental group Wör, whose members specialize in bringing the music of earlier centuries to life, and Kongero, the acclaimed Swedish female a capella folk quartet, offers an unusual chance to explore how their two cultures, ostensibly so different, can come together. It might sound an unlikely mix, but here’s a spoiler: it turns out they’re pretty much musical best friends.

Crete’s Stelios Petrakis is at the peak of players of his island’s best-known traditional instrument, the Cretan lyra, a small pear-shaped fiddle held vertically on the knee. True to its title, Lyric is an album of his lyra with a panoply of other traditional instruments played by musicians of equal stature to Petrakis, in music of rich lyricism, in melody and texture.

Polish artist Maria Ka’s latest album Di Mashin (The Machine) emerged after she found that her family had Jewish roots – a discovery that led her to an immersion in Jewish studies and the Yiddish language. She unreels original songs written in Yiddish, embracing a politically active feminism and a committed meta-universality. Her musical vision is fragrantly mystical and musically all encompassing.

Loss galvanizes, loss focuses, and musical artists turn loss into shared reflections. Emi Makabe has focused the passing of her father into a generous meditation on resilience and legacy with Echo. The title reminds us of the connections between generations. Here are ten musical memories that span time and culture, blending a modern jazz sensibility with a traditional Japanese soul.

Born in Japan, where she studied Japanese traditional music, Emi Makabe is an educator and contributor to the jazz scene. Building from a foundation of soaring singing in Japanese, English, and wordless vocalizations, and accompanied by her flute and shamisen, she is joined by jazz-inspired piano, drums, and double bass.

Born in Montreal, Haitian-Canadian musician-composer Jowee Omicil plays a variety of instruments. He came of age in the choral milieu of his father’s Montreal congregation, studied saxophone and music education at Berklee, and has gone on to work with some of the century’s masters. Over the course of 2025, Omicil released one song per month, each accompanied by a philosophizing podcast. The collection is called sMiLes.

The Visit isn’t an album built on compromises. Composer-musician Cris Derksen, a Canadian from the North TallCree Reserve on her father’s side, and with a Mennonite lineage from her mother, pushes and cajoles her visions. She’s primarily a cellist, one who works across genres – one of the great joys of listening to The Visit is that it is impossible to attach any kind of handle to the music. Just as you think you have it nailed down, the next track is something different.

McDowell County West Virginia is nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, and is both stunning and isolated. The House of Lord Jesus in Squire is the focus of this remarkable series of live recordings of the Pastor Chris Congregation West Virginia Snake Handler Revival. There are guitars and drums, ecstatic singing, praying and preaching, lots of snakes, and people seemingly possessed as they surrender to a form of Pentecostal practice that uses a quote from Mark 16:18 as their raison d’être.