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In his 14 years of recording, violinist Oliver Schroer crossed many genres and walked many paths, from the humor and scope of his Stewed Tomatoes band to the austere beauty of his sound walk along the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain. Each step of this career was a strange adventure, driven by the curiosity of the great fiddler, composer and explorer that he was. Hymns And Hers is built on tricky turf. On a casual listen, you might be inclined to find it pompous, overwrought or simplistic. You listen casually at your own peril and loss. These twelve hymns are complex and deeply layered odes to both ancient folk and classical traditions, but display the modern sensibility that Schroer always brought to his work as both writer and performer. Read More | Listen In 1969, Munich producer Manfred Eicher founded ECM Records (Editions of Contemporary Music), long noted for a distinctive sonic angle that has defied the categories of "jazz" and "classical" while being conversant in both — and much more. Yet ECM has managed to document some of the most enduring figures of contemporary global jazz, among them Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, Paul Bley, Steve Swallow, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Paul Motian, Jan Garbarek, Ralph Towner, and Paolo Fresu. Michael Stone explores the legendary producer's literary, visual and musical approach to the creation of the iconic ECM catalog Read more Take four Danish musicians who play traditional tunes on fiddle, bass, guitar, and drums. Add some doubling on bouzouki, sitar, melodica, and hand drums. Augment the flavoring with accordion and banjo. Pour in musical influences from India, Turkey, Greece, the Romani, and Los Angeles psychedelic rock. Combine a sprinkling of cover songs and fold in a pinch of originals. Stir vigorously. Allow to ferment for the better part of a decade. What comes out is the first record of the Kefir Kvartet... Read More | Listen  Ø is the Danish word for island; the title refers to the members of Serras retreating to a quiet island in the Kattegat to record their fourth album. The music they have created in that setting is mostly slow, often quiet, but always intense. Most of the tunes on this album were penned by band members, both in individual and group efforts. The arrangements are all credited to Serras and that collective effort shines through as Ø is definitely a showcase for the band as a unit... Read More | Listen The title, Off the Map, might be overstating things, but the Silk Road Ensemble, started a decade ago by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, is certainly venturing well beyond their namesake trade route. Ma had a hand only as artistic director, leaving the composing and playing in other, very capable, hands. The disc is divided up into four sections, each a blend of inspirations and sounds that cross cultural divides and ethnic musical motifs to emerge as evocative pieces that are not quite classical, not quite "world" music and quite likely not like anything else you've ever heard... Read and Hear More When contemplating the jazz quartet, unison is not the word that normally comes to mind. Anouar Brahem on the other hand has never been one to shy away from unison passages in his compositions and arrangements, and with his new quartet, unisons are exercised, explored, and exploited to their fullest. On The Astounding Eyes of Rita, Brahem's oud is joined at various times by Klaus Gesing's bass clarinet, Björn Meyer's electric bass, and uncredited wordless vocals. These distinct instruments are carefully arranged, producing wonderful variety in unison melody lines. The hand drums of Khaled Yassine add even more color variation. Read and Hear More Trio Ifriqiya comprises the compelling talents of Fayçal El Mezouar (vocals, violin, oud, percussion, trained at Algeria's El Kordobia conservatory), French jazz pianist-composer Didier Fréboeuf, and Congolese drummer-percussionist Emile Biayenda (a founding member of Les Tambours de Brazza). Inspired by the traditions of the Maghreb, yet invested with a collective improvisatory genius that blends lyrical traces from four continents, they craft a music that defies easy categorization on their CD, Petite Planète. Read More | Listen Newest reviews Panama! 3 Oliver Schroer, Canada Cesaria Evora, Cape Verde The Very Best, Malawi/UK Kefir Kvartet, Denmark The Silk Road Ensemble Les Triboliques, UK Stefano Bollani Trio, Italy Tummel, Sweden Serras, Denmark Keletigui et ses Tambourinis, Guinea Harald Haugaard, Denmark Sver, Norway Valravn, Faroes, Denmark Anouar Brahem Banda Olifante, Italy Cheik Hamla Diabate, Mali/US Bebel Gilberto, Brazil An Dochas, US Issa Sow, Senegal/Belgium Sara Tavares, Portugal Gnawledge, US ...plus many, many more.

The narrow waist of the Americas (as Pablo Neruda once put it) was a major transshipment point between the Atlantic and Pacific long before the Panama Canal's construction claimed the lives of thousands of black English-speaking Caribbean immigrant laborers in the early twentieth century. The presence of U.S. military forces and contractors, overseas radio broadcasting, international touring bands, imported recordings, foreign films, the constant migratory flow, and local ethnic and linguistic diversity made for a unique and vibrant popular music culture. While much music has gone undocumented, plenty more mid-twentieth-century vinyl has been lost to tropical moisture, mold, dust, needle wear, neglect, technological change, and heedless discard. Of course, as an endless tsunami of shoddy reissues from Cuba to West Africa painfully confirms, any sham can stroll into a developing country recording vault and slap together a gushing, half-witted compilation destined rapidly to disappear into the second-hand dustbins. A stellar exception is Soundway Records, which recently issued its third volume of Panama!... Read More | Listen Hearing The Very Best for the first time is a disorienting - though, surprisingly, not unpleasant - experience. Is it new,old? Is it African, European? Is it silly, profound? It's the riding of the fine lines between opposites that makes The Very Best fascinating, not to mention the sweet voice of singer Esau Mwamwaya or the compelling electronic rhythms of his European partners. Etienne Tron of the production team Radioclit met Malawi-born musician Esau Mwamwaya while perusing an old bike in an East London used-furniture shop that Mwamwaya managed, and they soon began collaborating with Tron's partner Johan Karlberg. Their first project, a digital mixtape with Mwamwaya singing over remixes of pop songs, became an internet-based success with over 200,000 free downloads. They now have released their much-anticipated debut album of original material, Warm Heart of Africa... Read More | Listen A pensive-looking Cesaria Evora ponders her mirrored reflection on the cover of Nha Sentimento, as though the woman who brought the music of Cape Verde to the world is pondering what her next step might be. If such is the question, the answer is found in the songs. For while the initial two have the characteristic acoustic bounce and moderately refined African beats of more uptempo Cape Verde, the first morna selection, "Vento de Sueste," has the unexpected zest of an Arabic qanun zither and Egyptian string section. The additions are a lovely fit with the Cape Verdean blues that Evora's been singing for decades... and provides enough of a twist to make Nha Sentimento not just a typically good Cesaria Evora album. Read More | Listen Electric Dirt is the second outing by former The Band drummer and singer Levon Helm, since his recovery a few years ago from the throat cancer that nearly robbed him of his distinctive country tenor. Its predecessor, 2007's Dirt Farmer, was a fine effort, but more rustic and Helm's voice hadn't yet fully recovered from the rigors of cancer treatment. Electric Dirt finds him in better shape vocally and the music is more varied and packs more punch. Produced by Bob Dylan's former lead guitarist Larry Campbell, the album features a number of the musicians who have been playing with Helm at the Midnight Ramble jams he hosts at his home in Woodstock. Read More One of the oldest critical clichés is that art inspired by politics, or art made to express a political point of view, is agit-prop or just propaganda, that is, bad art. And supposedly the worst is art made under the aegis of a political movement or a government. In post-colonial Africa, governments attempted to revitalize (and de-colonize) culture by using it to foster a new sense of nationhood and national identity. In Guinea during the 1960s and 70s, President Sekou Touré instituted a cultural policy he called authenticité... No doubt some would regard such a policy as the enemy of art. But authenticité's effect was exactly the opposite: it inspired the creation of some great music, and not only in Guinea but elsewhere on the continent. In the homeland of authenticité, Keletigui Traoré and his Tambourinis were at the forefront of this cultural revolution... Read More | Listen Valravn hail from Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Everything about Koder på snor (or "codes on a string," a tribute to the theoretical physics of string theory) is so fresh and inspired that Valravn may have released one of the more significant albums to successfully combine traditional folk elements with electronic ambiance... Not just a recording, Valravn's Koder på snor is a whole other world of gorgeous pop, folk, and dance music. Read More | Listen "These are the songs folk use for fun, to have a laugh at their own problems. There are horrifying stories like "That's Capitalism For You" or the song about Bombardine who has a child out of wedlock. We know they are real tales of misery but they are told in a humourous way, so we can laugh at ourselves. That's OK, but you have to show solidarity with the people you are singing with, you mustn't sing anything you can't sing from the heart. You mustn't sing down, so to speak, because that's when it becomes hollow. To say 'Now I'll sing you one of the kind of songs you like hear…' - that's no good. Then you're cheating people. But you have to take the temperature" Morten Alfred Høirup brings us another Danish adventure, but this one is a little closer to home and a lot more personal. Morten talks with his father, Danish folk singer and musician Fin Alfred Larsen Read more | Listen