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Special presentation: "Paradise in Strangers"

A live performance of a globally influenced composition by British-born Palestinian composer Reem Kelani and The Beating Wing Orchestra.

The somber horns, meandering guitar and tentative drums at the outset of La Bodega soon shift gears and burst into lively celebration, and once the voice of Totó La Momposina is in the thick of the chorus, all of Colombia's African, indigenous and European roots are joyously entwined. Toto's been the leading lady of Colombian music for some time, always drawing upon traditional sources while maintaining a progressive spirit and vision that has produced such albums as 2001's stunning Pacanto, which was propelled by a contemporary African undercurrent that enriched the music magnificently. La Bodega doesn't quite match the heights of that classic, though it similarly builds on a folkloric foundation of drums and vocal blueprints handed down from generations of village cantadoras who lead people in song and often serve as herbal healers as well. Read More The second recording by Mali's Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba references a language spoken from Gambia to Sudan, though aside from Guinea, the Fulani are a cultural minority of the countries in which they reside. So it seems Bassekou Kouyate reaches out to the masses and those whose voices are often marginalized at the same time, making their new CD, I Speak Fula, at least in title, a perfect statement - both vague and specific, large and small, culturally complex as well as blunt... Read More | Listen From Valencia, L'Ham de Foc approaches the Sephardic repertoire by turning east, exploring how the traditional repertoire changed as it moved from the Iberian Peninsula in the post-1492 diaspora, taking on new life in the exile communities of Sofia, Thessalonica, Istanbul, and Izmir. There is no shortage of contemporary Sephardic recordings, but Aman, Aman turns away from a certain slavish celebration of an imagined medieval multicultural sound toward a living if lesser-known Levantine tradition, complemented by instrumentation of the region (ud, tanbur, cümbüs, kopuz, santur, kemençe, various flutes, and percussion). The Al Andaluz Project unites L'Ham de Foc with Estampie, the Munich group led by Michael Popp, better known for its dedication to medieval music. Beginning with informal collaboration based on mutual interest in older repertoires, the ensembles first shared the stage at the July 2006 Landshut Hofmusiktage festival, a performance recorded and broadcast live by Bavarian state radio. As heard on Deus et Diabolus, they followed with a November 2006 studio session at the Dominican monastery of La Cartuja de Cazalla, near Sevilla. Read More | Listen Belgian violinist,nyckelharpist and composer Didier François has come up with an intriguing collection of art song/chamber music that plumbs the depths and scales the heights of bowed string capabilities. He has a refined yet daring ear for harmony, exploring the outer edges of conventional tonalities, then going on to invent his own. A quartet of singers (Patrick Riguelle, Neeka and Tom Theuns, and Aurélie Dorzée, who also contributes violin on some tracks) croon smoothly over the biting string harmonies, setting up a tension-filled dichotomy... Read More | Listen 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 Perhaps more than any other single figure, Américo Paredes (1915-1999) - border native, journalist, singer, poet, novelist, scholar, winner of the Mexican government's Order of the Aguila Azteca and Order of José de Escandón, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities prize recipient, and professor of folklore and English at the University of Texas at Austin-brought the corrido (ballad) tradition of the U.S.-Mexico border region to light. The notes to Corridos of the Chicano Movement do not mention Paredes - who founded the university' Center for Mexican American Studies and trained two generations of folklorists and anthropologists - but Rumel Fuentes (1943-1986) attended UT Austin in the 1960s, almost assuredly apprenticed with Don Américo, and went on to become one of the Chicano movement's most prolific singer-songwriter-activists. Now, his work is available for the first time. Recorded by Chris Strachwitz in Austin and Eagle Pass, Texas in 1972 and 1975, Corridos expresses Fuentes's pride of Mexican American identity... 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 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 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 Mariza, Portugal (NYC concert review) Bassekou Kouyate & N'goni Ba, Mali Trio THG, Denmark Abaji, Lebanon Dick van der Harst, Belgium Didier Francois, Belgium Lou Dalfin, D'Oc / Italy Marta Topferova, US/Latin Rumel Fuentes, Mexico/US 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 ...plus many, many more.

Think what you may of the Grammys, but the Academy got one thing (partially) right this past year: Omar Sosa's 2009 recording Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm & Ancestry was nominated for Best Contemporary World Music Album. While Béla Fleck took home the statue, the nomination introduced many people to the music of Omar Sosa. For these new listeners, this is good timing. The most recent release by Omar Sosa, Ceremony, shows off his deep "world" credentials. Sosa, originally from Cuba, teamed up with Germany's NDR Bigband and Brazilian arranger Jaques Morelenbaum, and the result is a powerful recording of celebration and joy. Read More | Listen Sometimes a musical outing is all about innovation, blending new and old sounds, adding electronics in just the right places, making the old sound new. And sometimes it's about purely reveling in the old. The Danes of Trio THG take the latter route. Listeners should expect quite a bit of fun from a record entitled Tongue Out of the Window and Trio THG delivers on that promise with gusto. These young musicians, fiddlers Andreas Tophøj and Michael Graubæk along with guitarist Sigurd Hockings, take traditional Danish tunes and play them really well. Their arrangements are simple yet effective, allowing the fiddles sometimes to play in unison, sometimes to work in octaves or thirds, and occasionally dropping underneath to let the guitar carry the melody... Read More | Listen Originally founded in 1982, the Lou Dalfin project sought to revitalize Occitanian music: Occitanian culture is found across southern France, into Italy, and also in Spain. Use of the language has long been a source of cultural pride, a statement of identity, and a political act, as 'Occitania' could be considered a country that exists within and across the boundaries of European countries as a cultural presence. The music and language have often been associated with medieval troubadours, and Occitanian music shares some of the ancient qualities of that repertoire. In 1990, Sergio Berardo revived the Lou Dalfin group and he was determined to take the music in radical new directions by incorporating a whopping dose of rock, jazz, and reggae influences, and by utilizing a barrage of instruments both traditional and modern in order to create a massive wall of sound. Three new reissues allow listeners to trace the development of Lou Dalfin over the course of the 1990s... Read More | Listen 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