It’s been a year of roadblocks, shutdowns, tariffs, walls, incarcerations, deportations, and other less tangible sociopolitical obstacles. Authoritarianism is on the rise, and jobs for human workers are declining. It’s harder than ever to get music and artists into the United States. Here’s the thing: we make music anyway. We draw on everything we know and everything we feel, and we make music anyway. We seek out the music of others. Others become familiar. Community grows in uneven and surprising ways.
The global music albums on this list represent ten especially powerful examples of musical communion from the past year that defy the frictional fictions of borders. Rather than being genre-bound, this list highlights how music can have deep roots and also be planetary in scope, in which tradition does not exclude imagination and in which continuity and change are inseparable. Ours is a globe marked by peril. In making and experiencing music, we can find fleeting moments of comfort among one another.
10. Kayatibu – Ni Hui: Voz da Floresta (Da Lata Music/Mi Mawai)
Indigenous to the Amazonian regions surrounding the Purus and Curanja rivers in Brazil and Peru, the Huni Kuin people predominantly speak a Panoan language they call Hancha Kuin, meaning “real words”. In Ni Hui: Voz da Floresta, we hear some of those words in songs produced by Brazilian artist and researcher LUIZGA (Luiz Gabriel Lopes), who highlights young Huni Kuin performers and the long-held traditions and aesthetics they carry.
Ni Hui is a celebration of nature through shamanic poetics, earthy aesthetics, and contemporary Western pop instrumentation. Lopes’s deep and sustained collaboration with the Huni Kuin artists featured here is crucial; funded initially to work on an educational project in the province of Acre in 2019, Lopes returned when invited back by Kayatibu to help them put together this album. Ni Hui is a platform that allows Kayatibu’s young artists – Txai Shane, Yaka Huni Kuin, Shane Kaya, Txaná Tuin, Maxi Huni Kuin, Tuyn Kaya, and Dua Ninawa, at the forefront – to share their community and cosmology with the world.
9. Salin – Rammana (Independent)
JUNO-nominated and Questlove-approved, drummer Salin draws on the sounds of northeastern Thailand and 1970s funk in her always soulful sounds. Her new album Rammana represents some of her finest work in this regard to date, flowing effortlessly from the stripped-down rural sounds of the introductory track “Lam” to the brassy, groovy throwback of “Ma’at” and beyond.
The cross-genre appeal is off the charts throughout: “Painted Lady” is slinky and sultry, while the plucked strings and silky flute of “Being Here” evoke the South Asian-African American sonic coalitions of so much 1960s jazz and 2000s R&B. As a drummer, Salin is creative and nimble, her rhythms the heart of the album from start to finish no matter how the foreground shifts.
She knows how to use a kit to its fullest, as on thrilling “Si Chomphu”, but also how to streamline without compromise, as in the sharp beats of liquid “Egungun” and the stripped-down hand percussion of the closing title track. Rammana is a party, and Salin is a thoughtful host who knows her roots well.
8. Guedra Guedra – MUTANT (Smugglers Way)
Moroccan-rooted producer Abdellah M. Hassak crafts energetic electronic landscapes as Guedra Guedra, and his new album MUTANT is a breathtaking example of his work. Filled with thoughtful assemblages of field recordings, digital and analog beats, and some of the year’s most luscious dancefloor melodies, it’s scintillating work from an artist deeply invested in every sound he touches. It does not attempt to collapse the vast stretches of space it figuratively crosses but instead understands the importance of taking each step with care.
The sounds Hassak uses come from places that are far apart. Chaabi violin techniques from Morocco appear on one track, djembé patterns from Guinea on another, Tanzanian and Kenyan songs on yet another. On MUTANT, though, Guedra Guedra does not let this translate into exploitation and appropriation. This is sensational music, and even more than that, it’s a significant release whose maker gives credit where credit is due and knows how to put things together in a way that hits soul and body all at once.
7. Raúl Monsalve y los Forajidos – SOL (Olindo)
Multi-instrumentalist Raúl Monsalve and band Los Forajidos are in ecstasy on their new album Sol. The group’s third full-length release features some of their highest energy to date. They make music in a vivid spectrum, jazz melding with funk and sprinkled with synthpop, all shaped by Monsalve’s home music scene of Caracas and his collaborators’ backgrounds.
Los Forajidos here include Egypt 80’s Mario Orsinet (drums), Lya Bonilla (vocals), Edgar Bonilla (keyboards), and Andrés Vela (saxophone), all following Monsalve on bass, vocals, and percussion. Ably sculpting them is producer Malcolm Catto of the Heliocentrics. The last two lines of the standout track “Como el Sol” are a statement of purpose: “Brille tu alma (como el sol) / Que no se apague (como el sol)”: let your soul shine like the sun, may it not go out.
With Sol, Raúl Monsalve and Los Forajidos add their soulful illumination to a world in which, even in the most difficult and unsettled of times, there are always bright and beautiful moments, music like this among them.
6. Elana Sasson – In Between (PKMusik)
Rarely is “beautiful” the most accurate or informative descriptor for anything, especially music. Even so, something is striking about In Between, the latest work from singer and composer Elana Sasson, that is hard to describe any other way. Sound, sentiment, and intent all work in exquisite aesthetic and affective concert here, the layering of these aspects giving the album multiple dimensions that are sincerely beautiful from start to finish.
In Between is indeed a rarity, and Elana Sasson and her quartet perform with the depth it takes to anchor the beauty of their output in artistic and personal truth. Sasson’s honeyed voice is the main attraction here, winding its microtonal way through lullabies, folk songs, and poems in Kurdish, Persian, and Ladino. She is well attuned to the power of subtleties and the strength that comes from instruments working together; Santiago Bertel on piano, Manos Stratis on double bass, and Victor Goldschmidt on drums sound just as invested in their work as Sasson, crucial to the album’s success.
Beauty, after all, does not automatically make music good or interesting; good and interesting music is not always beautiful. In Between sits at the unlikely nexus of all of these things.
5. Marlon Williams – Te Whare Tīwekaweka (Independent)
For his new album Te Whare Tīwekaweka, singer-songwriter and guitarist Marlon Williams sings entirely in te reo Māori. Of Ngāi Tahu and Ngāi Tai descent, Williams’ linguistic decision is a deeply personal one, and the fruits of his labor are abundant and sweet. Like all of Williams’ music, Te Whare Tīwekaweka is gorgeous and soulful. The incorporation of Polynesian sounds opens up new dimensions for the artist, his connections to his forebears and ancestral homeland vivid in each thoughtful song.
Fellow Aotearoa artists KOMMI and Lorde lend their voices to Williams at various points. However, the most striking additional textures come from the group He Waka Kōtuia, whose collective harmonies buoy Williams’ music to transcendent, communal heights on almost half of the album’s tracks.
These are sublime moments, but perhaps the album’s peak (and one of my favorite musical moments of the year) also sports its smallest crew: multi-instrumentalist Mark Perkins on percussion, guitars, synths, and bass backing Williams on “Ko Tēnā Ua,” a song about rain that starts soft and lonesome and gradually builds through a wistful warmth into a cathartic and tremendous storm. Williams has found a truly incomparable way to express himself on Te Whare Tīwekaweka.
4. Brighde Chaimbeul – Sunwise (tak:til)
Sunwise, the new album by Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, begins with a drone. It features almost six minutes of that drone, a risky and utterly transfixing move that clears the way for Chaimbeul to march forth and pipe with wild abandon. What emerges is astounding work: Chaimbeul’s approach to the bagpipes, deeply rooted as it is, is innovative.
Capable of exceeding their players exponentially in volume, endurance, breadth, and depth, bagpipes are instruments unique among winds for their sheer force, and Chaimbeul’s curiosity and skill make for earth-shaking new music based on centuries-old repertoires and archival materials. She is so well-versed in her instrument’s roots that her performances ring sincere not only at their most familiar but also at their most expansive.
Sunwise is fresh and takes seriously the power of the bagpipes, which Chaimbeul honors not with staid repetition but with an appreciation for tradition’s dynamism and outstanding technical skills. Though she’s still a young artist, she’s covering exciting ground. It’s easy to imagine her taking the smallpipes even further over time.
3. Ghazi and Boom.Diwan x Arturo O’Farrill – Live in the Khaleej! (Independent)
In his teenage years, jazz guitarist and ethnomusicologist Ghazi Faisal Al-Mulaifi listened to stories from his grandfather, one of Kuwait’s last master pearl divers before the nation’s shift to oil led to the practice being outlawed, as head of ensemble Boom.Diwan and in collaboration with Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra director Arturo O’Farrill on new album Live in the Khaleej!, he pays tribute to divers and their daily practices by intertwining pearl-diving song styles, central African dance sounds, and broadly American jazz and blues.
In many ways, it’s an emulation of Kuwaiti cosmopolitanism as the group’s repertoire moves from ten minutes of sparse melancholy on “Ana Mashoof” to rhumba-powered “Muneera”, then to swirling and wailing “Blue” and freeform “Compay Doug” before ending with mournful “Utviklingssang”. This is rich jazz made by a group thoughtful about their roots, music, and scholarship, more powerful for each other. Even more than that, Live in the Khaleej! is communication between musicians, between cultures, between times, and between performers and audiences, beautifully done.
2. Florence Adooni – A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise in Unity) (Philophon)
The ordinary is nothing short of extraordinary on Florence Adooni’s rapturous international debut, A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise in Unity). Music for Adooni is intertwined with everyday being, grounded, and inclusive. Accordingly, A.O.E.I.U. rejuvenates. Originally from Ghana, Adooni makes music that runs the gamut from jazz to highlife to the warmer side of EDM, exulting throughout.
In the ten-minute title track, she waxes philosophical on the unity of all things in the cosmos; on “Vocalize My Luv”, she leads punchy synths (and labelmate Jimi Tenor on sax) to the dancefloor for one of the catchiest songs of the year. Velvety mid-tempo bops, playful funk, and a whole breadth of wondrous feelings come together under Adooni’s charismatic leadership and with the help of a skillful ensemble recorded between Kumasi and Berlin.
Adooni has been working with Philophon for years, collaborating with Jimi Tenor, Guy One, and fellow Frafra musicians Alogote Oho and His Sounds of Joy. A.O.E.I.U. proves that she is more than capable of blazing her own trail, too.
1. Mulatu Astatke – Mulatu Plays Mulatu (Strut)
If only one name comes to mind when you think of Ethio-jazz, it’s almost certainly that of Mulatu Astatke, often considered the genre’s originator. Inspired by Ethiopian melodic modes and the rhythms and instrumentation of Latin and other American jazz traditions, Mulatu has been releasing music under this stylistic nomenclature since the 1970s.
In Mulatu Plays Mulatu, he offers new arrangements of ten of his own compositions from this half-century of work. These are more expansive versions of already brilliant tracks. Several Ethiopian instruments–krar, masenqo, kebero, begena–are as integral to the album’s textures as brass, keys, and Mulatu’s own virtuosic vibraphones. Vocal ululations and syncopated handclaps on “Chik Chikka” evoke East African folk sounds with particular aural acuity, while the wah pedals of “Yekatit” recall the relative recency of the so-called 1970s Golden Age of Ethiopian music.
It’s a triumphant demonstration of how, in his octogenarian years and perhaps on the verge of retirement, Mulatu Astatke is still the master of his craft. If this is his farewell, it’s a shame for us, an audience that will always want more. It’s a triumph, though, for Mulatu, who may have made his most tremendous record to date with Mulatu Plays Mulatu.