The world of 2016 has been a fragmented place, with fear and hate giving rise to isolationist movements around the globe and huge portions of the population turning inward rather than trying to understand each other. As such waves of xenophobia spread like wildfire, the world music scene becomes doubly important, not just because it means more great music (and it does), but because it connects us all together on a wavelength that hits the human heart even harder and faster than anger.
PopMatters contributor George de Stefano, Rootsworld founder and editor Cliff Furnald, and I have all come together on this year’s list of top world music. Debuting artists stand side-by-side with old favorites as we circle Europe and cruise the Mediterranean, travel the Sahara, and then take a trip to the Americas, both North and South. All selections here are divided by review author; Cliff Furnald’s writings also include links to full reviews on Rootsworld.
Traditional sounds of Eastern and Mediterranean Europe are fresh, bold, and ready for the 21st century on many of our selections, while from Africa come new twists on Tuareg desert blues, a whole spectrum of rare music from Morocco, prison songs from Malawi, and the ever-dulcet tones of Rokia Traoré; Afrobeat legend Tony Allen crosses the Atlantic Ocean for a whirlwind collaboration with some of Haiti’s finest musicians. In Brazil, the modern thrives and memories of revolution still ring; balancing out two contemporary electronic albums is an acoustic, live album by a still-potent duo of two of the most politically and culturally influential artists to fight against Brazil’s 1970s military regime.
It’s a difficult thing to pick a handful of albums from a category as widely varied as world music, itself less a true genre than a broad category for culture-defining music, but it’s also easier to find something new. There’s no short list that can be truly comprehensive of all the music in a single country, much less a planet, but there are always a few promising places to start. — Adriane Pontecorvo
Album: Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra
Label: Glitterbeat
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Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra
Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra
Since co-founding the unstoppable musical style of Afrobeat almost 50 years ago, master drummer Tony Allen has recorded dozens of albums, both solo and with everyone from Damon Albarn to Zap Mama. Now, he’s teamed up with some of Haiti’s finest, including musicians from Lakou Mizik and Yizra’El Band, forming supergroup Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra. Their brief time together marked by technical and musical chaos (including a smoke grenade at a music festival), the Orchestra’s only album had to be pieced together from rehearsals and re-recording sessions. The result: a space-age frenzy of traditional Caribbean music, Afrobeat rhythms, and psychedelic electronics.
It was well worth the effort. Every track is brand new, bursting with tightly packed colors and textures. “Chay La Lou” sounds like smoke and neon. “Bade Zile” is pure Afro-Caribbean electrofunk. “Mon Ami Tezin” haunts, slow and mournful. “Pa Bat Kòw” rises to the top of the pack, with soaring solo vocalists Zikiki and Mirla Samuel Pierre from Yizra’El Band. Each member of the Orchestra adds to the ecstasy as cultures swirl together, and each piece feeds off of the whole group’s unstoppable energy, creating something exponentially stronger than each individual member. In spite of their improbable and almost disastrous beginnings, Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra is a masterpiece of trans-Atlantic collaboration, full of familiar sounds that make up a completely unique creation. — Adriane Pontecorvo
Album: Azel
Label: Partisan
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Bombino
Azel
Whenever Nigerian guitarist Bombino releases a new album, the desert doesn’t seem so bleak, and this may be his brightest moment yet. Blossoming with the colors of spring and the Sahara sunshine, Azel cushions the blow of a chaotic year with a combination of desert blues and reggae vibes. Hand-in-hand with producer David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, Bombino leads a tighter band than ever on his sixth release; the whole Bombino crew handles traditional Tuareg sounds and electric rock and roll with equal skill. Handclaps and full drum kits coexist not only peacefully, but beautifully alongside Bombino’s soothing voice and nimble guitar work. Azel brings together a full rainbow of tempos, moods, and genres, from the unbridled joy of opening track “Akhar Zaman” to the rootsy sweetness of “Igmayagh Dum” and the driving, dirty grooves of “Iyat Ninhay/Jaguar”. It’s a fine and varied selection of music, each track full of love, soul, and expert-level musicianship. — Adriane Pontecorvo
Album: Tropix
Label: Six Degrees
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Céu
Tropix
Another gem in a steady stream of brilliant Céu albums. As always, she has new frontiers in mind, and on Tropix, she blends tropical and digital sounds together to craft an innovative wonderland that avoids the trap of relying too much on either traditional Brazilian sounds or overprocessed electronics. Nostalgia plays a major part on this album; the pixels referenced in its title are chunky, retro blips, and sole English-language track “Chico Buarque Song” strings childhood memories together into one of the album’s most powerful songs. Classic samba beats add another layer of warmth and familiarity, especially on closing track “Rapsódia Brasilis”.
While it’s easy to break the music down into individual, identifiable pieces, though, the magic is in Céu’s delivery. Every track is fresh, expertly-produced pop music that forgoes easy labels in favor of showcasing Céu’s brilliance as a singer, songwriter, and all-around mastermind who continues to find exciting new outlets for her overflowing creativity.
Album: Imarhan
Label: City Slang
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Imarhan
Imarhan
Imarhan isn’t like other desert blues bands, and this eponymous debut album of smoldering ballads and red-hot dance tracks proves it. A newcomer to the Tuareg rock scene with close ties to the almighty Tinariwen (frontman Sadam’s cousin is Tinariwen’s bassist Eyadou Ag Leche), Imarhan leaves behind the emptiness of the vast desert to draw on the urban streets of its native Algeria, adding warmer, fuller sonic layers that transform melancholy into potent, youthful romance. There’s a heart-on-sleeve quality to those starlit Saharan guitars, a wilder fire and a gentler touch, creating a whole new style of free-spirited desert music. A polished funk edge and a dash of soul further set the group apart from its musical forebears. Imarhan opens up the way for a complete reimagining of Tuareg pop, one with greater depth of feeling and room for passion. It’s a great sign for the future of West African rock, and a demonstration of fantastic versatility within the realm of nomad rock. — Adriane Pontecorvo
Album: Apikorsim/Heretics
Label: World Village
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The Klezmatics
Apikorsim/Heretics
When the Klezmatics emerged nearly 30 years ago, they were radical in their political stance and their approach to Eastern European Jewish music. They titled their debut album Shvagn=Toyt (Yiddish for Silence=Death, the motto of the AIDS activist group ACT-UP); the band featured two gay members, singer Loren Sklamberg and violinist Alicia Svigals (since departed); and their politics were forthrightly leftist. Whether playing traditional material or their original numbers, they electrified audiences with a sound that was powerfully physical and deeply spiritual. A late ‘80s show I caught at the original Knitting Factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side remains in my memory as one of the most exciting and revelatory I’d seen in that dismal decade. Now, what was radical several decades ago has become classic, an established style that offers the pleasures of familiarity. Apikorsim/Heretics has everything the band’s fans have to come to expect: up-tempo dance numbers; instrumentals featuring round-robin solos and tight ensemble work; the seamless incorporation of jazz, Latin, and other influences; utopianism and irreverent humor. Their classicism doesn’t preclude new sounds or ideas, though; the former include the Latin flavor drummer Richie Barshay, a recent addition, brings; the title track celebrates dissent and rebellion with lyrics like “Cheerful heretics don’t believe in God” and “Happy heretics have no rabbi”. (But why doesn’t the band take on Israel, given that Netanyahu and the country’s right-wing politics are the antitheses of everything they stand for?) All six Klezmatics play with authority and soul, but Sklamberg deserves special mention – he’s nothing less than extraordinary, the kind of vocalist of which it might be said, “I’d listen to him sing the phone book”. — George de Stefano
Album: Fio da Memória
Label: Cumbancha
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Luísa Maita
Fio da Memória
It’s been six years since Luísa Maita’s debut album, Lero-Lero, and in that time, she has grown by leaps and bounds. On Fio da Memória, she taps into her wilder side and leads us through the dark and dreamy parts of her São Paulo. Neon electronics and tropical rhythms provide the perfect backdrop for her voice as she goes from whisper to bellow and back again, reaching refreshingly chaotic heights. The key to Fio da Memória is Maita’s newfound control: she knows exactly when to let loose and when to lie low here, maintaining a low-key strength even when she sounds effortless.
Percussion and guitars vary greatly in style across the album, but always move together in a well-choreographed dance of rhythm and melody. In contrast to the squeaky-clean Lero-Lero, instrumentation here tends to be full of electric fuzz, allowing Maita to maintain an enticing air of enigma. Fio da Memória is a stellar, ultrahip comeback that reveals another dimension of Luísa Maita, and promises a few more still to come. — Adriane Pontecorvo
Kristi Stassinopoulou and Stathis Kalyviotis and more…
Album: NYN
Label: Riverboat
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Kristi Stassinopoulou and Stathis Kalyviotis
NYN
This has been a year that has had more than its share of chaos and disappointment, but on one front, it has been one of the best in a decade. Musically, 2016 provided a global treasure trove of releases, and I could have offered you a dozen must have releases from the past year.
The top of my list this year is NYN, a work of poetry and politics by the Greek duo of Kristi Stassinopoulou and Stathis Kalyviotis. In the midst of the political and immigration turmoil that has rocked their country, they have composed a set of songs that address these issues with absolute devotion to poetry above polemic. RootsWorld’s Nondas Kitsos summed it up perfectly in his review. “In the song ‘NYN’, Stassinapoulou sings, ‘I threw away the past in the garbage bin.’ It’s one of the most revolutionary phrases ever uttered in Greece, a country that sometimes seems exists just to justify its ancient history. In this hymn for the here and now they sing ‘I’ll just lie down in the Ypsilon of the NYN’ (the υ of the νυν in Greek letters).” Delivered in their raw self-named Greekadelia style, Stassinopoulou and Kalyviotis offer a convergence of art, hope, and determination that is what I consider the essence of rock music. — Cliff Furnald
Album: Terra Sangue Mare
Label: Self-released
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Terra Sangue Mare (Michela Musolino, Michael Delia, and Fabio Turchetti)
Terra Sangue Mare
The first album by Terra Sangue Mare, a trio led by the Sicilian-American vocalist Michela Musolino, was recorded in Prague, but its 13 selections, original compositions and traditional songs, are suffused with Mediterranean warmth and color. Musolino, a first-rate singer with a rich, soulful voice, was born and raised in New Jersey, but she has close connections—familial and cultural—to Sicily. She often has performed there, as a soloist and with the cream of the island’s traditional/folk artists. On Terra Sangue Mare (Land, Blood, Sea), she sings in Sicilian (which actually is a language, not an Italian dialect), but the arrangements and instrumentation don’t make a fetish of authenticity. Musolino, Delia, and Turchetti play Sicilian and southern Italian instruments — tamburri and other frame drums, mandola, accordion — but also some from other musical traditions — the South American bandoneon; dumbeck, a Middle Eastern hand drum; the Zimbabwean mbira; bouzouki; and the waterphone, a percussion instrument modeled on Tibetan water drums. “Fammi Ristari” (Let Me Stay), with Musolino backed only by guitar and the chiming tones of the mbira, boasts a beautiful melody and romantic lyrics by Luciano Maio of the Sicilian neo-folk band Taberna Mylaensis. The up-tempo “U Sceccu” (The Donkey) takes its lyrics from a poem published in 1848, when Sicilian popular classes revolted against their oppressive Bourbon rulers. “Rove Ngoma/Palumedda” deftly fuses a Zimbabwean melody and lyrics from a Sicilian love song. Earthy and ethereal, Terra Sangue Mare is an auspicious debut for this rootsy yet innovative threesome. — George de Stefano
Album: Né So
Label: Nonesuch
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Rokia Traoré
Né So
Home, and the exile’s longing for it, is at the heart of Né So, the sixth album by the Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. But Traoré isn’t commiserating with the plight of the displaced from a safe distance; she instead witnessed it in her homeland, as Mali descended into civil war. Traoré has made something beautiful and moving from the traumas of war and her personal crises. She wrote 10 of the 11 songs (the exception being Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”), rehearsed them in Bamako, Mali’s capital and center of its music industry, and then recorded in Brussels and Bristol with a band that included her producer John Parish and musicians she recruited from throughout West Africa.
Traoré has made an African rock album in which guitars—often as many as three per song, including Traoré‘s—dominate. Concise, melodic guitar phrases — a.k.a. riffs — are the foundation of most of the songs, and drum kits, rather than African percussion, provide the beats. The album has a consistent sound and mood that at first might seem a bit too unvarying but with subsequent listening becomes entrancing.
“Strange Fruit” can elicit melodramatic overstatement, but Traoré avoids that pitfall with her hushed, tremulous rendering of Holiday’s devastating lyrics. And so it goes for the rest of Né So. Whether expressing a refugee’s longing for home, or exulting in the pleasures of a happy love affair (“Amour”, “Obiké”), or preaching an ethical code of mutual respect (“Sé Dan”), Traoré is never a showy singer. But her subtlety and quiet intensity, and her way of digging deep into a groove, make her a consistently captivating one. — George de Stefano
Album: Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959
Label: Dust-to-Digital
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Various Artists
Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959
It’s also been a remarkable year for making the old new again, and if there is a single recording label that does it with style, every time, it’s Atlanta’s Dust-to-Digital. This year they have released Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams, a hardcover book and accompanying CD that explores the 1927-29 recordings, and the personal history of a little-known gospel artist and his unique instrument. Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll gave us a glimpse of a pop music world we’d never have known, otherwise. And another book and CD set gave us the music of Blind Alfred Reed: Appalachian Visionary, music from the unsung artist who gave us songs like “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” and “The Telephone Girl” that have gone on to become country and blues staples.
Dust-to-Digital also brought out one of my top choices for 2016. Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959 is a masterpiece of music, passion and presentation. In 1959, novelist and cultural explorer Paul Bowles convinced the Library of Congress, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to record music on the streets and homes of Morocco. What he came home with was remarkable. Long, trance pieces gave the listener a deeper understanding of what the music could do, how it could move people in ways far deeper than popular music. But there are also light moments, with humorous street songs and spontaneous singing. What moves the whole collection from educational anomaly to masterpiece is the seemingly random track orders, made more for the ear than the mind, and Dust-to-Digital’s impeccable presentation style. The four CDs are placed in a cloth- wrapped “cigar” box, with an embossed leather ledger of notes by Bowles and others, and drawings and photographs by Bowles made during his travels. — Cliff Furnald
Album: Dois Amigos, Um Século de Música: Multishow Live
Label: Nonesuch
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Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil
Dois Amigos, Um Século de Música: Multishow Live
What better bond is there than fifty years of music, protest, imprisonment, exile, and even more music? Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso have a friendship that has weathered it all, and then some. Now in their 70s, Gil and Veloso each still provide the perfect vocal counterpoint to the other, Gil’s voice sounding rich and deep while Veloso’s rings out higher, lighter. Together, they are a complete sound, yin and yang, with a gravitas and beauty on stage together that can only come from shared experiences such as theirs.
On Dois Amigos, two men, their guitars, and a single spotlight trace a vital portion of Brazilian musical history as Gil and Veloso play new, stripped-down versions of their own songs from decades earlier, highlights of which include a wistful version of Gil’s formerly bombastic”Marginália II” and Veloso’s reflective “Nine Out Of Ten”, a song that has grown more poignant with age. The live recording itself is clear, perfectly capturing each harmony and echo while leaving in just enough audience applause to serve as a reminder that Gil and Veloso, godfathers of Tropicália, still have that legendary star quality. Dois Amigos puts this perfect team on a perfect pedestal. — Adriane Pontecorvo
Album: I Will Not Stop Singing
Label: Six Degrees
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Zomba Prison Project
I Will Not Stop Singing
The guards and prisoners of Malawi’s only maximum-security prison became Malawi’s only Grammy nominees with 2015 album I Have No Everything Here, a poignant compilation of recordings from within the overcrowded Zomba Central Prison, produced by Grammy winner Ian Brennan in conjunction with a documentary. Their second album is just as raw and emotional, full of largely acoustic songs with titles like “AIDS Has No Cure” and “I Will Never Stop Grieving For You, Wife”. Each singer colors their tracks with their own unique experiences; hope mingles with melancholy, resignation with still-burning resolve. Electrified track “Leave My Daughter Alone” is a march ready for fighting, and a hidden track at the end sounds almost like a spiritual.
Malawi is sometimes referred to as “The Warm Heart of Africa”, and this second installment of Zomba Prison Project proves why. While it may be harder to imagine empathizing with some inmates than others (Zomba Central houses double murderers as well as people convicted of homosexual acts, still criminalized under Malawian law), the Project creates direct human connections from its participants’ words to listeners’ ears, giving a global voice to a group of people who might otherwise go unheard forever. On top of that, a percentage of the proceeds of each sale go toward legal aid for the inmates, making this an album worth both time and money.
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