Electric Vocuhila combine the spirit of free-jazz legend Ornette Coleman with driving urban guitar rhythms like tsapiky from Madagascar or Congolese sebene. They masterfully sew them together on their pulse-raising third album, Palaces. "I had a long time love for African music and the repetitive motifs used in bebop and free jazz," the band's saxophonist and composer Maxime Bobo told RFI just ahead of the Palaces release party in Paris. The album is an electrifying patchwork of rhythms like tsa...
Sep 18, 2020•12 min
Admas, a quartet of young Ethiopian musicians living in exile in Washington DC, had a ball recording an album of synth-heavy, funked up versions of Ethiopian classics. 'Sons of Ethiopia ' was soon forgotten but became cult among fans of ethiojazz. Now reissued by Frederiksberg Records, it reflects happier times from a generation that "just escaped" the worst of the Derg. Some records are far more than the sum of their parts, and Sons of Ethiopia is one such. The seven tracks were recorded in 198...
Sep 08, 2020•16 min
Italian composer Ennio Morricone was famed for his film scores but his work straddled jazz, pop, psychedelia as well as the avant-garde, influencing bands as diverse as Air and Metallica. Ennio Morricone left behind some 500 scores for both film and television. The theme tune to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is undoubtedly one of the most renowned. “Just 10 seconds into one of Morricone’s soundtracks, you know it’s him, you know which film it’s from, you can se...
Jul 11, 2020•10 min
"Everyday I walk in this city, I know I walk alongside death," singer Hachalu Hundessa said just days before he was shot dead in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on 28 June. We hear how the 34-year old protest singer became the voice of the Oromo ethnic group. "He was the soundtrack of the 2018 revolution that brought change to Ethiopia" Awol Allo told RFI. The murder of Hachalu Hundessa last Monday sent thousands of Oromo out onto the streets in protest. More than one hundred have died in the ...
Jul 03, 2020•16 min
Inspiring speeches are great, but a song can travel and connect people like nothing else. After the tragic death of George Floyd, musicians are helping to bring issues of police violence and social justice to the fore. Beyoncé, queen of R 'n' B, and the young gospel singer Keedron Bryant have just released songs with a strong 'Black Lives Matter' message.
Jun 26, 2020•12 min
After exploring Zoroastrian chants on her 2016 album “Gathas, songs my father taught me”, mezzo soprano Ariana Vafadari puts femininity to the fore with the heart-wrenching “Anahita”, inspired by the Persian prophet Zarathustra and the goddess of water. Ten deeply spiritual songs set to Oriental maqam scales, tracing a path from despair to resolution. French-Iranian Vafadari has a successful career as an international opera singer, but remains deeply attached to her Zoroastrian roots. “I’m from ...
Jun 19, 2020•18 min
There are big names in The Eddy, a Netflix series about a struggling jazz club in Paris. But the real star is jazz. And since coronavirus is depriving us of the thrill of live music, the jazz sessions recorded with its own six-piece band provide music lovers a much needed fix. Composer Glen Ballard and saxophonist Jowee Omicil talk about the joy of putting music first. All the songs in The Eddy were written by award-winning American composers Glen Ballard and Randy Kerber. The series began with ...
Jun 12, 2020•20 min
When Swiss beatmaker FlexFab was doing a set in the coastal town of Kilifi, Kenya, a young Kenyan rapper Ziller Bas grabbed the mike and delivered his "Swengflow". The chemistry was immediate and six months later the two artists are set to release their debut EP Mugogo! A dancefloor must. Pablo Fernandez, who's been working under the moniker FlexFab for a decade or so, likes to work outside his comfort zone. He's lent his beatmaking skills to Kenya's Muthoni Drummer Queen, Batuk from South Afric...
Jun 06, 2020•13 min
When musicians Amadou Diagne and Cory Seznec had a chance encounter in a bar in Bath in 2007, they knew one day they would record together. Thirteen years later, after many "touki" (journeys), they've embarked on a new musical adventure with a debut album Right of Passage. They talk to RFI about making new roots music with kora, banjo and guitar. “It was a fortuitous meeting of like-minded kindred spirits,” said Seznec , a French-American singer-songwriter, guitarist and clawhammer banjoist who’...
May 31, 2020•17 min
When N'Djamena-based electro band Pulo NDJ found themselves stranded in Abuja with no chance of returning to Chad because of the coronavirus, they made their way to Lomé, set up a home studio and recorded a song about living in lockdown. Their story is one of friendship and remaining creative through the crisis. Since the release of their acclaimed debut album Desert to Douala in March 2019, Pulo NDJ has spread its inventive blend of traditional Chadian rhythms with an electro beat around West A...
May 22, 2020•12 min
Djibouti is better known as a strategic outpost than a hotbed of music but Groupe RTD, the country's national radio band, are one of its best kept secrets. By day they play at official ceremonies, off duty they let rip their love of American jazz, Indian Bollywood, Jamaican reggae and Somali funk. For the first time ever an independent label, Ostinato Records, was allowed to capture that sound and release it to the outside world on the upcoming Dancing Devils of Djibouti album. Since Djibouti ga...
May 18, 2020•15 min
Sarah McCoy is undoubtedly one of the most exuberant and talented singer-songwriters around, unafraid to bear her heart and soul in her music. "Honesty is important," says the 35-year old American. "If I were just singing about how it's sunshiny all the time, well some people can do that, but it's my job to sing about when it rains." McCoy was picked out by a French researcher singing and playing piano in clubs and bars in New Orleans. After a few years on the road, living rough, she moved to Pa...
Mar 17, 2020•14 min
Olga "Olgha" Nkweti is a singer-songwriter from the English-speaking part of Cameroon. She began singing professionally aged just 17 and has made a name crafting covers of popular songs into Pigdin English, but also writes her own soulful afro-pop compositions. She talks to RFI about composing the song Cold to draw attention to the innocent victims caught up in the Anglophone conflict. "I decided to write Cold to create an awareness about what has been going on in the English speaking zones of C...
Mar 05, 2020•13 min
Seb el Zin founded the surrealist rock band Ithak in 2005 and it somehow manages to straddle hardcore, metal, psychedelia and traditional Turkish music with equal ease. He talks to us about why metal is ethno music, his love of dystopia and science fiction, and finding lyrical inspiration in the odd mushroom. Seb El Zin (Seb the beautiful!) has many strings to his bow: composer, singer, musician and producer, he's frontman and guitarist with ethno-psychic punk band Ithak. Their second album, Bla...
Feb 29, 2020•16 min
Singer-songwriter Piers Faccini's latest opus is a four-track EP Hear My Voice. And what an original voice it is. He chats to us about his artisan approach to making nourishing music, doing it his way on his record label Beating Drum and how unpleasant years at Eton public school probably helped forge his unique musical identity. Anglo-Italian singer songwriter and guitarist Piers Faccini launched the Hear My Voice project in 2018 as a way of giving a platform to talented artists with distinct a...
Feb 07, 2020•17 min
"Some tracks have 300 different layers of vocals and most of them are me," says Ala.ni about her new album Acca. The London-born, Paris-based singer with a rare four-octave range beguiles us with her voice. The record is mainly her, a capella. With a bit of Iggy Pop. She talks to us about how her great uncle the singer Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson "black and bisexual in the 30's" gave her a lot of courage to be herself and "do things differently". We chat about how Iggy Pop took a shine to her and ...
Jan 24, 2020•17 min
On her latest album Lucid, Nigerian singer-songwriter Asa explores the many colours of love: warm, dark, brilliant, somber, the joy, the longing, the wanting. But also the violence that can seep into a relationship and destroy lives. As the world wakes up to the reality of sexual violence against women, Asa's song Murder in the USA, the opening track on the album, couldn't be more pertinent. She was fully aware that femicide was getting a lot of media attention, but personal experience also push...
Jan 17, 2020•15 min
La Mòssa are a five-piece band of female vocalists who excel at polyphonic chant. They've just released their debut album A Mòssa and talk to us about reinterpreting folksongs they love in a free and playful way in the spirit of Nina Tirabouchon, a 1920s Italian cabaret artist with hip swing to die for. La Mòssa means movement in Italian. Listen in to find out why that suits the women so well. La Mòssa : Lilia Ruocco, Emmanuelle Ader, Sara Giommetti, Gabrielle Gonin, Aude Marchand Upcoming conce...
Jan 10, 2020•15 min
Sona Jobarteh comes from a long West African tradition of Griots and kora players from Mali and The Gambia. She's become one of the rare women in the world to master the 21-string instrument which is traditionally reserved to men. She talks to RFI about working within the tradition to be better able to expand it. Sona Jobarteh's grandfather was Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, an oral historian and hereditary praise singer from the Mandinka people of The Gambia. Her cousin is Mali's Toumani Diabaté. Her ...
Dec 07, 2019•17 min
Emmanuel π Djob started out singing gospel in his native Cameroon and is building a successful blues-soul career in France. He heads up the six-piece AfroSoul Gang, but it’s performing alone with guitar that his gravel-rough baritone voice, raw emotion and soul really shines through. We caught him performing live on RFI's Musiques du Monde. Emmanuel π Djob started out with Bayembi’s International, a pan African gospel formation popular in Cameroon in the 1990s. After settling in France, he helpe...
Nov 29, 2019•13 min
A decade after their acclaimed album Tweet Tweet, Abraham Inc. return with Together We Stand, using their eclectic mix of klezmer, funk and hip hop to show that different religions, ages, sexes and races get along. David Krakauer, Fred Wesley and Socalled talk to RFI about how the U.S. president’s “Muslim” ban got them back in the studio making great music. “The band is kind of crazy mix of just about anybody you can imagine,” says Socalled, a Canadian beatmaker who’s been working with Krakauer ...
Nov 22, 2019•17 min
Nick Gold has been at the helm of World Circuit Records for close to three decades. The label has produced some of the best world music around: Buena Vista Social Club, Ali Farka Touré, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté, Cheikh Lô ... and most recently Trio Da Kali and Fatoumata Diawara. The London-based producer has a nose for talent but maintains being allowed to work with such artists makes him the lucky one. In 2018, World Circuit merged with BMG and together they recently released remastered v...
Nov 01, 2019•23 min
Raashan Ahmad is an American DJ, MC and hip hop artist with a big heart and a sharp mind. A thought-provoking rapper whose latest album The Sun explores joy and pain, hope and despair: the loss of his mum, the birth of his son. "Balance is something I've strived for... I can never get out of my mind how beautiful things are at the exact same time that they’re horrible." "Do you know what it feels like to be a black person?" asks American comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory on the ope...
Oct 18, 2019•16 min
Dubbed "the golden voice of West Africa" Pat Thomas embodied the glory days of Ghanaian highlife in the 60s and 70s alongside the great Ebo Taylor. The music fell out of fashion in the 80s but Thomas never stopped singing. He made a much-praised comeback in 2015 with the Kwashibu Area Band thanks to Ghanian musician and producer Kwame Yeboah and together they've now released another gem: Obiaa! (Everyone). Listen to Thomas and Yeboah, two generations of highlife, discussing their love of the mus...
Oct 11, 2019•14 min
