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Brazilian music has lived in London for years through Jazz Cafe residencies, samba schools in Notting Hill, baile funk nights in Hackney warehouses and a community that fills out shows from Camden to Brixton every weekend. What it has never had is a festival of its own. That gap closes on Friday 22nd May, when Boa Nova Festival takes over Leyton Jubilee Park with a bill made up entirely of Brazilian artists, presented by The Columbo Group in collaboration with […]...
Africa Oyé returns to Sefton Park on 20 and 21 June, and Liverpool gets it back after a fallow year in 2025. The UK’s largest African and Caribbean music festival, which drew over 80,000 people to its last edition in 2024, returns with a bill that spans Lagos, Bamako, Kinshasa, Maputo, Accra and Port of Spain across two days. Founded in 1992 by Kenny Murray, the 2026 edition of the weekender arrives with one major change. Infrastructure costs climbed, supplier […]...
There is a historic town in southern Estonia, population 17000, that every July transforms into a global cultural hub. For four days, the ruins of its 13th-century Livonian Order Castle fill with tens of thousands of people who have come, some of them from the other side of the world, to listen to music that in some cases nearly ceased to exist. The Viljandi Folk Music Festival has become one of the largest events of its kind in the Baltic […]...
Katariina Tirmaste was teaching at a traditional music camp in Estonia five years ago when one of her students, Kärt Pihlap, ended up on stage beside her. “We just looked at each other. And then we played,” Pihlap says. “The chemistry or the listening was really good between us. And so it was like, oh, wow, experience.” They kept going after that. The two flutes became a project, and the project eventually pulled in a third element when they collaborated […]...
A Bakhshi or an Ashiq, in the old Iranian tradition, walks from village to village with a saz across his back, and when he stops to eat or sleep, he stops to tell a story. The stories travel further than he does. By the time he leaves a village they are already on their way to the next one, in the mouths of the people who heard him. Pouya Ehsaei and Tara Fatehi reached back to this tradition, more than […]...
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