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When Alceu Valença was six, his grandfather declared that the boy had no rhythm. The old man got it badly wrong. Valença, a singer-songwriter from Pernambuco in Brazil’s Northeast, has spent more than five decades writing songs for the region’s dance floors and carnival streets, and has become one of its best-loved voices. Now 80, he brings his birthday tour, 80 Sunflowers, to London’s Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 7th November. Rhythm came at him from every corner, from the […]...
Kluane Lake sits two hours from the Alaska border, ringed by mountains, under a midnight sun in summer and months of darkness in winter. Diyet van Lieshout was born in a tent on the ancestral lands of the Kluane First Nation, in a community of ninety people whose families have lived in that country for more than ten thousand years. She discovered she had a voice at ten, by accident, as a shy kid. She took a degree in voice […]...
Zando no longer exists. The market at the centre of Kinshasa, a city inside the city, where hundreds of thousands of Kinois poured in daily through a permanent uproar of decibels, bodies and adrenaline, has been demolished and is being rebuilt. The gangs that gave it its mythology, Vampire 4, Arabes Chauds, Gucci Boys, Zaïre 243, Temple Rouge, BB d’Amour, P8, Androïdes, Filles Têtues, have been dismantled by police. What survives of it, in large part, is on a record. […]...
The London Choro Festival returns for its second edition this weekend, from Friday 16th to Sunday 18th October, at Copper Cats, an independent pub on Kingsland Road with bare brick and timber beams. Its three days of concerts, workshops and rodas, the open sessions where anyone with an instrument can join in, are all devoted to choro, Brazil’s oldest urban instrumental tradition. Every day pairs a free roda at 5PM with a concert at 7:30PM, and a ticket for all […]...
It all began with a box nobody wanted. In 2004, digging for jazz and funk at Casablanca’s Derb Ghallef flea market, Aziz Konkrite found a neglected crate of nearly two hundred Moroccan 45s. Their owner saw little value in them. Twenty years later, they have become the foundation of Siba Sawt-System, the project the Franco-Moroccan DJ, digger and producer describes as an instrument he built in order to speak: one that archives on the road, composes in the studio and […]...
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