The Whole Music Experience

World Ana Alcaide La Cantiga Del Fuego Arc Music I heard about the Spanish traditional musician Ana Alcaide last December.   Alcaide interests me because the musician/culture preserver/composer/performer went from playing her nyckelharpa (a traditional Swedish keyed-fiddle) on the streets of Toledo, to producing the album La Cantiga Del Fuego which landed on the top of the World Music Chart in Europe. Alcaide’s journey has lasted over a decade thus far, and which also includes higher education in music conservatories in Sweden and Spain, studies in biology, and a fascination with both musical traditions of the Sephardic Jews of Spain and North Africa, as well as, the nyckelharpa.   If you want to know how all of that fits together, then you must listen to La Cantiga Del Fuego , an album filled with stories about love, tragic loss, exile and hope, brimming with the sounds of exotic European and Middle Eastern instruments. Journalists have compared Alca...

World / Jazz Ablaye Cissoko/Volker Goetze Amanké Dionti Motema (2012) The world music duo Ablaye Cissoko, a griot kora player from Senegal and Volker Goetze, a trumpeter originally from Germany returned with another masterful recording, Amanké Dionti .   After the duo’s critically-acclaimed Sira (2008), which married a trumpet’s clear tones with the delicacy of a kora (West African harp) and Cissoko’s Senegalese vocals, transformed both world music and jazz.   Not long after, Sira came into the world, another Euro-African duo, Vincent Segal (France) and Ballaké Sissoko (Mali) wed cello with the kora (this duo has an album out in February 2013). When I listen to Amanké Dionti I wonder what Miles Davis or John Coltrane would have thought of the musical marriage.   The recording fits easily and comfortably into jazz and world music.   I would even squeeze it into world classical and if a new ager didn’t reflect on the socio-political messages ...