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Gnawa music is often likened to American blues and gospel. Gnawa music is a mixture of African rhythms and Islamic poetry created by enslaved West Africans brought to Morocco. For centuries, it was ...

At 2 p.m. Feb. 3, I met John Fleming, his sister, and Ruby Miller, at the American Museum of Science and Energy. It was my privilege to provide a tour to acquaint our speaker for the evening with ...

Corey Harris won the MacArthur Fellowship, the $500,000 “genius award,” two years ago for his unrelenting quest to trace the blues back to Africa. This week the ...

Your browser does not support the audio element. On the islands off the coast of Georgia, the Gullah Geechee culture of ex-slaves was isolated from the rest of the ...

The mainstream pop world still may not be aware of it but, over the last four decades, there has been a distinctive brand of guitar-driven, blues and rock-flavored music wafting in from northwestern ...

The trumpeter and composer Russell Gunn will premiere “The Blues and Its People,” a suite inspired by Baraka’s influential text, to mark its 60th anniversary. By Alan Scherstuhl When he first read ...

African music, with its distinctive emphasis on polyrhythm and beats flowing from percussive instruments, was long treated as subordinate in the international music arena. Music from the continent ...

Thinking back on the biggest cultural moments of 2024, it’s hard to ignore the many African women who were at the center of it all. Over the past decade, global African music has been dominated by ...

The 2024 Grammy awards will see the introduction of a new category: "best African music performance." When the category was announced last year, Grammys CEO Harvey Mason Jr. stated that it would be ...

I have to hand it to the Putumayo label. Since it started as a soundtrack-provider to a clothing store in the early '90s, the operation has placed racks of CDs with friendly-primitivist art by Nicola ...