World music can be like a genome project sometimes, except here the DNA involved is an aspect of culture, not biology, and in this case music, descended through history along many crooked lines of mutation and permutation. Ali Farke Toure’, the...

No one has ever accused me of being reggae’s greatest fan, though I’ve always liked it. It’s just that after its early good-time urban Caribbean florescence and its Marley-defined climax, the good-timers turned to dancehall, leaving reggae...

Cairo International Film Festival is the kind of film festival that I like, the kind where you can watch a lot of cutting-edge films- cheap. While many other film festivals concentrate on traipsing in some Holly Woodstars for a photo-op, while sending...

If combination is the essence of creativity, then it’s also key to enjoyment of it, the more incongruous the better. It’s interesting to see a ‘Native’ event in London, not exactly a crossroads of ‘native’ activity (except for a few...

I’ve always wondered at the musical concept “Afro-Latino,” usually expressed as “Afro-Cuban” with no ensuing explanation, as though the meaning were obvious, even though there is little or no documentation of this. Presumably the existence...