'World Music' Bands // p 2 of 4

Cheikh Lô

He was born in the late 1950s to Senegalese parents in Bobo Dioulasso in Burkina Faso and began playing drums and singing at an early age.

He joined Orchestre Volta Jazz, a Bobo variety band that played Cuban and Congolese pop songs as well as traditional Burkinabé music. Lô moved to Senegal in 1978, performing in several mbalax outfits. By then, the Zairean sound was in full flower, Camerounian makossa was coming on strong, and reggae had entered the mix, and Lô absorbed everything. In 1985, he was playing guitar with numerous Côte d'Ivoire and French musicians, which led him to record material in Paris in 1987. After his band dissolved, Lô remained in Paris as a session musician, developing his own sound, described as a mix of mbalax, reggae and soukous influences. He spent most of his time in recording studios, and he picked up as much as he could. His casual contacts with Zaire's most successful progressive singer, Papa Wemba, were especially memorable. "I was a drummer. So when there was a group who came and didn't have a drummer, I would practice with them. Papa Wemba's drummer was also a businessman, so if he wasn't there, I would help out. He's from the school of Tabu Ley, and when I was young, I listened to Tabu Ley a lot."

In 1995, Youssou N'Dour offered to produce Lô's debut album, Ne La Thiass, which became a success worldwide.

In 2000, Lô sang alongside Ibrahim Ferrer on "Choco's Guajira", from Cuban pianist Rubén González's, (Buena Vista Social Club) album Chanchullo.

In 2002, he appeared on two tracks of the Red Hot Organization's tribute album to Fela Kuti, Red Hot and Riot. He collaborated with Les Nubians and Manu Dibango on one of the tracks, "Shakara / Lady (Part Two)."

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Cheo

Latin GRAMMY winner and former founding member, lead songwriter and guitar player of Los Amigos Invisibles, Jose Luis “Cheo” Pardo, is based in Brooklyn, NY and hails from Caracas, Venezuela.

Cheo has compiled a soulful body of tasteful work over the years, including projects released under the names of Locoeach, DJ Afro, Los Crema Paraiso, and Orquesta Discotheque. He has also released over 50 remixes for a wide variety of artists like The Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Devendra Banhart, Julieta Venegas, Natalia Lafourcade, Monsieur Periné and Basement Jaxx.

His new album SORPRESA (released on April 2020) includes sounds of Latin Soul, Bossa nova, Disco, Funk, House, and Mambo- this time, all released under his own name.

^{Source spotify.com}

Chicha Libre

Chicha Libre is a Brooklyn-based six-member band founded by Olivier Conan. Its name is a reference to chicha, a corn-based liquor that has been produced in South America since the time of the Incas. It is also the name of a Peruvian musical genre (also known as Peruvian cumbia) on which the band's music is based.

History
Conan was first introduced to chicha music on a trip to Peru in 2005. Their first album, ¡Sonido Amazonico!, was released in 2008 on Barbes Records, a label which Conan runs from his home in Brooklyn. They released their second album, Canibalismo, in 2012, and an EP, Cuatro Tigres, in 2013, both digitally and on vinyl.

The band's original members were Olivier Conan (lead vocalist, cuatro), Josh Camp (DuoVox, keyboards, background vocals), Vincent Douglas (guitar), Greg Burrows (percussion, background vocals, timbales, bongos, guiro, reco-reco), Timothy Quigley (percussion, bongo, shakers, conga) and Nick Cudahy (bass guitar). Additional members are Neil Ochoa (congas) and Karina Colis (timbales). Featured guest artists have included Jose Carballo (a former member of the seminal Peruvian chicha band, Los Hijos del Sol).

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Damon Albarn

Damon Albarn OBE (/ˈdeɪmən ˈælbɑːrn/; born 23 March 1968) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer, best known as the frontman and primary lyricist of the rock band Blur and as the co-founder, lead vocalist, instrumentalist, and primary songwriter of the virtual band Gorillaz.

Raised in Leytonstone, East London, and around Colchester, Essex, Albarn attended the Stanway School, where he met guitarist Graham Coxon and formed Blur, releasing their debut album Leisure in 1991. After spending long periods touring the US, Albarn's songwriting became increasingly influenced by British bands from the 1960s. The result was the Blur albums Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995). All three albums received critical acclaim while Blur gained mass popularity in the UK, aided by a Britpop chart rivalry with Oasis. Subsequent albums such as Blur (1997), 13 (1999), and Think Tank (2003) incorporated influences from lo-fi, art rock, electronic and world music. These were followed by The Magic Whip (2015), Blur's first studio album in 12 years.

Albarn formed the virtual band Gorillaz in 1998 with comic book artist Jamie Hewlett. Drawing influences from hip hop, dub, pop, trip hop, and world music, Gorillaz released their self-titled debut album in 2001 to worldwide success, spawning successful follow-ups Demon Days (2005), Plastic Beach, The Fall (both released in 2010), Humanz (2017), The Now Now (2018) and the first season of their Song Machine project, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez (2020). Although Albarn is the only permanent musical contributor, Gorillaz albums typically feature collaborations from a range of artists. Gorillaz are cited by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "Most Successful Virtual Band".

Albarn's other notable projects have included two supergroups: the Good, the Bad & the Queen and Rocket Juice & the Moon, working with the non-profit organization Africa Express, which he co-founded, and composing film soundtracks. He also scored the stage productions Monkey: Journey to the West (2008), Dr Dee (2012) and Wonder.land (2016). His debut solo studio album Everyday Robots was released in 2014, with his second The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows released in 2021.

In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked Albarn number 18 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". In 2016, Albarn received the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to music. In 2020, Albarn was granted Icelandic citizenship.

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Dead Can Dance

Australian music historian Ian McFarlane described Dead Can Dance's style as "constructed soundscapes of mesmerising grandeur and solemn beauty; African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant, Middle Eastern mantras, and art rock."

Having disbanded in 1998, they reunited briefly in 2005 for a world tour and reformed in 2011 when they released and toured a new album, Anastasis.

Dead Can Dance formed in Melbourne, Australia in August 1981 with Paul Erikson on bass guitar, Lisa Gerrard (ex-Microfilm) on vocals, Simon Monroe (Marching Girls) on drums and Brendan Perry (also of Marching Girls) on vocals and guitar. Gerrard and Perry were a couple who met as members of Melbourne's little band scene. In May 1982, the band left Monroe in Australia and moved to London, England, where they signed with alternative rock label 4AD. With the duo, the initial United Kingdom line-up were Paul Erikson and Peter Ulrich.

The group's debut album, Dead Can Dance, was released in February 1984. The artwork, which depicts a ritual mask from New Guinea, "provide[s] a visual reinterpretation of the meaning of the name Dead Can Dance", set in a faux Greek typeface. The album featured "drum-driven, ambient guitar music with chanting, singing and howling", and fit in with the ethereal wave style of label mates Cocteau Twins. They followed with a four-track extended play, Garden of the Arcane Delights in August. AllMusic described their early work as "as goth as it gets" (despite the group themselves rejecting the label), while the EP saw them "plunging into a wider range of music and style".

For their second album, Spleen and Ideal, the group comprised the core duo of Gerrard and Perry with cello, trombone and tympani added in by session musicians. Released in November 1985, it was co-produced by the duo and John A. Rivers. Raggett describes it as "a consciously medieval European sound like it was recorded in an immense cathedral". The group built a following in Europe, and the album reached No. 2 on the UK indie charts. By 1989, Gerrard and Perry had separated domestically – Gerrard returned to Australia and Perry moved to Ireland – but still wrote, recorded and performed as Dead Can Dance.

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Djivan Gasparyan

Djivan Gasparyan (var. Jivan Gasparyan; Armenian: Ջիվան Գասպարյան, Armenian pronunciation: [dʒiˈvɑn ɡɑspɑɾˈjɑn]; born October 12, 1928) is an Armenian musician and composer. He plays the duduk, a double reed woodwind instrument related to the orchestral oboe. Gasparyan is known as the "Master of the duduk".

Biography
Born in Solak, Armenia to parents from Mush, Gasparyan started to play duduk when he was six. In 1948, he became a soloist of the Armenian Song and Dance Popular Ensemble and the Yerevan Philharmonic Orchestra.

He has won four medals at UNESCO worldwide competitions (1959, 1962, 1973, and 1980). In 1973 Gasparyan was awarded the honorary title People's Artist of Armenia. In 2002, he received the WOMEX (World Music Expo) Lifetime Achievement Award.

A professor at the Yerevan State Musical Conservatory, he has instructed and nurtured many performers to professional levels of performance in duduk.

In 1998 he released an album with a unique duduk quartet he formed. Creating arrangements for 4 musicians with "new duduk tones, alto and bass, was an extremely difficult task" and challenge, but the quartet did become a reality performing and "there is no other like it in the world", he witnessed in the lines notes of Nazeli.

He has toured the world several times with a small ensemble playing Armenian folk music. His music has been chosen on the soundtrack of several international films.

He has collaborated with many artists, such as Sting, Peter Gabriel, Hossein Alizadeh, Erkan Ogur, Michael Brook, Brian May, Lionel Richie, Derek Sherinian, Ludovico Einaudi, Luigi Cinque, Boris Grebenshchikov, Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Hans Zimmer and Andreas Vollenweider.

He also recorded with the Kronos Quartet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Gasparyan played as part of the Armenian entry "Apricot Stone" by Eva Rivas at the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo and became the oldest ever person to feature in a Eurovision Song Contest performance, but was not officially listed as a guest artist.

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Ebo Taylor

Ebo Taylor (born 1936) is a Ghanaian guitarist, composer, bandleader, producer and arranger focusing on highlife and afrobeat music.

Ebo Taylor has been a pivotal figure on the Ghanaian music scene for over six decades. In the late '50s he was active in the influential highlife bands the Stargazers and the Broadway Dance Band. In 1962, Taylor took his group, the Black Star Highlife Band, to London. In London, Taylor collaborated with Nigerian afrobeat star Fela Kuti as well as other African musicians in Britain at the time.

Returning to Ghana, Taylor worked as a producer, crafting recordings for Pat Thomas, C.K. Mann, and others, as well as exploring solo projects, combining traditional Ghanaian material with afrobeat, jazz, and funk rhythms to create his own recognizable sound in the '70s.

Taylor's work became popular internationally with hip-hop producers in the 21st century. In 2008, Ebo Taylor met the Berlin-based musicians of the Afrobeat Academy band, including saxophonist Ben Abarbanel-Wolff, which led to the release of the album Love and Death with Strut Records (his first internationally distributed album). In 2009, Usher used a sample from Taylor's song "Heaven" for "She Don’t Know."

The success of Love and Death prompted Strut to issue the retrospective Life Stories: Highlife & Afrobeat Classics 1973-1980, in the spring of 2011. A year later, in 2012, a third Strut album, Appia Kwa Bridge, was released. Appia Kwa Bridge showed that at 77 years old, Taylor remained creative, mixing traditional Fante songs and chants with children's rhymes and personal stories into his own sharp vision of highlife.

He performed at the 2015 edition of the annual Stanbic Jazz Festival along with Earl Klugh,Ackah Blay and others.

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Extra Golden

Extra Golden is a musical ensemble founded by two Americans and one Kenyan.

Bandmember Ian Eagleson studied Benga music from Nairobi for his Ph.D. thesis, and received assistance from Otieno Jagwasi, a Kenyan musician who played in a group called Orchestra Extra Solar Africa. Eagleson traveled with Jagwasi to Africa to continue his studies in 2004, bringing studio equipments along. His friend Alex Minoff, of Weird War, visited him in April 2004, and the three of them recorded an album together during their stay, which was released on Thrill Jockey Records. Jagwasi died of liver failure in 2005, but the remaining two members collaborated further with Jagwasi's brother, Onyago Wuod Omari (a drummer in Orchestra Extra Solar Africa) and Opiyo Bilongo, an established Benga musician. Two more albums with this configuration arrived in 2007 and 2009.

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Fatoumata Diawara

Fatoumata Diawara (born 1982 in Ivory Coast) is a Malian actor, singer-songwriter and multiple Grammy Award nominee currently living in France. She received two nominations at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards for Best World Music Album for her album Fenfo and Best Dance Recording for Ultimatum featuring the English band Disclosure.

Biography
Born in the Ivory Coast to Malian parents, Diawara moved to France to pursue acting, appearing in Cheick Oumar Sissoko's 1999 feature film Genesis, Dani Kouyaté's popular 2001 film Sia, le rêve du python, in the internationally renowned street theatre troupe Royal de Luxe, and played a leading role in the musical Kirikou et Karaba. She later took up the guitar and began composing her own material, writing songs that blend Wassoulou traditions of southern Mali with international influences. Noted for her "sensuous voice," she has performed or recorded with Malian and international greats such as Cheick Tidiane Seck, Oumou Sangaré, AfroCubism, Dee Dee Bridgewater (on Red Earth: A Malian Journey), and the Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou. The EP Kanou was released May 9, 2011, and her debut album Fatou from World Circuit Records was released in September 2011. (Nonesuch Records released the Kanou EP digitally in North America on September 27, 2011, and the album Fatou on August 28, 2012.)

In September 2012, she featured in a campaign called "30 Songs / 30 Days" to support Half the Sky, a multi-platform media project inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book. September 2012 also saw her board the Africa Express Train with Damon Albarn, Rokia Traoré, Baaba Maal, Amadou & Mariam, Nicolas Jaar, and the Noisettes, amongst many others. The show culminated in a 4.5k venue in Kings Cross where Fatoumata performed with Paul McCartney.

Fatoumata has spent the recent years touring the world, with a landmark performance for the English-speaking public at Glastonbury 2013. Alongside many European gigs her schedule has taken her to South America, Asia and Australia as well as on multiple trips to the US, where in September 2013 she performed as part of the Clinton Global Initiative alongside The Roots in New York. Since mid-2014 she has been in collaboration with Roberto Fonseca, with numerous live performances and a joint live album, At Home - Live in Marciac, along the way. In 2014 she also extended her list of collaborations by a joint performance with Mayra Andrade and Omara Portuondo. February 2015 saw her first live concert as a meanwhile established international name back home at the Festival Sur Le Niger in Ségou, Mali, where she shared the stage once again with her long-time friend and mentor, Oumou Sangaré; Bassekou Kouyate; and many other domestic acts.

Alongside, she has continued her cinematic activities, with numerous roles, appearances and musical input in multiple feature films, such as the seven times César Award winning and Academy Award nominated 2014 Timbuktu.

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Geoffrey Oryema

Geoffrey Oryema (16 April 1953 – 22 June 2018) was a Ugandan musician. In 1977 after the murder of his father, Erinayo Wilson Oryema, who was a cabinet minister in the government of Idi Amin, he began his life in exile. At the age of 24, and at the height of Amin's power, Oryema was smuggled out of the country in the trunk of a car.

He sang in the languages of his youth, Swahili and Acholi, the languages of his lost country, the "clear green land" of Uganda, and he also sang in English and French.

Oryema earned his international reputation on the release of his second album, Beat the Border. He had collaborated with Peter Gabriel and others, and was backed by French musicians including Jean-Pierre Alarcen (guitar) and Patrick Buchmann (drums, percussion, backing vocals), touring with WOMAD in Australia, the USA, Japan, Brazil and Europe. In 1994 the band performed at Woodstock 94 celebrating the 25th anniversary of the legendary festival.

Gabriel's record label, Real World, helped with the first three of Oryema's albums, before his move to Sony International, a label established in France, where Oryema had lived since his exile.

In July 2005, he performed at the LIVE 8: Africa Calling concert in Cornwall, and with 1 Giant Leap at the Live 8 Edinburgh concert.

He resided in Paris, France until his passing. His ashes were delivered to Anaka.

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Gipsy Kings

The Gipsy Kings are a group of flamenco, salsa and pop musicians from Arles and Montpellier in the south of France, who perform in Andalusian Spanish. Although group members were born in France, their parents were mostly gitanos, Spanish gypsies who fled Catalonia during the 1930s Spanish Civil War. They are known for bringing Catalan rumba, a pop-oriented music distantly derived from traditional flamenco music, to worldwide audiences. The group originally called itself Los Reyes.

Their music has a particular rumba flamenca style, with pop influences; many songs of the Gipsy Kings fit social dances, such as salsa and rumba. Their music has been described as a place where "Spanish flamenco and gypsy rhapsody meet salsa funk".

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Goat

Goat is a Swedish alternative and experimental fusion music group. The band originates—according to its own publicity—from Korpilombolo, Norrbotten County. Their first album World Music, was released on 20 August 2012 by Rocket Recordings, and in North America on the Sub Pop label. The group released their third studio album, Requiem, in October 2016.

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Habib Koité

Habib Koité (Bambara: Habib Kuwate, born 1958 in Thiès, Senegal) is a Malian musician, singer, songwriter based in Mali. His band, Bamada, is a supergroup of West African musicians, which included Kélétigui Diabaté on balafon until his death in 2012.

Koité is known primarily for his unique approach to playing the guitar by tuning it on a pentatonic scale and playing on open strings as one would on a kamale n'goni. Other pieces of his music sound more like the blues or flamenco which are two styles he learned under Khalilou Traore.

Koité's vocal style is intimate and relaxed, emphasizing calm, moody singing rather than operatic technical prowess. Members of Bamada play talking drum, guitar, bass, drum set, harmonica, violin, calabash, and balafon. Koité composes and arranges all songs, singing in English, French, and Bambara.

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Hailu Mergia

Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument (Amharic:ኃይሉ መርጊያና የመሣረያ ቅንብሮቹ), also known as Shemonmuanaye, is a 1985 studio album by Ethiopian jazz musician Hailu Mergia, formerly of the Walias Band. After the band split up in 1983, Mergia moved to the United States and began studying music at Howard University, during which time he discovered an accordion and began playing it. Initially intending to record a cassette of himself playing the accordion in a small studio belonging to an acquaintance at Howard, he also incorporated other instruments in the studio, such as a Rhodes piano and synthesiser.

Using all three instruments and a drum machine, he recorded His Classical Instrument to showcase his mastery of the accordion, an instrument which reminded him of his youth – and which had lost popularity in Ethiopia since the 1950s – with the hopes of bringing it back to prominence. Via the inclusion of modern instruments, the album was also intended to mix the old accordion style with the modern technology of the United States. Originally released in Ethiopia on cassette by Kaifa Records, the album was a surprise hit when listeners warmed to its unusual sound, though, as was often the case with Mergia's music, the album was unheard outside of the country, and he soon slipped into obscurity.

When Brian Shimkovitz, founder of American reissue label Awesome Tapes From Africa, discovered a copy of the album in Ethiopia in 2013, he hoped to re-release it on his label, and contacted Mergia, who greenlit the project. Upon its re-release in various formats by the label that same year, the album received critical acclaim, with Western critics complimenting its uniquely psychedelic and dreamy sound. The success of the album relaunched Mergia's international touring career, which had ceased several decades earlier, and brought him international recognition. The label would later re-release further cassettes of Mergia's music.

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Har-You Percussion Group

The 101 Strangest Records on Spotify: Har-You Percussion Group - Har-You Percussion Group

Forming after the Harlem Riots of 1964, Har-You make Afro-Cuban sounds with furious and hip-shakingly groovesome rhythms

If you've ever wondered whether the world has changed a bit since the late summer of 1969, or whether it's basically the same, your answer will lie in this record and one of its contemporary reviews. "Here is a young, unknown group of musicians from Harlem," US music industry bible Billboard wrote in the last August of the 1960's. "[They've] pooled their talents to prove to the world that ghettos can produce more than shiftless undesirables." Wow, well there's a phrase to conjure with. Of course, it's hard to tell whether the unnamed writer was going for humour, but - either way - there's nothing funny about this LP. Funky, yes. Furious, yes. Hip-shakingly groovesome, yes. Awesomely enthusiastic, yes. Funny? Not so much.

Produced by legendary Jamaican jazz percussionist and drummer Roger "Montego Joe" Sanders and released by ESP Disk, this is a fantastically dynamic blend of Afro-Cuban rhythms with richly melodic jazz overtones, capturing the sound of people on the cusp of becoming great players. The horn-section in Tico is together and on the beat, but not quite confident enough to stretch out, while the gloriously full-steam-ahead attack of Santa Cruz threatens to derail itself but never does. Har-You began life as Harlem Youth Unlimited, a community group put together by Sanders after the Harlem Riots of 1964. On the audio track that accompanies this edition of the LP he described the group as "emotionally unstable young men with no inspiration and no place to go" and the record was meant to show those who held the city's purse strings that many people who had been written off and ignored would be much better listened to and appreciated. You have to hope that, after a showing like this, they were. Of course, despite the goodwill, the stinging Latin percussion and the powerful R&B horn riffs, no one really bought it, but the track Welcome To The Party - thanks to its ebullient brilliance and insane rarity - grew into a huge rare-groove club hit, one big enough to ensure this wonderful album was never forgotten. An original will cost you £500, by the way. So up yours, anonymous critic.

^{Source theguardian.com}