The Adventures of Andy Kershaw: An Evening with the Legendary Broadcaster and Foreign Correspondent runs from January 14 until March 21, and is sure to be an unmissable and revelatory delight for all those who have benefited from Kershaw’s expansive tastes in the world of music.

With 31 dates already confirmed and more possible dates to come, it is a rock’n’roll style marathon, of which Songlines – with its long association with Kershaw – is proud to be the media partner.

www.andykershaw.co.uk

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This year’s festival is arrayed between the shiny new Kings Place, eclectic arts venue Rich Mix and uber-trendy Café OTO in north London and Wandsworth’s Lost Theatre.

The festival features new Portuguese fado from Claudia Aurora, Vietnamese Cai Luong (theatre music) song from Huong Thanh, Poland’s Warsaw Village Band and the Siberia’s Namgar, the Samí song of Mari Boine and Jamaican reggae from Misty in Roots. This only scratches the surface of a list of artists spanning China to Angola, Estonia to Brazil.

www.lifem.org.uk

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The Finnish connection comes via singer Sanna Kurki-Suonio, who appears on Cronshaw’s new album The Unbroken Surface of Snow, alongside the other members of the quartet, Armenian duduk master Tigran Aleksanyan and reed instrumentalist Ian Blake.

The quartet bring their otherworldly sounds to the Centre for Reconciliation & Peace at St Ethelburga’s in central London, a church damaged by an IRA bomb in 1993 and since restored as a place of global interaction.

http://stethelburgas.org

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The project has its roots in a collective of producers brought together by Albarn and named DRC Music. They are Kwes, Jneiro Jarel, Richard Russell, Alwest, Actress, Marc Antoine, Remi Kabaka, Dan the Automator, Rodaidh McDonald and T-E-E-D. Over five days in July 2011, DRC Music worked with over 50 Congolese artists including Bokatola System, Nelly Liyemge, and Jupiter and the Okwess International to create the album, which was released by Warp Records digitally on October 3 and will be out on CD/vinyl on November 7.

All proceeds will benefit the local performers, as well as supporting Oxfam projects in the DRC. View the trailer and find out more at:
http://drcmusic.org

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On July 3, he disappeared and according to reports, his body was found in the city’s river with its throat cut and vocal cords ripped out. It suggests the brutality of the regime in the face of open articulation of dissent by protest singers and poets, though all reports from within Syria are impossible to verify due to the regime’s media blackout.

Hear Qashoush leading the crowds in Hama on this YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH57lRemXtw&feature=player_embedded

Meanwhile, across the border in Lebanon, where Syria has for so long had a political as well as military presence, the uprising is building tensions. Beirut hipster Zeid Hamdan was jailed temporarily in July over slander charges he faces for defamation of the Lebanese president Suleiman in a song he posted on YouTube in August 2010. The track, ‘General Suleiman’, calls on not only the president, but also the country’s militiamen, corrupt politicians, arms dealers and foreign intelligence operatives to, ‘go home’.

The 35-year-old musician is a veteran of Beirut’s outspoken independent music scene and used to be one half of the electronica fusion duo Soap Kills. Prosecutors will now decide whether to press formal charges in a Middle East climate of increasing discontent towards those in power.

Judge the song for yourself at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L83n4zhg8Jw

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A petition has been launched calling for a greater representation for Gypsy jazz musicians at the festival honouring the Gypsy inventor of the genre. It is claimed that the festival has become steadily taken over by more straightforward jazz music – though a look at this year’s star-studded programme reveals a far wider musical representation than pure jazz alone, with headline performances by Serbian brass band leader Goran Bregovic and US soul legend George Benson.

It is claimed that this year’s event sees not one Gypsy swing band, and that the ticketing has made the event – on an island in the Seine – so exclusive as to detach it from the local area and the Gypsy musicians who flock to Reinhardt’s resting place to hear Gypsy jazz.

See for yourself this weekend at the Django Reinhardt Festival 2011 in Samois-sur-Seine. If you agree, sign their petition:

http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/djangosamois

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