Around half of the 80,000 indigenous Sámi people live in Norway. Simon Broughton talks to one of the country’s rising musical stars, Marja Mortensson, about how she’s invigorating the joik tradition. Photos Knut Åserud & Tom Askew-Miller
Catching up with the stellar folk collective who are casting their illuminating charms on a world in need of a little magic
Heiress to a piece of Norwegian musical history, Gro Marie Svidal talks about the allure of her unique Hardanger inheritance
Gambian kora player Sona Jobarteh speaks to Lucy Hallam about how she is shaking up the continent’s antiquated education system and dragging the griot tradition into the 21st century
The Beatles’ fusion of Indian music into Western pop inspired a monsoon of similarly adventurous experiments. Nigel Williamson offers a chronological selection of the most inventive albums of the last 50 years
Israeli-born vocalist Noam Vazana composes songs in the Jewish Ladino language and speaks here to Simon Broughton about her fascination with this dying tongue
The stereotype-shattering sitarist talks about their deeply singular musical approach informed by dance, electronics and family reminiscences
Indian sitar maestro Purbayan Chatterjee’s new star-studded album, a go-getting synthesis of South Asian and Western elements, is a creative response to the limitations of lockdown. Simon Broughton reports
The South African superstar talks about the revolutionary music that inspired him and ‘This Town’, his joyous collaboration with Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Nigel Williamson explores The Beatles and India, a new film lifting the lid on the Fab Four’s journey east and the impact that Indian music and culture had on the group’s own sound and legacy
Ahead of their appearance at this year's Songlines Music Awards ceremony, revisit an interview with the Barcelona-based Ayom, whose push for greater global understanding via ritualistic Afro-Lusophone engagements bagged them 2021's Best Group category
Michael Levy speaks to Simon Broughton about his ‘lyre of Apollo’ explorations, which follow in the exalted footsteps of the ancient Greek masters
For five decades Susana Baca has been performing plangent protest songs in the name of South America’s marginalised peoples, the poor and the planet. On the eve of the release of her latest album, Palabras Urgentes, the Afro-Peruvian diva talks to Chris Moss
We speak with the saxophonist and composer whose boisterous outfit, A Espetacular Charanga do França, are putting the heart back into Carnaval
Rob Adams examines the extensive career of the acclaimed French double bassist, who has been influential in taking the instrument to its sonic limits
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