South Korea boasts a wealth of artists who are performing both time-honoured and progressive music on traditional instruments. Here Simon Broughton selects ten of the country’s finest instrumental albums
Having recorded albums in Yiddish and Tatar, and songs in most of Poland’s minority tongues, Karolina Cicha talks about the Karaite people and their language
The Scottish musician has become one of the most lauded names on the European folk scene. Tim Cumming follows Polwart’s career from her trad band origins to the award-winning singer-songwriter we know today
The Czech artist talks about the Finnish and Chinese zithers feeding her distinctive sound, which bridges two seemingly disparate cultures
Meet the Sheffield-based trio who used the isolation time of lockdown to fashion a striking homage to the natural world
One half of the South Korean duo Dal:um, Hwang Hyeyoung speaks about her deep-toned, bamboo-plucked zither
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
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