Lullaby for Naila

How right-on do you like your music? The London Lucumi Choir is a community choir that doesn’t select through auditions. Its singers perform in Yoruba, Sephardic Spanish, Yiddish, Lingala, French Creole, English and a Babel of other tongues. Professional Afro-Cuban percussionists assist, but guest artists include friends and family. Their second CD was, says director Juwon Ogungbe (who sings like Paul Robeson), inspired by the birth of his granddaughter and celebrates the life of a little girl – and the ancestry of all migrants and mixed-race people in London. ‘Lullaby’ doesn’t capture the richness of the 16 songs in the sequence, which sound, by turns, like rock opera numbers, gospel hymns, chansons, even musical interludes from a Brechtian drama.

The lead singers are astonishingly talented and the music is ‘world music’ by definition – multi-ethnic, hard to place, occasionally familiar (such as the snatches of Yupanqui's ‘Duerme, Negrito’, reworked in Lucumi, the Cuban dialect of Yoruba), and often surprising. The tender fragility of childhood is the one common theme; you won’t hear sweeter, more melancholy music this year.