Reviews
Here & There
Folk guitar virtuoso and music professor Dimitris Mystakidis started playing professionally as a 16-year-old in Thessaloniki, inspired by his mother's...
Reviewed by Russell Higham in issue: Jan/Feb/2020
Le Cri du Cyclope
French-Lebanese percussionist Wassim Halal was originally trained in Lebanese dabke music. His first album, Revolutionary Birds, with Mounir Troudi and...
Reviewed by Marwan Shamiyeh in issue: March/2019
Natural Invention
Peter Knight's Gigspanner Big Band
After four decades with Steeleye Span, in 2009 fiddle player Peter Knight formed Gigspanner (the touring musician's name for that...
Reviewed by Julian May in issue: June/2020
Aynaabe
The traditional bowed violin of the Senegalese Peul shepherds is called nianiorou or riti. Former shepherd Issa Sow is perhaps...
Reviewed by Martin Sinnock in issue: March/2020
Uncle
Many reviewers judged the indigenous Pitjantjatjara singer-songwriter Frank Yamma's 2010 acoustic opus Countryman to be a masterpiece. The intervening years...
Reviewed by Seth Jordan in issue: March/2015
Como la Luna y el Sol
There is now a legion of different approaches to Sephardic song but two predominate. There’s the scholarly, supposedly authentic manner,...
Reviewed by Dennis Marks in issue: June/2014
Songs Lost & Stolen
In 2008 Bella Hardy, a young singer from Edale in Derbyshire, stepped onto the stage at the Royal Albert Hall...
Reviewed by Julian May in issue: June/2011
True Speech
This is one of the most dynamic and accomplished folk groups from Eastern Europe I've heard in a long time....
Reviewed by Simon Broughton in issue: Jan/Feb/2011
The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Africa
If time travel ever becomes a viable option, Africa during the 1960s and 70s will be a priority destination if...
Reviewed by Nige Tassell in issue: June/2012
Hunter
Christina Alden & Alex Patterson
Locked down doesn’t mean imaginations are locked up. In Hunter, song inspiration is global, despite being set down and sung...
Reviewed by Sophie Parkes in issue: July/2021
