You would be excused for suspecting there’s a secret subtext to A Man About a Horse (ECM). Minnesotan guitarist Steve Tibbetts admits that the ebbing and flowing compositions, held together by Indonesian drumming patterns, sheets of feedback-laden electric guitar, and delicate acoustic guitar passages, gang up to tell a story…

Totó la Momposina is a one-woman walking encyclopedia of Colombian musical folklore. She’s also something of a perfectionist. A band with the chops and horn section wielded by her ensemble could easily have cranked out an entire disc of the blazing salsa-influenced raveup that opens Pacantó. The title cut transforms…

Few folks are liable to turn handsprings at the thought of a double-CD of traditional music from East and Central Asia. It suggests a listening experience loaded with nutritional value but perilously low on the enjoyment scale. But The Silk Road (Smithsonian/Folkways) plows new ground by opening disc one with…

It sure feels like genuine 1970s nostalgia as Geraldo Pino testifies, “Get down you people. We’ve got a brand-new gal in town.” The organ burbles heatedly in the foreground. The Fender bass bounces a melodic riff off a wah-wah rhythm guitar. But as the song grinds on, it might not…

Dang-dut! The sound of the tabla is unmistakable. Sharp, hollow, and surprisingly melodic for a drum, it can percolate in the background like water dripping in a subterranean pool or rattle at full throttle at machine-gun pace. Many people know the distinctive timbre of the tabla from its backbone role…

The strongest, strangest folk-based music out of Western Europe sounds closer to medieval Bulgarian grain-threshing songs than anything from modern Scandinavia. But don’t tell that to the members of Finland’s “girl group” Värttinä, who have invented a delirium-inducing flavor of pop anchored to a seventeenth-century Finnish Karelian musical genre called…

Ho-hum. Classic reggae and Indian film music. Tell us something new. Decades after their big breakthroughs in the late 1960s, reggae and filmi have become marginalized by their popularity. Stuck in their respective niches, the genres haven’t gained appreciable momentum from the sputtering but occasionally lively world-music bandwagon. Innovation has…

I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a love-hate relationship as intense as the one I’ve been enjoying-despising with Fermin Muguruza’s Brigadistak Sound System. How could I not love an album with Euskera-language lead vocals, Cuban horns, a reggae dub aesthetic, and a Toots and the Maytals cover? How…

If the folkie soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ romp O Brother, Where Art Thou? has given you a hankering for American roots music, Rounder Records’ Roots Music four-disc set might seem like the logical box to buy. But hold your horses. Don’t confuse this mislabeled anthology with the just-released American…

If you’re not a Spanish speaker, “Contrabando y Traición” by Los Tigres del Norte on the Mexican-music anthology Corridos y Narcocorridos sounds every inch as innocuous as a wedding polka. Jorge Hernandez’s sweet vocals ride a bouncing oompah bass while accordion tootles suggest a nostalgia-laden ranchera that wouldn’t offend a…

It’s fitting that Raul Malo’s first solo album kicks off with a whirlwind hybrid of a song, blending salsa figures with calypso horns, English-language lyrics, a chorus drawn from Beatles-era Top 40 hits, and a pumped-up carnival atmosphere raucous enough to swallow the rest of Today. But Malo’s huge, emotive…

Once upon a time, the city of Mostar was considered a model for how fractious ethnic communities could learn to live together. The Bosnian war changed everything, although amid the general destruction, groups of musicians struggled to instill a small sense of normalcy. Meeting by candlelight, they quietly assembled to…

Yat-Kha’s end-of-the-century Delai Beldiri was a glorious freak show that counterpoised stone-age shamanic Siberian throat singing with Sixties-era rock-combo amplification. No matter how many times I played it, the album never ceased to startle me. But its successor, Aldyn Dashka, is so well crafted, so heady with one good song…

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain imagined an abrasive New Englander transforming Medieval England into a precursor of the nineteenth-century United States, complete with the plagues of a stock market, baseball leagues, and telephones. Radio Tarifa gave me an equally audacious thought: What if, instead of…

It’s a surprise right up there with hearing rap at a nursing home. Buena Vista Social Club bassist Orlando Cachaito Lopez busts out of the senior activity center for señors with a genre-bursting release worthy of a youngster. But few urchins could wield the know-how to carry off Cachaito by…

Back in 1978 the Paul Winter Consort made a kind of musical history on the disc Common Ground by incorporating the calls of wolves, birds, and humpback whales into the group’s material. Ancient Future upped the ante in 1981 with the interspecies recording Natural Rhythms, which found Matthew Montfort interacting…

Castanets and tablas may seem an unlikely combination. But a New York City production called Nacho Nacho: Gypsy Storytelling actually combines flamenco traditions with northern Indian kathak dance styles. Samir Chatterjee, one of the foremost Indian tabla drummers in the United States, conceived and directed the project. “Flamenco has a…

The only reason why qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis, is known in the West when other types of Pakistani music remain hopelessly obscure is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. While he may not have been the greatest qawwal of the Twentieth Century, his two fusion CDs with British producer…

Some 40 years ago Cuba’s octave-hopping queen of melodrama, Xiomara Alfaro, poured her persona so thoroughly into the torch song “Siboney” it became impossible to imagine another soul attempting a straight-faced rendition of the same. But Raul Malo of the Mavericks matches Alfaro’s sun-extinguishing angst, and the all-star ensemble backing…

You can’t miss the royal overtones to Istanbul Oriental Ensemble’s Caravanserai. As unmistakable as a peacock’s tail, this eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music sprang from a repertoire designed to flatter, pamper, and bathe the spoiled personage of the sultan in sensual delight. The luxurious, highly ornamented mixture of hand drums, kanun…

Big Youth may not have been the first of the great Jamaican DJs, but he was the second. U-Roy preceded him, virtually inventing what then was called toasting by improvising rants, brags, and poetry atop the instrumental B-side of reggae 45s at Kingston dance halls where records provided sole entertainment…

Various ArtistsCalypso Awakening Smithsonian Folkways In his notes to Trinidad Carnival Roots, musicologist J.D. Elder calls calypso “undoubtedly the national song of Trinidad and Tobago.” Today that “national song” has all but gone the way of its nineteenth-century predecessor, kalenda. A collection of 1962 field recordings by Alan Lomax, Carnival…