Arhoolie-label founder Chris Strachwitz spent 40 years combing the nation in search of idiosyncratic ethnic music. His travels are traced in the five-CD set, The Journey of Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection: 1960-2000. Strachwitz was attracted to songs lit with an earthy honesty that commercial music just can’t…

In Griot Time stands magnificently on its own as a sampler of Malian string music styles, but it works even better as a soundtrack. Don’t look for the film at your neighborhood video store, though. The CD is the companion to the Temple University Press book In Griot Time, by…

Oh, the crimes that have been committed in the name of world beat. The United Nations is convening a court in the Hague to deal with the atrocities of Scandinavian didgeridoo players, scat-singing Bulgarians, Brits performing in made-up languages, Americans affecting Caribbean accents, classical Indian ragas set to drum machines…

Just ten years ago, riding the leading edge of world beat was a gaggle of guys in fezzes claiming the last name of Mustapha. The 3 Mustaphas 3 deadpanned that they came to London from the Balkan town of Szegerely by smuggling themselves inside a shipment of refrigerators. They celebrated…

Desi Arnaz was a television genius. Fifty years down the road, the antics of the Ricardos and the Mertzes may smell musty until you consider that Arnaz had mastered the sitcom formula well ahead of everyone else. He was the innovator of three-camera simultaneous shooting, still the standard method of…

The sarode isn’t a big name in the United States. You might even accuse the sitar of hogging all the glory when it comes to lead instruments in Indian classical music. Blame it on the Beatles, who first brought the sitar to Top 40 radio with their Rubber Soul LP…

It’s no exaggeration to say Jai Uttal is the best in his genre. He’s the only one in his genre. He’s built his devotional-music shtick from the ground up, and his contagious enthusiasm transcends any doubts I have about forebearing hymns to Shiva, Krishna, and others in the Hindu pantheon…

On the minus side, the self-titled first American release by Uzbekistan’s pop songbird Yulduz Usmanova could have been produced by the World Trade Organization. The hungry, spinning, microtonal singing of Usmanova comes together with gritty backing vocals by South Africa’s The Family Factory in a buttery blend of synthetic textures…

Paris, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles. You’d expect to find enclaves of African musicians there. But Portland and Seattle? You bet, and it’s not even a new development. Ex-Ghanaian Obo Addy came to Portland in 1975 and his countryman Kofi Anang settled in Seattle three years later, to cite…

The cover of the box set Dinner on the Diner boasts, “two CDs and 64 pages of recipes, photos, and travel adventures …,” and, sure enough, the first page of the liner-note booklet I flipped to contained instructions for Sea Bass/Salmon Baked in Salt from Mary Ann Esposito. Later pages…

It’s got all the right ingredients for a huge disaster. Os Amores Libres by Galician piper Carlos Nuñez mixes up northern Spanish, Celtic, Moorish, Romanian Gypsy, flamenco, and Sephardic music. It amalgamates Jackson Browne with the Sufi Andalousi Choir of Tangiers, barricades Gypsy band Taraf of Caránsebes inside an Irish…

It strains the brain to think that Takashi Hirayasu and Bob Brozman had never played together, never met, never really spoken, and had no idea if they’d even get along before sequestering themselves for a week in a small wooden cottage on Taketomi, the most untrammeled of the Ryukyu Islands…

Just a few years ago, releasing an anthology of music from the Dominican Republic that wasn’t dedicated to merengue would have been unthinkable. Now it’s all bachata, a working-class meat-and-potatoes music that hit the big time with Juan Luis Guerra’s 1990 album, Bachata Rosa. Although widespread for decades, bachata was…

Most music that reaches us from the Balkans is emotionally of a piece with the area’s tragic history. But Gypsy brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia proves on Baro Biao, World Wide Wedding that Romanian music also can be deliriously celebratory. Well equipped to make momentous music for equally momentous occasions, the…

For a fix of Finnish fiddle music, you’d naturally look in the Finland section of your friendly neighborhood CD store. But to satisfy that Finnish-harmonica jones, you’d best bypass the international bins altogether and grab this one-of-a-kind disc from the Marquette, Michigan-based Les Ross, Sr. Playing in the all-but-extinct lumberjack…

If the new CD by guitar troublemaker Marc Ribot and his band Los Cubanos Postizos coheres better than the “fake Cubans” eponymous 1997 debut, that’s because Atlantic Records originally signed them after they had played just three gigs together. The group’s concept of parsing the music of Cuban composer and…

Franco Luambo Makiadi, better known as Franco, was the most influential musician in the history of African pop music. But he doesn’t have a single American-label record in print. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, the magnificent 2096-page tome edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry…

We all know Africa gave birth to the blues. Identifying the father has been a favorite game of recent CDs, which try to match John Lee Hooker’s DNA to a specific West African style. Taj Mahal traded songs with a six-piece Malian folk ensemble fronted by kora player Toumani Diabate…

The talent, if not the ego, of prodigious Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure tended to eclipse the accomplishments of his accompanists. But now that Toure has retired to his family farm with a Grammy-winning disc under his arm, one of his band members is making good on Toure’s desire that…

The Drepung Gomang college earned its name a little differently than most Western centers of learning. The Tibetan word gomang literally means “many doors,” and the story is that spiritually advanced monks of Drepung Monastery were able to walk through the college’s solid stone walls without the need for doors…

Handsome Boy Modeling School So … How’s Your Girl? (Tommy Boy) Bring it on, man. All you gotta do in true-blue hip-hop circles is utter the sequined names Prince Paul and Dan the Automator in the same sentence and you’ll get some wide-eyed gawkers going giddy. Were it only for…

In Northern India instrumental music has traditionally been considered a male domain. Fathers pass on both their technical prowess and their acquired lore to their sons or closest male relatives. Until recently, women have been left out of the loop. “The one instrument where females have made some inroads is…