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Al-Andalus was a region of Spain which, after the expansion of the Islamic Empire, was governed by Muslim rulers for nearly eight centuries – from 711 to 1492.

During the first part of that time, followers of Judaism and Christianity were tolerated by most of the Muslim rulers, which encouraged a relative climate of cooperation between scholars of all three faiths. That climate of cooperation produced advances in math, science, art and music that influenced the rest of Europe.

The region’s spirit has inspired contemporary Norwegian pianist and composer Jon Balke — who, with his group Siwan, recently released his second album drawn from those influences, titled Nahnou Houm.

Balke first learned of Al-Andalus when he was commissioned to write music by a Moroccan promoter to celebrate a venue’s 15th anniversary.

“This was how I stumbled upon Gharnati music, which is the Andalusian music that existed in 1400 in Spain and was driven out,” Balke says.

The intellectual and social exchange fostered by its rulers helped make Al-Andalus one of the most culturally rich areas of Europe. But the Christian kingdoms to the north attacked repeatedly, and in 1492, the Spanish crown reclaimed the last vestiges of the region. Muslims and Jews were either forced to convert, killed or expelled. Many sought refuge across the Mediterranean Sea.

“They left Andalucía and went to North Africa, and Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria,” Mona Boutchebak says.

An Algerian classical singer, Boutchebak is the lead vocalist on the new album by Jon Balke and Siwan. She says the culture of what came to be called Andalusia was carried and preserved by the exiles.

“It is a mixture between Arabic music [and] Spanish,” Boutchebak says. “Flamenco comes from this music, from this tradition. I’m from this tradition, from the Arab-Andalusian one.”

It’s a tradition that’s still taught in schools — “what we call in Algeria the Arabo-Andalusian schools, where you can learn to sing the Arabo-Andalusian tradition,” Boutchebak explains. “So I went and I said, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I started to sing when I was 11, to learn this tradition.”

Jon Balke has taken this tradition’s poetry and composed his own music around it.

“It’s a framing of the musical project,” Balke says. “It puts the project in a framework that speaks about history and that speaks about a kind of a mentality that, from what you can read, existed in the best parts of this period — a kind of open, liberal practice of tolerance and coexistence.

“These poems, they speak about this kind of attitude, even if they speak about love or rain on the river or mystical experiences. You get the kind of a feeling of a period which was a really booming period in European history.”

At first, Boutchebak resisted the idea of combining her ancient tradition with jazz improvisation and music from the north.

“At the beginning, even for me, it was a little bit hard to imagine baroque music, improvisations, Andalusian music, and me in the middle,” she says. “I was asking myself, ‘What am I going to do?’ At times I felt it like it was so far from me, but it isn’t. We are all the same. The title of the album is ‘We Are Them,’ Nahnou Houm.”

Balke hopes that by trying to recapture a long-gone period of cultural and religious coexistence, his Siwan project can offer an alternative intolerance in the modern world.

“It is possible to coexist,” Balke says. “It is possible to respect even a person who believes something different from you or comes from a totally different background. And even if there are conflicts, it’s possible to solve them in another way than shooting the person.”

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Updated at 3 p.m. ET

Hugh Masekela, the legendary South African jazz musician who scored an unlikely No. 1 hit on the Billboard chart with his song “Grazing in the Grass” and who collaborated with artists ranging from Harry Belafonte to Paul Simon, has died at 78 after a protracted battle with prostate cancer, his family announced Tuesday.

“[Our] hearts beat with profound loss,” the Masekela family said in a statement. “Hugh’s global and activist contribution to and participation in the areas of music, theatre, and the arts in general is contained in the minds and memory of millions across 6 continents.”

Over his career, Masekela collaborated with an astonishing array of musicians, including Harry Belafonte, Herb Alpert, Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Paul Simon — and his ex-wife, Miriam Makeba. For almost 30 years, “Bra Hugh,” as he was fondly known, was exiled from his native country. And almost despite himself — as he struggled for decades with copious drug and alcohol abuse — Masekela became a leading international voice against apartheid.

The trumpeter, composer, flugelhorn player, bandleader, singer and political activist was born in the mining town of Witbank, South Africa, on April 4, 1939. Growing up, he lived largely with his grandmother, who ran a shebeen — an illicit bar for black and colored South Africans — in her house. (Until 1961, it was illegal for nonwhites in South Africa to consume alcohol.)

Masekela heard township bands and the music of the migrant laborers who would gather to dance and sing in the shebeen on weekends. One of his uncles shared 78s of jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller. Those two forces, the music and the booze, did much to shape Masekela’s life. He began drinking at age 13.

He was given his first trumpet at age 14 by an anti-apartheid crusader, the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, who was also the superintendent of a boarding school that Masekela attended.

“I was always in trouble with the authorities in school,” Masekela told NPR in 2004.

He had been inspired by the Kirk Douglas film Young Man with a Horn. Huddleston, hoping to steer him away from delinquency, asked what it was that would make Masekela happy. “I said, ‘Father, if you can get me a trumpet I won’t bother anybody anymore.’ “

Masekela soon became part of the Huddleston Jazz Band. And the priest managed to get one of the world’s most famous musicians to send young Hugh a new instrument, as Masekela told NPR in 2004.

“Three years later,” Masekela recalled, “[Huddleston] was deported and came through the United States on his way to England and met Louis Armstrong and told him about the band. And Louis Armstrong sent us a trumpet.”

By the mid-1950s, he had joined Alfred Herbert’s African Jazz Revue in Johannesburg; within just a few years, Masekela was good enough to co-found a landmark South African band, The Jazz Epistles, which also featured another landmark South African artist, the pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. They recorded the first modern jazz record in South Africa featuring an all-black band.

Within months of The Jazz Epistles’ creation, South African police opened fire on thousands of protesters and 69 people were killed in the infamous Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. The apartheid government declared a state of emergency, and The Jazz Epistles couldn’t play together. Meanwhile, Masekela had learned that he was being targeted for his anti-apartheid activities, and he had made friends with a talented singer named Miriam Makeba, who had already fled the country for New York.

Masekela, now 21 years old, was scrambling to secure a passport and papers to study music abroad. And his friendship with Makeba proved crucial, as he told NPR’s Tell Me More in 2013. She and the singer and activist Harry Belafonte became his patrons and mentors.

Masekela had originally planned to head to England to study at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. But once he was there, Makeba encouraged him to head to New York.

“We’d always dreamt of coming to the States, but she came a year earlier and blew the States away,” he told NPR.

“So she said, ‘Hey, you got to come, forget about London, this is the place to be.’ And she was on a first-name basis with everybody. Then she and Harry Belafonte gave me a scholarship to Manhattan School of Music. I also had to work part time in Harry Belafonte’s music publishing, because they ain’t going to give you no money,” Masekela said.

In short time, Masekela and Makeba became romantically involved; he also recorded with her and appeared on her album The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba. They married in 1964, despite the fact that their relationship was already tempestuous. Their marriage — one of four for Masekela — ended after barely two years.

At night, Masekela would go to the city’s great jazz clubs to catch the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. He wanted to be a jazz player in the same bebop style as his heroes, and that’s what he sounded like. But several of those giants gave him some solid advice. One of them was Miles Davis, as Masekela told NPR’s Morning Edition in 2004.

“I have a lot of great musical encounters with Miles, and he said, ‘Yeah. Yeah. You’re trying to play like me,’ ” Masekela said. “Miles was a funny guy. He said, ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you something. You’re going to be artistic because there’s thousands of us playing jazz but nobody knows the s*** that you know, you know, and if you can put that s*** in your s***, then we’re going to be listening.’ “

Masekela decided to put Davis’ advice to work. He put that bleep in his bleep, and began to develop his own, distinctive style — a blend of jazz, soul and one of the South African dance styles he had grown up with: mbaqanga.

It took him a while to get the blend just right. His first solo album was 1963’s Trumpet Africaine. In his 2004 autobiography, inevitably called Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela, the artist called that project a “disaster” and an “unlistenable mixture of elevator and shopping mall music.”

By the end of the decade, however, Masekela had pulled it all together and was living in Los Angeles. In 1967, the year his song “Up, Up and Away”was released, he performed alongside Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, The Who and his friend Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival.

A year later, his single “Grazing in the Grass” became a No. 1 hit on the Billboard charts. It was an astounding success — and all the more so as a tossed-off track that the trumpeter recorded with his band as album filler in just half an hour.

In 1977, Masekela’s Soweto Blues, about the anti-apartheid Soweto uprising, was recorded by Makeba, and it reached an international audience. After the stupefying success of “Grazing in the Grass,” however, Masekela largely spent decades living in a haze of drugs, alcohol, bad financial decisions and a string of failed marriages and countless other relationships. He occasionally made music, but he was dumped by label after label; by his own reckoning, he hadn’t played sober since he was 16 years old.

In his autobiography, Masekela estimated that he wasted $50 million, all told. It wasn’t until 1997 that he reportedly got clean; he went on to found the Musicians and Artists Assistance Program of South Africa, to help fellow performers struggling with substance abuse.

He spent stints living in Liberia, Guinea, Ghana and Botswana, where he worked and recorded with a diverse array of African musicians, including leading the Ghanian band Hedzoleh Soundz. He also recorded the anti-apartheid anthem Bring Home Nelson Mandela in 1986.

In 1987, he appeared with Paul Simon on his Graceland album tour alongside South African musicians Ladysmith Black Mambazo and again in 2012 on the 25th anniversary of the Grammy Award-winning album’s release.

Masekela finally returned to South Africa in 1990, following Nelson Mandela’s release. In the meantime, some of his friends and family members were on the frontlines of the new South Africa; his sister Barbara, for example, became her country’s ambassador to the U.S. Upon his return, Bra Hugh was hailed as an elder statesman of South African music, and he subsequently recorded a string of international albums.

Masekela performed at the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup and tournament in Soweto’s Soccer City in 2010. That year, Masekela was also given the Order of Ikhamanga in gold, his home nation’s highest medal of honor.

He had been scheduled to tour the U.S. this spring with his former bandmate Abdullah Ibrahim. But last October, he announced that the cancer that he had been battling off and on for nearly a decade had returned.

Among those marking his death is South African President Jacob Zuma, who released a statement on Tuesday: “Mr Masekela was one of the pioneers of jazz music in South Africa whose talent was recognized and honored internationally over many years. He kept the torch of freedom alive globally fighting apartheid through his music and mobilizing international support for the struggle for liberation and raising awareness of the evils of apartheid. … It is an immeasurable loss to the music industry and to the country at large. His contribution to the struggle for liberation will never be forgotten.”

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On Sept. 20, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, initially wiping out electricity and cellular reception on the entire island and causing billions of dollars in structural damage. Nearly four months later, much of the island still has no power and there are debates over the official death toll. Although the island officially reopened its doors to tourism last month, locals and natives note that the Christmas holiday was understandably scaled back compared to years past.

“In my town, this Christmas has been way understated because there’s many parts that still have no electricity,” says Luis Miranda Jr., a native of Vega Alta. “So it’s difficult to even put a Christmas tree up with some lights.”

But while Christmas was subdued, morale on the island is being re-energized by this weekend’s upcoming celebration of Three Kings Day. As one of the most important dates on the Puerto Rican calendar, the Jan. 6 holiday commemorates the arrival of the biblical three kings, also known as the three wise men or the magi, and their adoration of the baby Jesus. In many Spanish-speaking countries, the holiday is marked with festivals, processions and presents for children. Miranda has memories of singing, dancing and chasing chickens for the holiday meal at his grandfather’s house in Maricao.

“It was the holiday,” Miranda explains. “There is always live music. We celebrate it with music and food — those were two important ingredients. Presents were important and we all got presents, but the celebrations’ main items were music and food.”

Usual traditions on the island include a celebration at Luis Muñoz Marín Park in San Juan and large processions in Juana Diaz, the unofficial hometown of the magi. (The tourism offices of these respective cities could not be reached to confirm if their annual events were taking place this year.) The department store chain Macy’s is still planning to hold celebrations in both their Ponce and San Juan stores this week.

“Guests will enjoy live holiday music from local group Plenativa, arts and crafts [and] special gifts,” Jacqueline King, Macy’s Inc Media Manager says. “Plus, guests will be able to snap a photo with the three kings themselves with their personal camera.”

But with the past few months being anything but usual for Puerto Ricans, new traditions are forming as well.

Luis Miranda, Jr. and with his son, the Tony Award-winning Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, have partnered with Toys ‘R’ Us and Telemundo, to orchestrate 40 toy drive events in the last month. The Mirandas’ “Toys 4 Puerto Rico” drive will distribute the nearly 40,000 collected toys across the island this weekend, while four events take place in the U.S. where Puerto Ricans have migrated (New York, Philadelphia, Orlando and Chicago).

Luis Miranda, Jr. is employing out-of-work musicians on the island, from plenero bands to singing theater troupes, to act as the day’s entertainment.

“They will get paid to perform when they have not been able to because of the economic situation in the island,” Miranda says.

To hire the talent, Miranda enlisted the help of R.Evolucion Latina, an arts and community outreach organization based in NYC but working extensively on the island. Luis Salgado, founder and director of the organization, says there are performances planned in every corner of the island, from San Juan to Vega Alta to Dorado, with “a big spectrum of different artists.” One of those artists is Yari Helfeld. R.Evolucion Latina has been working with Helfeld’s performance group Y No Habia Luz since the hurricane hit in September and has hired them for this weekend’s events.

“It’s super useful to help people start opening their feelings because now people are super tense and anxious,” Helfeld says. “We don’t know how to escape, to relax the feelings the catastrophe created in us. So, through the music, we start to ‘dejando,’ let it go.”

R.Evolucion Latina and the Mirandas aim to not only unite the island with music this holiday, but set up a six-month work calendar for those still on the island — a new “normal” for Puerto Rico’s musicians, Salgado says.

“Once the parrandas season is over, a lot of those musicians are also looking for work,” he explains. “We’re trying to activate them in social ways where they continue to visit different towns and continue to uplift the moral necessities and the psychological necessities that people are going to are facing due to the circumstances.”

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Handling aux cord duties in a car full of girlfriends headed to a party is no small task. Expectations for playing just the right song to soundtrack the shared levels of excitement, confidence and sass are high. It only takes a few faulty shuffles or hesitant moments of silence to get your privileges revoked. It was in such a moment last summer that my friend, Keylah, triumphantly put me on to Parisian afropunk group Tshegue.

Something of a perfect storm of culture and innovation, Tshegue mix African drum patterns with pop and punk influences. Faty Sy Savanet, a braid-swinging vocal shape-shifter born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, sings over beats made by Nicolas Dacunha (a.k.a. Dakou). The band’s debut EP, Survivor, released this past June, houses only four tracks, but every note is of dynamic, pulsing jubilation.

The final song, “Muanapoto,” starts off with a simple, fast drumbeat but builds up over the course of four minutes into a controlled explosion of sound. Like a car chase in an action movie, “Muanapoto” is exhilarating as it is unexpected — you’re not sure where the beat will take you next, but you already know you want to be along for the ride.

Get familiar with Tshegue now and expect to hear more in 2018.

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