Brazil’s Hermeto Pascoal is a legend among musicians and fans for his ability to conjure beautiful sounds out of just about anything — from tea kettles to PVC pipes to traditional woodwinds.

Earlier this May, the New England Conservatory awarded Pascoal an honorary Doctorate of Music degree and in July, the 81-year-old released No Mundo Dos Sons, the first album from him and his group in 15 years.

Pascoal can come up with a melody at the drop of a hat. He says he’s written 9,000 compositions and most, if not all, were created on the spot.

“It’s because I’m 100 percent intuitive,” he says. “I don’t premeditate anything. I feel it. When something happens, I don’t say, ‘Now I’m going to do that.’ No. If I want to write the music, I start creating. Every piece of my music, even the one I write on a piece of paper, I consider an improvisation.”

Pianist Jovino Santos Neto is a professor of music at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts and agrees with the impromptu nature of Pascoal’s work. Santos Neto was also a member of Pascoal’s band for 15 years and is now the archivist of his work.

“Hermeto is music,” Santos Neto says. “He is the current. He’s like a source or a spring that’s just gushing that water, and that water is music. … There’s a saying, I think it’s a John Cage thing that said, ‘Music is playing all the time. Music continues, we just kind of dip into it once in a while.’ Well, Hermeto is fully immersed in it. So because of that, whenever you are close to him, you just see [that] the music is just coming out.”

Pascoal was born in a small farming town in the northeastern Brazilian state of Alagoas. He dropped out of school in the fourth grade — there was no such thing as special education back then for a child with the vision problems that come with albinism. His father taught him to play the accordion and in the early 1960s, Pascoal moved to Rio de Janeiro. By then, he’d picked up piano and flute and began recording with some of the new generation of Brazilian musicians, including Quarteto Novo.

Quarteto Novo’s percussionist was Airto Moreira, who went on to play with Chick Corea and Miles Davis. Moreira recommended Pascoal to Davis and together, the trumpeter recorded with the Brazilian on the album Live-Evil.

Santos Neto says one of Pascoal’s compositions for Miles, titled “Little Church,” was inspired by the Brazilian’s childhood memory of hearing his mother and her friends singing novenas to the Virgin Mary.

“[Pascoal] would hear these voices wafting through the walls of the church,” Santos Neto says. “He was scared to go inside, so he’d sit outside and listen as his mother was singing. So he wrote this gorgeous melody.”

Pascoal recalls an interview Davis gave in which the trumpeter was asked how he’d like to return from the afterlife.

“‘I would like to be a musician like that ‘crazy albino,'” he says, recalling Davis’ response to the question. “[Miles] used to call me ‘crazy Brazilian albino.’ And to make music like that of Hermeto Pascoal, the ‘crazy albino.’ I was very happy when I heard that.”

That’s typical of Pascoal’s personality says Santos Neto. In the more than 40 years Santos Neto has known the older musician, Pascoal has never changed.

“He never aged and he’s at the same time…a very complex personality,” Santos Neto says. “He’s both the wise old man, because of the white hair, but he’s also the prankster, the 16-year-old who’s really crazy to play a prank on somebody and to laugh and to make jokes.”

Pascoal doesn’t make jokes about his honorary Doctor of Music degree from the New England Conservatory. He says it’s one of the greatest recognitions of his life. But this acknowledgement reinforces something he’s believed for a long time.

“Hermeto doesn’t make Brazilian music, he makes music in Brazil,” Pascoal says. “Therefore, Hermeto is a Brazilian citizen only on a piece of paper. But in my music, I’m universal.”

And, as the title of his new album says, Pascoal will always be No Mundo Dos Sons — in the world of sounds.

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You might think traditional West African music and Western classical music would share little common ground. But Ladilikan, the album from Mali’s Trio Da Kali and San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet is a welcome landmark in the history of unlikely musical collaborations.

The two groups together are a voice of an African praise singer harmonized by a string quartet.

Trio Da Kali’s members descend from venerable musical families in Mali. With centuries of history and musicianship at their backs, they represent the chamber music of West Africa. Hawa Diabaté, the group’s vocalist, has been singing for decades, schooled at the foot of her world famous father, Kassé Mady Diabaté. Lassana Diabaté — no direct relation — is a monster balafon player who’s worked with everyone from Taj Mahal to Béla Fleck to the top musicians of Mali. And the young Mamadou Kouyaté — whose dad, Bassekou Kouyaté, was nominated for a Grammy — holds down a solid, swinging bass on the traditional lute, known as a ngoni. Just these three musicians create such a big sound.

Kronos Quartet is known for progressive and daring rule-breaking. Trio Da Kali, by contrast, is made up of staunch defenders of an ancient tradition: jeliya, the art of the griot. “Da Kali” means to keep a pledge, and the group’s mission is to restore and renew their heritage in an era of rampant modernism and Islamic fundamentalism.

Trio Da Kali and Kronos first performed together in a series of concerts some years before this album was recorded. So by the time they met in a Swiss recording studio, they knew exactly what to do. Central to everything is Hawa’s luminous voice.

So call this a happy marriage of pledge-keepers and rule-breakers. The trio holds fast to tradition, while the quartet soars into realms unknown.

This mesmerizing album includes two songs adapted from Mahalia Jackson, who shares with Hawa a robust contralto voice. Think of it: a Muslim African praise singer channeling a late American gospel diva!

On Ladilikan, out now, Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet shatter boundaries of culture, genre, faith and ethnicity — all with an ease that must be heard to be believed.

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Late one Thursday night, the hippest cafe-bar in the village of Majdal Shams pulses with strobe lights. The dance floor is packed. Beloved hometown band Hawa Dafi — Arabic for “warm breeze” — is playing a live concert.

Early the next morning, another soundtrack rocks the village.

“We actually woke up to the sound of bombings and fighting,” says guitarist Busher Abu Saleh. He is groggy, nursing a coffee with some bandmates at the Why? cafe, where they performed the night before. “We were up late last night. They woke us up at six in the morning.”

The cafe-bar is a safe place for a coffee, but just a few minutes’ drive away is the Israeli border fence with Syria. Many in Majdal Shams have relatives who live just beyond the fence in a Syrian regime-controlled village that’s frequently under attack by rebel fighters.

The village’s location on the geopolitical map has always been precarious, even a bit surreal. But it has also created the perfect conditions to incubate an unlikely experimental Arabic music scene. Village musicians— a few professional ensembles and some garage bands — set Arabic lyrics to a variety of styles, from jazz and blues to heavy metal and ska.

For the young generation in Majdal Shams, music has provided an escape from a frustrating set of circumstances — not just the echoes of the Syrian civil war raging next door.

Israel captured Majdal Shams from Syria in 1967. Hugging the slope of a tall mountain, the village is stuck in a corner alongside the borders of both Lebanon and Syria.

Israel is in a state of war with those countries and today, villagers are prohibited from visiting. For years, villagers would gather at what’s known as the Shouting Hill and, with a megaphone, they’d hold conversations with their relatives across the valley in Syria.

The villagers are Arabs, mostly of the Druze religious minority. But many young people there, the musicians included, aren’t really into religion.

On paper, the people of Majdal Shams are not citizens of any country. They consider themselves Syrian, and most have refused Israeli residency papers. Their travel documents lists their nationality as “undefined.”

“This kind of speaks to me,” Abu Saleh says. “I’d rather be a citizen of the world than of imaginary borders.”

That undefined identity has inspired musicians from the village to look beyond their borders, to borrow from different music genres and to blend them into Arabic music that’s, well, hard to define.

Laissez Passer is the latest album by village band TootArd, Arabic for “strawberry.” The band blends Tuareg music of North Africa with saxophone and oud, a traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument. The album’s title track opens with a reggae feel and lyrics like, “I do not exist on an ID card.”

Abu Saleh’s band, Hawa Dafi, was formed in 2012, toward the start of the Syrian war. It borrows from gypsy music to riff on same theme — as in the song “Majhool,” Arabic for “undefined,” from its 2015 album Our Story.

Hawa Dafi also rails against organized religion in its song “Enta Meen,” and sings about the hopefulness of the beginning of the Arab Spring in “Shams Elhoreye,” meaning “the sun of freedom.” Abu Saleh says war doesn’t stop their music.

“My mother is from Lebanon and they had a 15-year-long civil war. And music was made back then, and people were getting married, and falling in love and out of love, and life went on,” Abu Saleh explains. “Eventually it will be over.”

Down the road from where the guitarist sipped his coffee, residents rally and sing next to the border fence, in support of their Syrian families besieged on the other side. On the same street overlooking the border, villagers are celebrating a wedding.

In this village, war is a part of life, and life is a part of war.

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This essay is one in a series celebrating deserving artists or albums not included on NPR Music’s list of 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women.

Walls of huge speakers delineate the outdoor dancefloor, the warmth of the air matched by the warmth of the bass: This is a Jamaican soundsystem dance. One of the best things to hear at one of these events is the powerful, smooth sound of Marcia Llyneth Griffiths’s voice floating over the rhythms. Hers is a voice that can be trusted, relied on; powerful, experienced and wise, but with such pure tone. It feels like it wraps itself around you, reassuring you that everything will really, truly be all right.

Marcia Griffiths is the undisputed Queen of Reggae. For over half a century, she has soundtracked Jamaica with her tell-tale timbre — in truth, you are more likely to hear Griffiths in Jamaica than Bob Marley — and she’s still recording and performing today. From 1960s ska to 1970s reggae to today’s dancehall, she has been a central figure in the history of Jamaican music. Outside Jamaica, Griffiths is also well-known for the go-to wedding party hit “Electric Boogie,” originally released in 1983 by Bunny Wailer. Griffiths’ 1989 remix is one that very few people have not heard — and it remains the top-selling single by any female reggae singer.

Griffiths is also well-known as a member of the I Threes, the all-important backing vocalists for Bob Marley on record and live, which she formed with Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt in 1974 and performed with until 1981. Griffiths, however, was recording solo all the while. And it is Naturally, released in 1978 (reissued as Dreamland), that perhaps showcases her talents most fully. Though the Jamaican music industry has always been more based on singles, Naturally is a ten-song, album-length argument for why Griffiths is such a foundational artist.

The story goes that Griffiths found her calling when the 99-pound teen — she describes her 13-year-old self as “one skinny little toothpick” — took the stage with then-calypso king Byron Lee and his Dragonaires at the Carib Theatre in Kingston, Jamaica on Easter Monday in 1964. Clement “Sir Coxone” Dodd was impressed and invited her to record at the storied Studio One, and this led to Griffiths’ first Jamaican No. 1 hit, 1968’s “Feel Like Jumping.” Legendary singer-songwriter Bob Andy wrote that classic and became one half of Bob and Marcia, whose joyful, string-laden version of “Young, Gifted and Black” reached No. 5 on the UK charts in 1970. The duo, who were successful solo artists already, eventually went their separate ways, but still, from time to time, perform together to this day.

The album kicks off with “Dreamland,” written by Bunny Wailer. Griffiths provides a narrative of repatriation, singing of a land “so far across the sea.” Given the Rastafari movement’s ideas and concepts, the song is potentially representative of a desire for Africa as home. This space, where breakfast comes from trees, waterfalls are plentiful and stars shine in the sky, can be seen as references to the roots and culture lifestyle of Rastafari as well.

“Truly,” another standout track on the album — originally produced by Sir Coxone and written by Bob Andy — has one of the most memorable hooks, just declaring love, over and over. The song’s instrumental track (referred to as a “riddim” in Jamaica) has been repurposed countless times — memorably by the late Garnet Silk as “Fill Us Up With Your Mercy.” The keyboard part riffs on Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” (better known as “Here Comes the Bride”) and is the perfect accompaniment for Griffiths’ declarations of love: as sincere and firm as Silk’s sung prayer to Jah. The focus on love in “Truly” makes it an excellent partner to “Melody Life,” another track on Naturally, perhaps one of the best arguments for marriage, thanks to Griffiths’ convincing delivery.

Naturally contains tunes that reach back to the beginning of Griffiths’ career, too — the Andy-penned “Feel Like Jumping” is here, with its tell-tale ska jump. It’s a little slower here than the 1968 original, but all the exuberant energy in the “la la la la laaas” still remains. The feel of the track still exemplifies the music of Jamaica, characterized by the excitement of a country who had recently — on Aug. 1, 1962 — achieved independence. Similarly, Griffiths’ variation on The Wailers‘ song “Lonesome Feeling” moves the track into a less ska and more relaxed reggae setting, communicating the title’s sentiment just so. The balance of the short album provides images of resistance, as in “Survival (Is the Game),” and struggle, in another Bob Andy song, “I’ve Got to Go Back Home,” which shows off the upper registers of Griffiths’ vocals.

Naturally was produced by Sonia Pottinger, an exemplary producer from the 1970s so-called golden era of reggae, and the production really demonstrates Griffiths’ absolutely reassuring control over her voice. “Miss Pottinger, the only female producer, she used to do gospel first. [She] was a woman that we could relate to as another female. And I was very comfortable working with Miss P,” said Griffiths in an interview with poet and radio host Mutabaruka in 2014, celebrating her 50 years in the music industry. The record exemplifies this comfort, with Griffiths reaching back to early career highlights and effortlessly moving from spirituality and celebration to love and loss, always with her stunning, reliable alto that expresses just the right amount of emotion — be it plaintive or joyful or somewhere in between. Though reggae is indeed a male-dominated industry, it would not be the genre it is today without Marcia Griffiths, Jamaica’s First Lady of Song.

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From the Celtic colors of Cape Breton Island to the amber of Highland Perthshire and the stunning autumnal displays of the Appalachian Ridges, we feature music from Maddie Prior, Dougie MacLean and The Critton Hollow String Band.

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This essay is one in a series celebrating deserving artists or albums not included on NPR Music’s list of 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women.

If there were ever a voice that embodied that of a siren, a voice that could seduce, sadden and soothe with its elegance, it was Cesária Évora‘s. It was the voice that lifted Cape Verde’s little-known blues, morna, beyond the island and into the international world of music. In 1995, Évora’s years of living and singing the blues culminated in Cesária, an album that cemented the importance of Évora, and morna, in world music.

As with the greatest blues singers of all time, the knowing and sensitivity Évora brought to morna was lived, not sought after. She was born in Mindelo, a port city on the island of São Vicente. Her musician father died when she was a young girl; Évora’s mother, unable to care for her, placed her in an orphanage soon after. By the age of 16, Évora was already world-weary: swigging scotch, burning through cigarettes and captivating patrons with songs of loss in tiny Cape Verde taverns.

She sang in Kriolu, which draws from West African dialects and Portuguese — the language of Cape Verde’s former colonizer. Évora had a gift for elevating morna ballads, a style of song whose lyrics address poverty, longing, and most deeply, partings: of both the physical and emotional kind. Her melodic voice conjured the beauty and struggle, melancholy and yearning of life in Cape Verde. Performing without shoes, Évora was often paid with drinks and trivial tips as she performed for the sailors who arrived on the Portuguese cruise ships that docked at Mindelo. Yet her languid vocals and blasé glamour were unforgettable. She would eventually be known as the “barefoot diva” and the queen of morna, both names capturing the humble majesty she evoked.

Decades before seasoned artists such as Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley reached world-wide fame at ages where most musicians had long retired or given up, Évora was “discovered” at the age of 47 by producer José Da Silva while singing in Lisbon. Bana, a Cape Verdean singer (known as the “king of morna“) who had found success off the island, wanted to expose Évora, and morna, to a larger audience. So he invited Évora to perform in Portugal. That fateful trip would change her life. But as with much of her career, rightful acclaim would come later: four albums in, to be exact, with 1992’s Miss Perfumado. That album made her an international star, and went on to sell 300,000 copies worldwide.

But in 1995, Évora lit the torch brighter with Cesária, cementing her place as Cape Verde’s morna master. Nominated for a 1996 Grammy for Best World Music Album, Cesária sees Évora’s exquisite vocals paired with theopulence of guitars, percussion and violin. For the first time, her music was carried by a celebratory quality, suggesting that even in mournful morna some moments call for one to dance and sway in pleasure.

On “D’Nhirim Reforma” the buoyancy in Évora’s vocals lifts her beyond her renowned languidness. The rhythmic guitars on “Petit Pays” and “Nha Cancera Ka Tem Medida” captivate with their warmth, while the inclusion of the violin on “Areia de Salamansa” makes Évora sound as if she is performing in a European cafe. “Consedjo” and “Flor Na Paul” are communal songs sang with spirited backing singers whose inclusion strikingly contrasts with the lonesomeness Évora’s vocals conjured on prior albums. And even when Évora is heard singing solo, the inspired whistles on “Rotcha ‘Scribida” and “Doce Guerra” feel like sorrowful companions. The result is an album that is nostalgic yet saccharine free, one on which Évora’s voice commands the music fully and is the vortex that all its beauty swirls around. By the end of Cesária,the definitive stamp that Évora had placed on morna was complete.

By the mid-2000’s, Évora was celebrated around the world — including a 2004 Grammy win for her ninth album, Voz d’Amor. But despite the acclaim, she was already beyond the notions and trappings of fame. She knew it was well-deserved and a long time coming. Rather than feel chosen like Cinderella placing her foot into the glass slipper, the barefoot diva remained unchanged. During one of her sold-out Montreal International Jazz Festival shows, which I attended towards the end of her career, Évora graced the stage with nonchalance, smoked throughout despite the non-smoking rule and addressed the audience at the end with a single goodbye. The intimate, spontaneous manner of her performance suggested that though the audiences had grown and the faces and places changed each night, she was still the woman performing in nondescript bars, singing timeless stories to drifting faces. She viewed fame as something that provided a greater vehicle to share her gifts with people around the world, which she did until her death in 2011.

Évora’s blues transcended the limitations of language, allowing her to blaze a one-woman path forward. And this groundwork she set has paved the way for others as diverse as the Buena Vista Social Club and Daymé Arocena. Today, artists in the genre of morna remain indebted to, and live in the shadow of, Cape Verde’s chanteuse of blues.

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Well before Paul Simon’s “Graceland” came along, a white musician from South Africa named Johnny Clegg was already breaking apartheid laws and celebrating Zulu culture. He co-founded two important, interracial bands, and became an essential voice in his country. But two years ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he’s on a farewell U.S. tour that he’s calling “The Final Journey.”

Johnny Clegg is 64 years old. He’s in remission now, but he has a very aggressive form of cancer. “I’ve come out of my second chemo in February,” he says. “In March, I just said to my management, you know, if there was a time to wrap up my affairs while I’m feeling pretty strong and good, it would be now.”

For his current tour, he’s playing a retrospective of a career that’s spanned four decades. Clegg’s life — and music — have moved in parallel to the currents of South Africa’s history. His song “Asimbonanga,” written in honor of Nelson Mandela, became an anthem for South Africa’s freedom fighters.

Clegg was born in England, the child born of a brief relationship between an English man and a female jazz singer from Zimbabwe (which was called Southern Rhodesia at the time). Clegg spent his early childhood in Zimbabwe; when he was 7, his mother remarried to a South African crime reporter. Soon after, the family moved north to Zambia for a couple of years, before settling in Johannesburg. “I went to six schools in five years in three different countries,” he observes.

It was in Johannesburg that Johnny — then just a young teenager — fell in love with Zulu culture and music.

“I stumbled on Zulu street guitar music being performed by Zulu migrant workers, traditional tribesmen from the rural areas,” he recalls. “They had taken a Western instrument that had been developed over six, seven hundred years, and reconceptualized the tuning. They changed the strings around, they developed new styles of picking, they only use the first five frets of the guitar — they developed a totally unique genre of guitar music, indigenous to South Africa. I found it quite emancipating.”

He started taking lessons in that local style. “The chap who taught me was an apartment cleaner around the corner from where I lived, and then I bought a cheap steel-string guitar. And I was on my way.”

His guitar teacher introduced him around, in places where he probably wouldn’t have been welcomed if he’d been a white man. But the teenage Clegg was really just a kid.

“He took me into these areas of backstreet Johannesburg, where the migrant laborers would hang out,” Clegg says, “in the industrial side of the city, which wasn’t really that well policed. We went around the migrant labor hostels, where somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 black, male-only itinerant workers could live and pay rent for a bed.”

The hardscrabble hostels were the center of life for these itinerant workers. “The hostels were these military barracks-like structures,” Clegg explains, “with 20 beds in a open-plan room: open-plan kitchen, open-plan showers, toilets, all that stuff. It was a very tough, hard life. People struggled and competed to get a bed, because if you got a bed, you got a bed number — which it meant that you could get a job, and if you had a job, you could be legal for 11 months of the year in Johannesburg.”

The hostels were raided at least once a month by the police, Clegg says. “You never knew when they were coming. And the hostels were also monitored by the municipal police, the ‘Blackjacks,’ who were basically there to prevent prostitution.”

But on the weekends, Clegg says, those migrant workers treated themselves to little tastes of home around the hostels. And Clegg fell in love with their Zulu culture.

“This incredible, tribal carpet would be thrown out into the streets,” he says, “and dance teams, diviners, herbalists — practitioners of various different tribal aspects of life — would ply their wares sitting on pieces of cardboard on them on the sidewalk.”

Clegg fell in love with Zulu dancing, just as much as with the music, and dancing opened up a whole new channel of being for Clegg. “It was like capoeira, or martial arts, to music,” he explains. “You kick high, and you stamp the ground, which is symbolically delivering a blow to an enemy or receiving a blow and how you would recover. So it’s a kind of warrior theater.”

Clegg says that those Zulu men dancing taught him — as a teenager trying to figure out his place in the world — what it meant to be a man. “The body was coded and wired — hard-wired — to carry messages about masculinity which were pretty powerful for an adolescent boy,” he observes. “They knew something about being a man, which they could communicate physically in the way that they danced and carried themselves. And I wanted to be able to do the same thing. Basically, I wanted to become a Zulu warrior. And in a very deep sense, it offered me an African identity. It was like a homecoming for me; I don’t know why, but I felt that.”

Clegg was only 15 when he first got into trouble with the authorities for mixing with blacks. “I was arrested for trespassing and for breaking the Group Areas Act. The police said, ‘You’re too young to charge. We’re taking you back your parents.'”

His mother opened the family’s front door. “I was standing between two policemen,” Clegg recounts, “and they said, ‘Listen, your son was inside a hostel. We only go in there armed with guns. Every weekend, there are dead bodies coming out, with tribal fighting and longstanding clan wars going back 50 years. They’re competing for scarce resources in there, there’s lots of crime, there’s stolen goods — it’s not a place for a 15-year-old white boy to be hanging out.'”

Initially, Clegg’s mother told him he couldn’t go back. But he was not to be deterred.

“I got the dance leader there, a 68-year-old chap who was a very famous dance leader at the hostel, to come to my flat and to meet my mom,” he says. “He brought his two lieutenants with him and they sat there, they chatted and he said, “Once he’s through the gates and he’s with us, he’s fine. Nothing will ever happen because we are all going there to dance.”

And so, he went back — over and over again. “It was a very strong experience dancing in a hostel,” Clegg says. “The beds were pushed up against the walls, and 40 or so men would sit against the wall. To make space, they would open their legs and put somebody else sitting between their legs, and then the guy in front between his legs, and between his legs, and so on. You’d sit and you’d clap and sing. You basically had on nothing more than car-tire sandals and long pants. There was a very powerful male odor, sweat, deep male vocals. When you’re sitting inside there — it’s the most powerful experience I had ever experienced.”

One of his dancing connections became one of the longest artistic collaborators of his career. “I met Sipho Mchunu, who became my partner in Juluka,” Clegg recalls, ” and we played traditional maskanda guitar music for about six or seven years. I also joined his dance team.”

Johnny and Sipho initially performed as a duo for years. “Sipho and I, we couldn’t play in public,” Clegg explains, “so we played in private venues, schools, churches, university private halls. We played a lot of embassies. We played a lot of consulates.”

The two started thinking about how they could combine Zulu music with sounds from elsewhere, Clegg says.

“I was exposed to Celtic folk music early on,” he recounts. “I never knew my dad, who was from England, and music was one way which I can connect with that country. I liked Irish, Scottish and English folk music. I had a lot of tapes and recordings of them. And my stepfather was a great fan of pipe music. On Sundays, he would play an LP of the Edinburgh Police Pipe Band.”

Clegg started hearing connections between the rural music of South Africa’s Natal province — the music that he was learning from his black friends and teachers — and the sounds of Britain. “I sometimes heard traditional Zulu war songs in a minor key. And I could hear Celtic melodies. I could hear rhythms. I could hear 6/8 meter.” Clegg pauses in his story to demonstrate a rhythm that could easily accompany a Scottish reel, but when he starts singing, it’s in Zulu.

“It was ridiculous,” he says of the similarities. “So I thought, ‘There’s a conversation here to be had.'”

That conversation led Clegg and Mchunu to found the band Juluka — which means “Sweat” in Zulu.

“I had no commercial or artistic aspirations to become a performer or anything,” Clegg avers. “I was like a musicologist, in a way. I was full of the music — I was bursting. I just wanted to get a recording.”

In the meantime, Clegg had become a professor of anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; Mchunu was working as a gardener. Nevertheless, they started shopping an album to record labels. There were no takers — back then, South African radio was strictly segregated, and no one thought an album that was partly in Zulu and partly in English would find an audience. Clegg says that their songs’ subject material wasn’t setting off any sparks with record producers, either.

“You know, ‘Who really cares about cattle? You’re singing about cattle. You know we’re in Johannesburg, dude, get your subject matter right!'” he says of the reactions Juluka initially got from record labels. “But I was shaped by cattle culture, because all the songs I learned were about cattle, and I was interested. I was saying, ‘There’s a hidden world. And I’d like to put it on the table.'”

“I couldn’t get anybody to sign it, though,” Clegg says. “I just hopped it around, and hopped it around, and eventually, I landed at the Gramophone Record Company, which was a subsidiary of CBS [in South Africa]. There was a chap there whose name was Hilton Rosenthal. And he said, ‘You know what, this is very interesting. This is not going to get radio play or anything, but it’s interesting as a documentary, a recording of what’s going on now.'”

Rosenthal signed Juluka to his independent label. In 1979, its first album, Universal Men, was released. Within a few years, this most unlikely band had managed to score a hit in the U.K. with the song “Scatterlings of Africa.” They were offered a tour of Europe and North America. Clegg and Mchunu both resigned from their jobs, and hit the road.

Eventually, Mchunu decided that he had tired of life as a professional musician. He hated Johannesburg and city living; he longed to go home to his native region of Zululand to raise cattle. “It was really hard for Sipho,” Clegg recalls. “He was a traditional tribesman. To be in New York City on tour, not speaking English that well — there were times when I think he felt he was on Mars. And after some grueling tours, he said to me, ‘I gave myself 15 years to make it or break it in Joburg, and then go home.’ So he resigned, and Juluka came to an end — but I was still full of the fire of music and dance. And so I took the dancer from Juluka and the drummer and myself, and then that just took off.”

That band was Savuka — which means “We Have Risen” in Zulu. “Savuka was launched basically in the state of emergency in South Africa, in 1986,” Clegg observes. “You could not ignore what was going on. The entire Savuka project was based in the South African experience and the fight for a better quality of life and freedom for all.”

A lot of Savuka’s songs were restricted or banned in South Africa. But eventually, they were embraced. The song “One Human, One Vote” was released in 1989, the year the country held its first universal election. As much as those songs were rooted in a very particular time and place, though, Clegg believes that the messages were timeless. “I think the music that we made at the time has that universal appeal,” he says, “because you can go to the songs and you can hear the echoes of thousands of struggles that happened over centuries.”

After Savuka disbanded, Johnny Clegg went solo. In 2015, Queen Elizabeth made him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He’s writing his autobiography, and he’s just released a new album called King Of Time. He’s planning to compose some music for film, and thinking about a few collaborations. But he says this U.S. tour, which mixes songs and dancing with anecdotes about his journey, will be his last. “It’s a very bittersweet undertaking, to be honest with you,” he says.

Not long after the tour ends, Clegg plans to head home to South Africa. “The future is open-ended,” he muses. “I have my two sons. One is a musician, one’s a filmmaker. They’re up and running in the world. So my wife and I have an open road now — to do what we want to do.”

Just as Johnny Clegg has done for all of his life.

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Augustin Mawangu Mingiedi, leader of the Congolese group Konono No. 1, died on Monday, Oct. 16 after a months-long illness related to complications from diabetes, a representative for the band confirmed. He was 56 years old.

Konono No. 1 was founded between 1965 and 1968, by his father, Mingiedi Mawangu. After the elder Mawangu’s death in April 2015 at the age of 85, Augustin Mawangu Mingiedi became the group’s leader. Now a third member of the family, Augustin’s son Makonda, will take the reins of the celebrated group. “We are devastated,” the band wrote. “But Konono No. 1 are indestructible.”

Augustin’s instrument, like that of both his father and his son, was an amplified version of the likembe, a handheld instrument sometimes referred to as a “thumb piano” (and also known elsewhere as the mbira or karimba, among other names). It is played by plucking metal tines connected to a resonator board. Mingiedi Mawangu electrified the instrument using found parts, yielding a mesmerizing distortion that Westerners compared to the sounds of experimental rock and electronic music.

“At the beginning, my father went very often to collect car parts like springs, wire, metal discs, old car alternators, magnets … all that sort of stuff, as well as the wood, which he used to make the likembe,” Augustin told the BBC in a 2015 profile.

Only decades after the group’s founding did it release its first album, 2004’s Congrotronics, recorded in Kinshasa for the Belgian label Crammed Discs. It was the result of a long search by Belgian producer Vincent Kenis, a zealous fan of Congolese music who first traveled to the country in 1971, making regular trips there over the following three decades.

“Only in 2000, I found a Konono fan club,” he said in a 2006 interview with Afropop. “I left a note.”

In that same interview, Mingiedi Mawangu said of Kenis’ search: “Konono was playing in villages in different places, and parties for a long time. That’s why Vincent couldn’t find me. We didn’t stop. We kept playing. But you had to know where we were, exactly where we were playing. Even if you asked people, they wouldn’t tell you. You had to know my address.”

In a statement sent to NPR, Kenis wrote, “On the footsteps of his father the great Mingiedi, founder of Konono No. 1, likembe virtuoso Augustin Mawangu acted as a pionneer by enhancing the instrument’s expressivity with electronic devices and new techniques, with stunning effects. His brilliant and bold playing, his stage presence, his humor and high spirits graced many projects …. It’s a great honor for me to have worked with him.”

The release of Congotronics led to the group touring the world and collaborating with artists like Björk, on her song “Earth Intruders” from the 2007 album Volta. The attention culminated in a nomination for best traditional world music album at the 2007 Grammys for the group’s record Live At Coleur Café, and a 2010 Grammy Award for best pop collaboration with vocals, for playing on Herbie Hancock’s The Imagine Project.

“To me,” Augustin Mawangu told the BBC, “it’s like you’re planting seeds which are useful, and that everybody loves. It’s like leaving a mark — it’s a feeling of joy.”

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