Zimbabwean six-piece Mokoomba makes its debut on Mountain Stage, recorded live at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston, W.Va. Regarded as one of the best touring acts from Africa, the young Afro-fusion band sing in unison in Tongan and Luvale as they mix together funk, ska and pop influences. As host Larry Groce puts it, “That’s the way music works the best: when you don’t categorize. You just bring it and let it hang out.”

Mokoomba’s self-produced third album is Luyando, translated to mean “mother’s love” in Tongan, and available now on Outhere Records. A band that deserves to be seen live, Mokoomba features Mathias Muzaza on lead vocals, Trustworth Samende on lead guitar, Abundance Mutori on bass, Donald Moyo on keyboards, Miti Mugande on percussion and Ndaba Coster Moyo on drums.

SET LIST

• “Kumukanda”
• “Muzwile”
• “Mabemba”
• “Kulindiswe”

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Reggae has long been the most vivid musical escape for me. Its soul-cleansing riddims always feel familiar and cozy, like rushing into your lover’s arms after a significant time away. This is especially true for roots reggae, whose staccato guitar licks, billowing bass, and sonic splashes on a canvas of negative space, are like salve for the soul. The mid-tempo pulse varnishes heads with Kool-Aid grins and daydreams of living beachside amid nature’s unrestricted beauty.

Given all that, you can understand why I’ve been obsessed with Chronixx lately. At a time when dancehall has been dominating the Jamaican soundscape, its refreshing to hear the man born Jamar McNaughton carrying the roots-revival torch for a younger generation and expanding upon the footprint left by his world-renowned predecessors.

Chronixx and his band Zincfence Redemption paid a long-awaited visit to the Tiny Desk to perform three songs from his sophomore album, Chronology.

Set List

• “Skankin’ Sweet”
• “Majesty”
• “Spanish Town Rockin'”

Musicians

Jamar “Chronixx” McNaughton (vocals); Evan Mason (keys); Stephen Coore (guitar); N’Namdi Robinson (guitar); Hector Lewis (percussion); Adrian Henry (bass); Oliver Thompson (drums)

Credits

Producers: Abby O’Neill, Niki Walker, Morgan Noelle Smith; Creative Director: Bob Boilen; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Niki Walker, Tsering Bista, Morgan Noelle Smith, Bronson Arcuri; Production Assistant: Jenna Li; Photo: Claire Harbage/NPR.

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Sometimes musicians write a song for a cause. Sometimes, the cause chooses the song.

That is what has happened with “Roman,” the latest release from Mashrou’ Leila, the Lebanese alternative rock band who toured the U.S. to huge acclaim this summer (and performed a spine-tingling Tiny Desk concert at NPR last summer).

When Mashrou’ Leila conceived “Roman” some five years ago, the band thought of it as a song about betrayal. Its opening lyrics are dark: “I don’t intend on swallowing your lies / The words will burn my throat.” Later, lead singer Hamad Sinno cries: “Worms carve my body and the earth embraces my skin / How could you sell me to the Romans?”

The music is slow, painful yet beautiful. Its chorus is a rebellion in a single word: “alehum,” which means “charge” in Arabic.

But upon its release this summer, “Roman” unexpectedly became an anthem for women’s empowerment.

“I definitely didn’t have that in mind when we were writing the song,” says Sinno. He says the meaning of the song was only transformed when the band met Jessy Moussallem, a film director, who pitched the idea that the music video should be about patriarchy.

In the video, a woman in a hijab contorts in a moderndancein an abandoned concrete building. She leads other women, many in brightly colored abayas —the conservative, loose-fitting robe worn by some Muslim women — to a beach. They hold hands and make kaleidoscope patterns through dance. Their expressions are defiant; they radiate self-respect. Later, a covered woman rides a galloping white steed.

The video and the song combined were a huge success; they’ve been described in Lebanon as being all but revolutionary. Blogs have written about “Roman,” and fans have left streams of adoring comments on Mashrou’ Leila’s Facebook page.

Sinno sees the video as an ode to self-realization: a rejection of the idea that Muslim women, especially in the Arab world, cannot be empowered unless they lose their adherence to tradition.

“The thing that kind of always drives me insane is that people are so quick to say stuff about Muslim women or veiled women,” he says. “And it’s like, dude, just come to one of our gigs, and you see all these women who are veiled, who are just celebrating other people’s diversity — who are clearly not without agency, right?”

Mashrou’ Leila headlined a festival in Ehden, a town nestled high in the mountains of north Lebanon, earlier this month. When Sinno introduces “Roman,” the crowd packing the stadium goes wild.

As the band performs the song, the video plays on a screen behind it — something Mashrou’ Leila hadn’t done before in Lebanon. The audience rises to its feet. Eyes closed, swaying, arms in the air, fans surrender to the music.

Afterwards, I meet Hazar Malab, a 16-year-old fan ecstatic about the song. I ask her: Was “Roman” her favorite song of the summer?

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she answers, almost breathless with excitement. “It is. It is.”

All her friends at school feel the same way, Malab says. She has forced her parents to listen to it, and even they “love it.”

Another fan, Jihad Saifi, says he believes the impact of “Roman” will go beyond a single summer. This is not just about making memories in the sun – the song and video together break important new ground for the portrayal of women in the Middle East, he says.

“It’s a beautiful picture to paint Arab women in,” he says. “I’ve never seen Arab women dance like this. And it’s liberating to men and women.”

One of the reasons the song has become so successful in Lebanon is that it speaks to different people in different ways. Some Mashrou’ Leila fans tell me that for them, “Roman” is about more than women’s empowerment: It’s also a response to greater feelings of insecurity about the future of the Middle East and beyond.

Rima Sleiman Frangieh, the organizer of the Ehden festival, says she believes many people see the song as a response to the war in neighboring Syria, the rise of jihadist groups like ISIS and what they perceive as a rise in fanaticism “around the world.”

“We have seen nothing but ugliness and black and pain and sorrow,” she says. “So this song: It’s about liberation and everything that opens windows of hope. I think [it] has a direct positive effect on people.”

Some fans even tell me they think the song has especially caught fire this summer because people see it as a response to Donald Trump’s presidency.

Sinno and Haig Papazian, the band’s lead violinist, agree with this interpretation. And Sinno says the band agreed to Moussallem’s pitch for a political music video in part because of current events in the U.S. and Lebanon.

Sinno says it’s “very hard not to be thinking about this stuff with, you know, Trump being in office,” or, he says, with the fact that the Lebanese state minister for women’s affairs is a man.

The meaning “Roman” holds for both its listeners and its creators has definitely changed since it was first written, Papazian says. “You have certain intentions when you first write it,” he says, “but then everything around you is constantly changing and then new meaning is given to a song after a while.”

All those years ago, “Roman” started off as a song about betrayal, but now it has become a song about hope and empowerment. And for Mashrou’ Leila fans, it’s yet another reason to dance.

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Robert Plant continues to explore his love of the blues and global music on a beautiful new single called “The May Queen.” The track, which will appear on a new album this fall called Carry Fire, is a sweetly innocent reflection on aging and the undying power of love to inspire and give life. “Out here the fire’s still burning so long into my night,” Plant sings. “Still captive and still yearning / Surrender to your light.”

The new song recalls Led Zeppelin’s classic acoustic work on tracks like “Going To California” and “Stairway To Heaven,” the latter of which also includes a reference to “the May Queen.”

“It’s about intention,” Plant said in a prepared statement announcing “The May Queen” and Carry Fire, his 11th solo album. “I respect and relish my past works but each time I feel the lure and incentive to create new work. I must mix old with new.”

Carry Fire is due out Oct. 13 on Nonesuch Records. It features the Sensational Space Shifters, the band that supported Plant on his previous 2014 album lullaby and…The Ceaseless Roar.

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Until last year, few Greeks had heard of Marina Satti.

The architecture student-turned-classically-trained singer had performed in musicals and ancient Greek plays, but her music career was largely under the radar. She played what she calls “blender” music — a combination of jazz, funk and rock — with musician friends at home.

“I grew up influenced by Björk and Moderat and the Berlin electronic scene,” Satti says. “And then, while I was studying at the Berklee College of Music, I looked to my roots.”

Satti’s father, a doctor, is from Sudan. Her mother, a chemical engineer, is from the Greek island of Crete. So she grew up biracial in a largely homogeneous Greece.

“I was afraid that I would stick out, ’cause I’m a little darker in the skin,” she says. “And sometimes, I remember myself being shy, and I remember I didn’t want my dad to come and pick me up from the school.”

At Berklee, she immersed herself in traditional Arabic and Greek music and realized the treasure of her heritage.

“What I loved about the States was that there, you can co-exist with something, someone, who is different than you,” Satti says. “It’s a state of mind I got into there that I carried back with me to Greece.”

When she returned home to Athens, she incorporated Greek and Arabic folk music into her jam sessions with friends.

Then, one night last year, after a pasta dinner at her apartment, they recorded a cover of “Koupes,” an old Greek rembetiko song, and uploaded it to YouTube. It went viral.

“YouTube can be a fair playing field for artists,” she says. “Your music is there, it’s free; whoever wants to listen to it can, and whoever doesn’t, that’s fine, too. I’m happy it was someone’s choice to listen to this song.”

So this summer, Satti offered an original song, “Mantissa” (“Seer”). She wrote the music and a friend wrote the lyrics.

“The whole song is about a fortune teller, basically, but it has its roots in ancient mythology, like Pythia,” Satti says. (In Greek mythology, Pythia is the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.) “Every verse is like an oracle: vague enough to be open for interpretation, like Pythia’s predictions. So, to me, it is a love song — but I like the fact that it doesn’t focus on the human pain; it’s not about being self-absorbed or self-pitying.”

The chorus is about taking charge, about spreading your wings and flying through winds and storms to find what you need.

“That’s the story of my life,” Satti says. “My dad had to come to Greece from Sudan to study and be who he is. And, me, I had to go to the States and embrace who I really am.”

“So,” she says, “it’s like a love song to yourself.”

Mantissa was released along with a music video featuring Satti and a posse of girlfriends dancing, flash mob-style, down Athinas, a street in Athens that’s seen better days.

“It’s one of my favorite streets,” she says. “There are people from Pakistan and Arabs who live there and work there. There’s a market or a bazaar. You can really see the Eastern influences, and then there’s the graffiti — and, in this video, a bunch of girls in our jeans and our jumpsuits, dancing.”

The video received more than 5 million views on YouTube in just a week. Fans made tribute videos. A male comedian in drag filmed a parody of it.

It also helped Satti, who describes herself as a D.I.Y. artist, get a deal with a record label in a country where the music industry, which hangs on to its aging stars, is hard to break into. She is signed to 314 Records.

“Mantissa” is the song of the summer in Greece: one of the most downloaded tracks and always on the radio. I hear it everywhere — in cafes, in taxis, on my balcony as my neighbors sing along while putting their washing on clotheslines to dry.

I meet a couple of thirtysomething statisticians dancing to “Mantissa” at a recent Satti concert at the gardens of the Athens Concert Hall. Savvas Giovanni and Giorgos Samaras sing the chorus so loudly they drown out the tweens next to them.

“I’m trying to remember the dance steps from the video,” Samaras says, hopping from side to side. “I’m a really good dancer.”

“I love this song,” Giovanni says. “It puts me in such a good mood. It makes me forget my problems.”

The song has especially resonated with young Greeks, who face a grim future as the economy has yet to recover from the debt crisis and austerity.

“There are so many miserable people in my age, and that’s so bad,” says Melina Chronopoulou, a 21-year-old university student in French literature. She’s also one of Satti’s backup dancers, and performed in the “Mantissa” video. “It’s hard for many of us to just get out and enjoy being young. Many times, I wish I had been born in a different generation just so I could experience real optimism.”

Chronopoulou says she appreciates “Mantissa” for its optimism.

“Greek songs usually talk about being hurt, and being in love, but in a really negative way,” she says, “like suffering, and there is no hope anywhere. Not this song. It’s full of hope.”

Satti smiles a little when she considers that her runaway hit has lifted the spirits of other young Greeks.

“It’s hard out there,” she says, “but we are good at hope.”

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When three-time Grammy-winning singer Angelique Kidjo was a 12-year-old schoolgirl in her native Benin, her best friend suddenly disappeared from school. Kidjo went to her friend’s house and asked her father what had happened. The reason shocked Kidjo: Her friend Awaawou had become a child bride, and that meant that her friend’s education — and her girlhood — were at an end.

That was about 35 years ago. But according to UNICEF, one in 10 girls in Benin still marries before the age of 15, and in Central and Western Africa, 41 percent of all girls marry before they turn 18. Marrying — and having children — at a young age leads to increased risks of domestic abuse and of dying due to childbirth complications. Since child brides often cease their education, they also lack the skills to earn a living later on.

Now Kidjo, who is a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, has collaborated with eight musical colleagues and UNICEF to sing out against child marriage, with a refrain that goes “A little girl is still a child. She cannot be a mother or a bride. Let her grow up to live a fulfilling life. Say NO to child marriage!” The message is serious but the music has a get-up-and-dance vibe.

In addition to being on YouTube and social media, the song is being broadcast several times a day on Beninese TV and more than 40 local radio stations reaching into remote areas.

We spoke to Kidjo about the song and her advocacy for girls and women. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

What happened to your friend?

She lived across the street from my house. We played together, we laughed together and then one day I waited for her to walk to school together, but she didn’t come. Then when I went to school, she wasn’t there, either. I went to her family to ask. They told me she was married! I was so angry!

Five years later I saw her, but when I tried to talk to her, she said she could not talk to me. She was so ashamed of not finishing school. She wasn’t the happy person I remembered. She was no longer cracking jokes; it was as if the light in her was shattered. She had two children, and she looked like she was 40. I went home and I cried.

What did this experience teach you about child marriage?

This said to me this is not a good tradition. How can you think that marrying your child at 12 can be good for her? When you finish elementary school and you start going to junior high, you’re no longer a child, but you are also not yet an adult. Women staying in school is crucial for their future, so stopping child marriage is crucial. And I was very vocal about it from the age of 12.

And now you’re vocal about it with a song. How did it come about?

I have been waiting for so long to do this. I started seeing the weakness in having a program [against child marriage] in just English or French because the [people] in the villages may not speak English or French. So the announcements and marketing have to be done in the local languages. That is why we decided we were going to use the main languages of the different parts of the countries [Benin, Burkina-Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo].

You and your colleagues sing in seven local African languages, including Fon, Goun, Bariba, Yoruba, Mahi, Sahoue and Mina — with a refrain in French. How did that collaboration work?

I wrote my part [in Fon, the national language spoken in Benin and also in Togo and Nigeria, as well as the refrain in French] then sent it to Zeynab Abib [a popular singer in Benin with whom Kidjo co-wrote the song], and we went back and forth with each other and with the other performers, who were coming from different regions [where the different languages are spoken].

The group of nine singers is a mix of women and men.

We have to solve the problem without a gender agenda — women and men need to hear this message.

Can one song make a difference?

Silence is what has allowed child marriage to continue. I think the first impact of this song is that the silence has been broken on the subject. So from the north to the south to the west and to the east — the song is going to the villages and saying this tradition is not right. It is communicating that to men and women, boys and girls. And when someone asks questions in school about what happened to a girl who is no longer coming to class, they can get answers and they can become agents of change.

What has been the response so far to the song?

We already have a million people in Africa who have commented on or “liked” the song on my Facebook page. And we are all of us planning on performing the song live in a concert in Benin.

Diane Cole writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Jewish Week, and is book columnist for The Psychotherapy Networker. She is the author of the memoir After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges. Her website is dianejcole.com.

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