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Monday morning, as we were all absorbing the horrors of the Pulse attack in Orlando — the deadliest mass public shooting in modern U.S. history — Mashrou’ Leila arrived to play a Tiny Desk concert. For this band from Beirut, Lebanon, the full weight of the tragedy hung heavily, and its members wanted to begin their set by addressing the Pulse shootings. We’ll have their full performance available soon, but this was so timely, we wanted to share it right away.

Mashrou’ Leila (the name translates as “Night Project”) includes five young Beirutis — singer Hamed Sinno, violinist Haig Papazian, keyboardist and guitarist Firas Abou Fakher, Ibrahim Badr on bass and drummer Carl Gerges — of mixed religious heritage. They are well acquainted with the targeting of both LGBT people and those questioning the political, religious and cultural status quo.

Sinno, who is also the band’s lyricist, is openly gay, and Mashrou’ Leila has faced condemnation, bans and threats in its home region, including some from both Christian and Muslim sources. The group’s sound is beautifully layered, with vocals that allude to the Arab tradition of ornamenting melodies, but is also fresh, modern and compelling. Sinno’s nuanced lyrics run deep.

The group opened its Tiny Desk set with “Maghawir” (Commandos), a song Sinno wrote in response to two nightclub shootings in Beirut — a tragic parallel to what happened in Orlando. In the Beirut shootings, which took place within a week of each other, two of the young victims were out celebrating their respective birthdays. So “Maghawir” is a wry checklist of sorts about how to spend a birthday clubbing in their home city, but also a running commentary about machismo and the idea that big guns make big men.

“All the boys become men / Soldiers in the capital of the night,” Sinno sings. “Shoop, shoop, shot you down … We were just all together, painting the town / Where’d you disappear?”

Ibn El Leil (Son Of The Night) is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon)

Set List

• “Maghawir” (Commandos)

Credits

Producers: Anastasia Tsioulcas, Niki Walker; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Niki Walker, Claire Hannah Collins, Kara Frame; Production Assistant: Sophie Kemp; Photo: Ruby Wallau/NPR.

For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast.

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Director Morgan Neville made one of the most memorable music documentaries in recent times. His 2013 film 20 Feet from Stardom, for which he won an Oscar and a Grammy, chronicled the paths of five undersung rock heroes: the backup singers who enlivened some of popular music’s biggest hits.

Neville has a long history of bridging sound and screen. His credits include Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story; Muddy Waters Can’t Be Satisfied and Johnny Cash’s America. He was also one of the directors of last year’s documentary Best of Enemies, which chronicled the William Buckley/Gore Vidal debates during the 1968 political conventions.

In Neville’s newest project, The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, the director turns his lens from intensely American music stories to global ideas. Over the course of several years, he followed the artistic collective of master musicians and other artists from more than 20 countries, which was founded by the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2000.

Earlier this week, Ma and Neville joined me at HBO’s headquarters in New York for a special evening to mark the release, which included a brief but beautiful performance by the cellist, a screening of the film, and a live Q&A with the director in front of an intimate audience.

The Music of Strangers was a big project. Neville shot his subjects in six different languages, filming them in locations as far-flung as China, Turkey and Iran. The film is full of brilliant performances and sumptuous colors, but what’s more incisive are the segments in which Neville zeroes in on certain members of the ensemble. Among them are the Paris-born, American-raised Ma, of Chinese descent; the deeply soulful Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor; the exuberant pipa master Wu Man, from China; the spirited Galician bagpipe player Cristina Pato; and the talented Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh. (As it happens, NPR Music has showcased each of them individually in video performances we’ve produced.)

Neville gives each of them the space and time to let their personal stories — full of heartbreak and loss, as well as joy and achievement — unfold. And through those stories, The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble becomes a series of investigations and explorations into larger themes, like what it means to be an immigrant.

How do you define yourself when you lose the moorings of your culture and plunge into in a new one? How do you preserve tradition and yet make room for new ideas? How do you carve out your own trajectory when talent and fate have determined your career path from childhood onward? And how do you endure immense, unimaginable loss — such as losing your entire family and your closest friends to war — and find meaning and joy?

“The best thing about it for me as a filmmaker,” Neville said during our discussion, “is that not only do I get to indulge my musical love, but that music is, to me, the most amazing Trojan horse to tell any other kind of story. The best music films are not about music … Music is just the language we’re speaking to tell a story about culture.”

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Composer and author Paul Bowles first went to Morocco in 1931. He fell in love with the country, returning often and eventually moving to Tangier, where he lived from 1947 until his death in 1999. Among the things Bowles valued most about Morocco was its varieties of music.

During an intensive five-month period in 1959, Paul Bowles made a series of recordings of Moroccan music for the Library of Congress. Now, they have been released as a four-CD box set called Music Of Morocco. These vivid recordings tell us almost as much about Bowles as they do about Morocco a half-century ago.

To record this music, Bowles traveled far and wide by Volkswagen Beetle with a large reel-to-reel tape recorder. Often, musicians had to come to locations where there was electricity, and Bowles would do his best to arrange them around his microphone to get the sound he desired. In the northern city of Fez, he recorded an entire Andalusian orchestra, music with ties to medieval Moorish Spain.

Bowles was not a scholar, out to study and survey; this was a labor of love. These CDs come with a 120-page booklet, full of Bowles’ colorful field notes and commentary complied by ethnomusicologist Philip Schuyler. Schuyler points out that Bowles was willing to resort to surprising, even questionable, tactics to get what he wanted. When one flute player insisted his instrument had to be accompanied by a drum, Bowles demanded that he play it alone, proclaiming “the American government wished it.”

There’s a fascinating contradiction here. Bowles always wanted to record the most authentic, archaic, traditional version of everything — except when something about the sound offended him personally. For instance, when he heard the buzz on a traditional bass lute as distortion, he made the musician remove the resonator and record again without it.

To listen through these diverse recordings and read Bowles’ urgent, revelatory notes is to enter a realm of his psyche. Bowles does not render these sometimes strident sounds safe or friendly. But, he makes them his. This collection has the power to lure us into his own deep hypnosis, his gut-level obsession with a North African land he has chosen to call home.

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Tinariwen, a groundbreaking Tuareg music collective from Northern Mali, has brought the sound of “desert blues” to most of the world. The Tuareg people have been fighting a war for independence off and on for almost 50 years; Tinariwen began with a group of Tuareg rebels who trained together in the 1980s. The band members have described their music as peaceful resistance and a way of getting their Tamasheq culture known by the rest of the world.

Tinariwen is slowly passing the torch to younger musicians: The vocal and guitar solos here are played by Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (a.k.a. “Sadam”), who also fronts the Algerian band Imarhan.

Last year, the group played “Tin Ihlan” for a nighttime set in the trees at the Pickathon Woods Stage. The 2016 Pickathon festival is held August 5-7 at Pendarvis Farm outside Portland.

SET LIST

• “Tin Ihlan”

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Marking their shared event at Edinburgh’s TradFest, host Fiona Ritchie revisits an encounter with her old friend Alan Reid, the singer and long-time Battlefield Band member who was also her very first radio interview subject. They reminisce about that meeting and reflect on musical journeys.

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Every month, I bring together some of the music from around the world that I’ve enjoyed most in recent weeks. April, however, has been completely overshadowed by Prince‘s death. Few contemporary artists have meant so much, for so long, to so very many people working in wildly disparate corners of the globe.

In the midst of putting together this month’s picks, I realized that I could hear individual facets of Prince’s polymathic, polymorphous talents in each of the tunes I’ve selected for this edition of Latitudes.

Hot guitar licks. I know I’m not the only one who’s been watching Prince’s incendiary solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. And anyone who has seen that (or his own set, which is online, at least for the time being) knows, that Prince was a consummate rock guitarist — if he had only been a guitarist, he would still be a legend.

And that legacy hasn’t lost on young Tuareg musicians, for whom rock-inflected guitar has become an intrinsic part of their own idiom. (See: Tinariwen, Bombino, et al.) Seizing upon that idea, an American filmmaker, music archivist and label head Christopher Kirkley (who collaborated with us at NPR Music and the show Afropop Worldwide a few years back to create a stream of 100 must-hear songs from Mali) directed a Tuareg remake of Prince’s film Purple Rain. He cast Mdou Moctar, a guitarist from Agadez, Niger, in the lead role.

Afro-funk. As my colleague Jason King wrote in his his marvelous remembrance, Prince was an uncategorizeable, “überfunky, hyper-synaptic, wildly eccentric, crazy-magical boho black genius.” Yet he was funk — and rock, and pop, and so much more.

This collaboration between Angolan/Portuguese producer Batida (a.k.a. Pedro Coquenão) and Congolese band Konono Nº1 just hits so many sweet spots, thanks in part to their shared love of funked-out beats and metallic textures. This song, “Nlele Kalusimbiko,” is the opening track on their new joint album, Konono Nº1 Meets Batida.

Smoky, sultry, sexy. The Turkish band Model, fronted by singer Fatma Turgut, is all about those vibes on their single “Mey” (Wine). The song boasts a catchy chorus — and it really highlights the allure of Turgut’s voice, which references old-fashioned melismatic acrobatics and yet sounds refreshingly up-to-date.

Courting controversy. As my colleague Ann Powers noted after Prince’s death, he was a transgressive force on so many fronts — sexual, spiritual, political and certainly musical. (As he wrote in a 1999 statement explaining his name change to his famous glyph, “It’s all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency.”) And certainly that involved playing with gender identity and roles, too.

I can’t help but hear — and see — some of that same sense of new possibilities when I hear a band like Lebanon’s Mashrou’ Leila. They’ve attracted worldwide attention this week for a show scheduled in a Roman amphitheater in Amman, Jordan; governmental permission was rescinded because of a furor over their “political and religious beliefs and endorsement of gender equality and sexual freedom.” The concert was granted approval at the last minute by Jordan’s ministry of the interior, but according to the band, it was much too late to re-coordinate the show.

Mashrou’ Leila has been playing with tropes of all kinds for years now. In one of their early hits, “Fasateen” (Dresses), the band members destroy all kinds of traditional wedding symbols — and toy with the idea of who would wear white tulle in any case.

Finally, I can’t let April run out without paying another tribute to Congolese singer Papa Wemba, who died last week doing what he clearly loved so much. He collapsed while performing a joyful set for a big crowd in Ivory Coast. The song “Yolele” comes from his 1995 album Emotion. Made for Peter Gabriel’s Real World records, it marked a watershed moment in Wemba’s career, in which he made an overt overture to an “international” — that is, primarily (white) European and North American — audience.

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A popular and groundbreaking alt-rock band from Lebanon called Mashrou’ Leila was scheduled to play a big show in Amman, Jordan Friday.

Instead, their show was cancelled by the government — and the band says they have been told they can never perform again in the country, because of the group’s politics, religious beliefs and “endorsement of gender equality and sexual freedom.”

Mashrou’ Leila had been slated to play at the famous Roman amphitheater in Amman, where they have previously performed three times, as well as elsewhere across the country.

In a lengthy note posted on Facebook in both Arabic and English, the band alleges that the actual reason for the permission to be withdrawn is different:

“We have been unofficially informed that the reason behind this sudden change of heart, few days before the concert day, is the intervention of some authorities. Our understanding is that said authorities have pressured certain political figures and triggered a chain of events that ultimately ended with our authorization being withdrawn.

“We also have been unofficially informed that we will never be allowed to play again anywhere in Jordan due to our political and religious beliefs and endorsement of gender equality and sexual freedom.”

The lead singer of Mashrou’ Leila, Hamed Sinno, is openly gay, and the band has addressed gay rights as well as politics and corruption in both its songs and many of its interviews. In an interview last year with the CBC show Q, Sinno said that a show they did in a predominantly Christian town in Lebanon called Zouk Mikael was protested by people who believed that “homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to set foot on Christian soil.” Sinno attributed that attitude to “broader fundamentalisms in the region.”

According to a report on the Jordanian news site jo24.net published Tuesday, at least one public supporter of the ban is a member of parliament named Bassam al-Batoush, who has called for the group to be banned due to their “controversial” material that references sex, homosexuality, “calls for revolution” and promotes “Satanic” ideas.

The governor of Amman district, Khalid Abu Zeid, told the Associated Press Wednesday that the band’s songs “contradict” Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Initially, the AP reports, officials from Jordan’s Antiquities Department rescinded permission because such a show would “contradict the ‘authenticity’ of the ancient venue.”

Mashrou’ Leila violinist Haig Papazian has posted pictures of one of their previous three shows at the amphitheater on Twitter.

As the band also noted on Facebook, Sanno’s mother is from Jordan, and the members say that the country is “a formative part of his identity and writing, and a place we have always considered our second home.”

The Facebook note concludes, “We urge the Kingdom to choose fighting alongside us, not against us, during this ongoing battle for a culture of freedom against the regressive powers of thought control and cultural coercion.”

The U.S. State Department’s 2015 human rights report on Jordan includes this assessment: “While consensual same-sex sexual conduct is not illegal, societal discrimination against LGBTI persons was prevalent, and LGBTI persons were targets of abuse. Activists reported discrimination in housing, employment, education, and access to public services. Some LGBTI individuals reported reluctance to engage the legal system due to fear their sexual orientation or gender identity would either provoke hostile reactions from police or disadvantage them in court. Activists reported that most LGBTI individuals were closeted and fearful of their sexual identity being disclosed.”

The five-member band was founded at the American University of Beirut in 2008 and has released three albums. Their name translates as both Leila Project and Night Project; Leila is a Juliet-like figure in Arabic literature. A rapturous review from London’s Guardian last November said that they “charge the stage with electricity, sensuality and a dazzling aura of resistance.”

Mashrou’ Leila’s latest video, for the song “AOEDE,” which was released earlier this month, opens with a young woman recounting a story of police brutality.

The band is heading to the U.S. and Canada on tour this May and June, with dates scheduled in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Washington, D.C. and Vancouver.

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One of Africa’s most famous musicians and an international style icon, Congolese singer Papa Wemba, died suddenly during a performance early Sunday at age 66. He died after collapsing onstage in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast; the show was being broadcast live on RTI 1, one of Ivory Coast’s public television channels.

Wemba’s death was confirmed by the culture minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Baudouin Banza Mukalay, the Associated Press reported. According to reports obtained by Reuters from the Ivory Coast morgue that received Wemba’s body, he died between his collapse and his arrival at a local hospital.

Papa Wemba was born in 1949 in Lubefu, in the Central African nation known then as the Belgian Congo, later as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). His birth name was Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba, but as the eldest son in his family, he was nicknamed “Papa.” His mother was a professional mourner; he grew up steeped in the sounds of her music and blessed with a singularly keening tenor.

But other circumstances also made Wemba’s emergence as an artist particularly fortuitous. He grew up during a golden age of Congolese music. During the 1950s and 1960s, his country was the epicenter of a brilliant new kind of dance music variously called Congolese rumba, lingala and soukous. This new style borrowed heavily from the sound — and particularly rhythms — of Cuban big bands, but put in an African context. Artists like Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau became idols all over the continent, and to the young Papa Wemba as well.

By the time he arrived in Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, in the late 1960s, the young Wemba had set his sights on a professional singing career. In 1969, he became a founding member of what would become one of the biggest acts in African music in the 1970s, Zaïko Langa Langa. The band took Congolese rumba, stepped up the tempo, and brought in more rock-ified guitars. And with that band, Wemba launched a trailblazing career that emphasized an internationally accessible sound.

Wemba left Zaïko Langa Langa in 1974; after co-founding a series of other short-lived bands (including Isisfi Lokole and Yoka Lokole), he founded a hugely popular group called Viva La Musica in 1977.

Offstage and on, Wemba embodied a dapper persona. He even turned to acting, and starred in the 1987 Congolese vehicle La vie est belle (released internationally as Life Is Rosy), in which he, unsurprisingly, played an aspiring young singer.

Papa Wemba’s smooth, easy sound and extraordinary voice reached the ears of some very famous European and American artists as well. He settled in Paris in the 1980s, and became one of the best-known — and most well-connected — musicians from Africa. He sang with Stevie Wonder and opened for Peter Gabriel, before going on to record for Gabriel’s Real World label.

As the years went by, Papa Wemba continued to hone his sound to keep up with current trends. In the early 2000s, he strove for a silky R&B sound on tunes like “Ye Te Oh.”

More recent singles found him collaborating on more hip hop-flavored tracks like “O’Koningana,” alongside a rising young performer named Tony Madinda.

Papa Wemba also gained notoriety for his offstage dealings. When he toured Europe in the 1980s, he would arrive with huge entourages of dozens of musicians, dancers and staff from Zaire. In 2003, he was accused in both France and Belgium of running a human-smuggling ring and went to jail for several months in France; when the case went to trial in 2004, prosecutors charged that many included in those entourages were actually illegal immigrants, who paid thousands of dollars to enter Europe with the famed singer. He was convicted in France, fined and given a suspended prison sentence; foreign news organizations like London’s Independent reported then that his bail was paid by the Congolese government. Upon his release, he moved back to the DRC.

At home, and across sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora, Papa Wemba will be remembered not just for his voice and for his musical innovations, but his legendary sense of fashion style. As I noted just last month on Latitudes, the singer was celebrated as “Le Pape (The Pope) de la Sape” — the undisputed king of the fashionable men known as sapeurs. That sobriquet is so well known in the French-speaking world that in a popular YouTube skit about dressing well and living large, a French comedy trio refers to their characters as “Papa Wemba’s hidden sons.”

The sapeurs‘ natty attire even became the inspiration for a number of international menswear designers, including Junya Watanabe and Paul Smith.

After Papa Wemba’s death, the BBC collected reflections from a number of other prominent African artists. Singer Angélique Kidjo, who recorded a duet with him for an album by Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, told the BBC’s Newshour:

“His whole attitude about dressing well was part of the narrative that we Africans have been denied our humanity for so long.

“People have always had stereotypes about us, and he was saying dressing well is not just a matter of money, not just something for Westerners, but that we Africans also have elegance. It was all about defining ourselves and refusing to be stripped of our humanity.”

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