Sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith grew up with Appalachian music, having been carried by their artist parents to festivals and mountain-music gatherings around the Asheville, N.C., area. The banjo- and fiddle-playing sisters embraced that music in their own way and formed the band Rising Appalachia in 2005. Their latest album is last year’s Wider Circles.

Song and Smith have also created what they call the “Slow Music Movement,” which works to humanize the touring experience with more community interaction along the way and the smallest possible carbon footprint. Watch Rising Appalachia perform live in this video, shot in Philadelphia at World Cafe Live.

At this point, Bombino — a.k.a. Omara Moctar, a Tuareg guitarist and singer-songwriter from northern Niger — is an old hand on the international scene. It was more than a decade ago that cassettes of his music circulated in the Tuareg communities clustered around the Sahara Desert. Ten years ago, he traveled to the U.S. to record a session (with The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Charlie Watts, no less) and then start touring these shores as a sideman with a Tuareg band. But his career in the U.S. and Europe as a solo artist has been in full force for a while now; it was five years ago that NPR Music presented him in a full concert from New York’s (Le) Poisson Rouge.

Over that time, Bombino has more than found his groove, perfectly balanced between mastery and ease. Out of a well-documented generation of talented Tuareg rockers, he’s emerged as the most virtuosic and melodically innovative, as he’s layered his voice over sparkling guitar riffs. He hasn’t uprooted himself: He continues to sing in his native Tamashek about Tuareg issues, and in his tunes you can still hear the feedback loop between West African sounds and music of the Americas, from rock, blues and R&B to Caribbean dancehall and reggae.

But he’s also found room for experimentation over the course of three studio albums, from his first solo project, 2011’s Agadez, to the buzzed-out garage vibe of 2013’s Nomad, produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. Now comes Azel, with Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors as producer; according to Bombino, Longstreth let him take the sonic lead, which was apparently not so much the case with Auerbach.

On Azel, the details of Bombino’s extraordinary guitar playing come back into sharp focus — and that’s this album’s greatest pleasure, track to track. Other experiments emerge, too: Bombino and Longstreth intercut the loping rhythms of Tamashek tradition with the one-drop of reggae in “Timtar” (Memories). (Lest that seem strange: Bob Marley has been as much a hero among generations of Tuareg musicians as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Dire Straits.)

But it’s in songs like the lilting “Naqqim Dagh Timshar” (We Are Left In This Abandoned Place) that Bombino’s artistry is on its brightest display. (Having spent a bit of time in the Sahara with Tuareg musicians from across their diaspora, I can say that that sort of slow burn feels exactly right.) The guitar is front-and-center. Bombino sings with passion, in that signature honey-and-sand voice, about the currents of Tuareg identity and politics, as well as his people’s precarious position at this very moment: “Everyone has left us / The world has evolved / And we’ve been abandoned,” he sings. “The whole world has evolved / Why haven’t we?”

Bombino may be prodding others there, because no one can say that he’s content to rest with his prodigious gifts. Musically, he’s always moving on to some new destination.

After six days of little sleep and a lot of music, the All Songs Considered team is back from Austin with a bucketload of bands and discoveries to share. On this week’s show, hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton are joined by NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson to share their favorite finds and memorable moments, from the stadium presence of Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb and party brass band Lucky Chops to the dark, moody folk of Edith Crash and the kick-ass rock and roll of Seratones.

Want to see and hear more from SXSW? We’ve got live concert video including performances by Mitski, Charles Bradley and Anderson .Paak; lullabies from Lucius and Declan McKenna; nightly podcasts taped in the wee hours direct from the streets of Austin and much more.

As President Obama touched down in Cuba over the weekend, Cuban artists were making waves at the SXSW music festival in Austin.

Organizers of the so-called SXAmericas — or South By Americas — series held a “Sounds of Cuba” showcase. Record label reps, music press and Latin music fans got to see rappers, Afro-Latin jazz singers and more from the Cuban music scene. The show was the first of its kind, given the difficulty these artists have getting clearance to go abroad. Many of these Cuban musicians had never performed on a U.S. stage.

NPR Music’s Felix Contreras, host of the podcast Alt.Latino, was at South By Southwest and said to remember one name: Dayme Arocena.

“She’s like a mix of Aretha Franklin and Celia Cruz in the same breath,” he says. “She is working a part of the music scene that is far from the pop world but very artistically complex and compelling. And she’s got this wonderful warmth and personality that comes across, even on record. But live, everybody in the place fell in love with her.”

Contreras says Arocena’s music blends many different aspects of the current music scene in Cuba.

“What she is doing is drawing on all this contemporary music that’s happening in Cuba,” he says. “A mixture of salsa, a mixture of jazz, a mixture of hip-hop, neo-soul — that nice little combination. And then adding elements of Afro-Cuban rumba with music, with vocals, with dancing styles — all of that, and put in this really wonderful package.”

Contreras says Arocena’s song “Madres” is a perfect example of her Santeria and soul influences. The powerful singing in the song might make you think Arocena would be a diva — broad and imposing. But when NPR’s Audie Cornish met up with Arocena, she was surprised by the small, full cheeked young woman with an infectious laugh.

Arocena is only 24 years old, but already well-known in Cuba, where she has been performing in bands and choirs publicly for a decade.

She says, laughing, that one of the first songs she learned in English, at age 5, was Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You.” She says she was a kid with a loud voice with a huge range.

“I used to get high notes so high,” she says. “Now I have a low voice — really low. But everyone in my neighborhood knew when I was singing because the voice was going everywhere, always.”

Arocena is Afro-Cuban. At SXSW, her head was crowned with a tightly wound white turban. The color is a symbol of her Santeria faith, which encompasses West African and Roman Catholic elements.

People often point to her faith when describing her music, which has been performed in church venues abroad. But she has a harder time when asked to describe her own sound.

“That is always a good question, because I don’t know yet,” she says. “It always has like a jazzy taste. But I am so Cuban, in the Cuban mood. And I think everything is so honest. I try to be honest, always, with myself, and that is why my music sounds like me. When the people get my music, people can get my soul, too.”

She grew up singing in a youth choir whose director taught jazz along with songs from Queen and the Beatles. Her father loved the singing of Ella Fitzgerald.

Arocena also reflects a new generation of Cuban musicians who grew up listening to pirated CDs. She was in the audience of the nearly half-million Cubans who, a few weeks ago, turned out to see EDM superproducer Diplo in Havana.

And finally, Arocena is the product of Cuba’s highly selective music education system. That’s where she learned classic composition and choral arrangements. But, she says, that education had its limits.

“The music school in Cuba is classical stuff; that’s all you get in the school,” she says. “And we don’t have enough money in the country to give instruments to all the kids to study music, or to try music.”

She says this lack of funding means that 20 students per province are selected, via a test, to study music.

“But [the schools] are focused on the music you cannot get in the street,” she says. “Because in Cuba you can get any kind of music in the street. You learn to play to rumba, to play salsa, to play — everything! But to play Bach, to play Mozart, you have to go to the musical school.”

Arocena is hopeful about the future for Cuban musicians. Now that the relationship between the United States and her home country is changing, Arocena says her main hope for Cuban performers is simple: information.

“In Cuba we don’t get enough information from the world,” she says. “Everyone outside — what they are doing, what they are playing, how the people are producing. We need to exchange blood. We need to see the people outside Cuba — how they produce, how they work. And they have to see what we are doing in Cuba, and what we are playing, what we are creating — that we are not still in the ’50s playing songs or Latin jazz. I am not the star; I am not a god — I am just a person. Cuba is a country with 11 million of persons! Come on, we need to be out, the people have to see us!”

It’s that time of year again! This week is March Madness for music lovers: South By Southwest. The annual music festival in Austin, Texas is a treasure trove of exciting new music to enjoy and brilliant artists to discover. For this week’s All Songs Considered, our hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton are joined by NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson and Saidah Blount to talk about which bands they are most excited to see for the very first time at SXSW this year.

They listened to around 1800 songs by bands performing in the multi-day music spree and whittled the list down to 17 for this week’s show, including the annual “Secret SX Santa” round, where each host gets to take control of one other team member’s schedule and assign a band they have to see while in Austin.

Head over to our SXSW page for NPR Music’s full coverage of this year’s festival. And stay tuned to our social media for updates, announcements and late-night dispatches from Bob, Robin and the All Songs team at SXSW.

Girlz With Gunz (Glitterbeat Records 2016) Courtesy of the artist hide caption

toggle caption Courtesy of the artist

In the aftermath of an eventful Black History Month and in the midst Women’s History Month, Chimurenga Renaissance’s “Girlz With Gunz” feels incredibly appropriate for the time in which it was released. It’s the title cut from the experimental hip-hop duo’s recently released EP, a project inspired by and dedicated to “revolutionary African women.“

And by “African,” vocalist/ multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire (of Shabazz Palaces) and guitarist Hussein Kalonji mean both women from the continent and those who are part of the diaspora. Invoking names like Nehanda (Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikan) and Afeni (Afeni Shakur) they celebrate black women who have fought oppression throughout history — “chimurenga” is a Shona word meaning “struggle” and the name of 19th century revolt against British colonizers in what is now Zimbabwe.

There’s a Pan-Africanist through-line present in Chimurenga Renaissance’s creations that not only informs their lyrics, but the very music itself. Maraire and Kalonji are the American-born sons of lauded musicians from Zimbabwe and Congo respectively — and their own compositions bring together traditional instruments like the mbira, with the modern, synthesized sounds of the West. The result is a trans-Atlantic mélange of melodies, polyrhythms, glitches, and distortion.

On “Girlz With Gunz,” they use all these sounds to construct a song in praise of black women and a pledge of devotion. Keep their sonic spectrum broad, Maraire and Kalonji celebrate the black woman in her various incarnations from celebrity to soldier. A revolutionary African woman need not carry a pistol to make her presence felt and she certainly doesn’t have to be beholden to a patriarchal society’s standards in order to be respected or revered. One time, for the “girlz with gunz.”

Girlz With Gunz EP is out now on Glitterbeat.

Welcome to Guest Dose. Every month, NPR Music’s Recommended Dose crew invites a knowledgeable and experienced DJ/selector to share with us their personal perspectives on electronic and beat-driven music, and make a mix from some new tracks they are digging.

Ask Daniel Haaksman how he cultivated his love for Africa’s digital rhythms, and the 47-year-old Berlin producer will tell you of a life supporting beats from around the world. Long before his latest album, African Fabrics, engaged in a dialogue between European club sounds and the music of Angolan kuduro, Mozambican pandza and South African house, Haaksman made a point of introducing gringo clubbers to global dance music.

The 2004 compilation he produced, Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats, was one of the gateways for the sample-heavy lo-fi streetwise electro-hip-hop of Brazilian favelas; and was instrumental to Haaksman’s founding of his label, Man Recordings, which set about releasing music by Brazilian baile funk artists, and by the European and American producers who wanted to collaborate with them. Haaksman’s work with global artists stretches as far back as the early ’90s, when along with his then-partner Stefan Hantel (better known as Shantel) he began a Frankfurt club night that focused on rhythms from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans (and Brazil) — in short “a sound distinctively opposing the ruling techno-house of the moment,” he told me.

With its myriad of drum machines, African Fabrics is far more receptive of those styles, though much of that has to do with how the creative process and the power of influence have changed over the last quarter century — especially as the Internet age has progressed.

“In the African countries I traveled to [while making Fabrics], I was amazed by how globalized these local musical cultures already are,” says Haaksman, when I reach him by Skype. “They use elements from rap, from European house, from trap, and mix it up with their own local rhythms and styles. It’s not about authenticity in its original context — they want to connect to other cultures through hybridization. And that’s what I did with my album.”

Haaksman’s album is, in his own words, “a Berlin take on different music styles that are present in some African countries at the moment.” Its guests are less a product of a survey than of Haaksman following his Portuguese-speaking muse onward from Brazil. He was first invited to Angola to play a festival in 2009; and in its capital Luanda, he became engrossed in kuduro, an up-tempo percussive style first created as a kind of choreography by the dancer Tony Amado as a takeoff of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s moves in the film Kickboxer – and which translates to “hard-ass.” (Amado appears on the album.) In Mozambique, Haaksman heard pandza, “a kind of Mozambican dembow or reggaeton,” and enlisted the excellent female MC Damo Do Bling and the crooner Alcindah Guerane. He also made a track with Spoek Mathambo, one of the more famous rappers/vocalists to come out of the South African house scene — it is a cover of “Akabongi,” the 1994 jive classic by the SA vocal group, Soul Brothers.

“I always think that culture travels down a two-way street,” he says. On African Fabrics, Haaksman has been energized to create his own hybrids. The special DJ mix he created for NPR Music’s Recommended Dose dances down these same roads. I asked Haaksman (follow his travels at @DanielHaaksman) to walk us through the tracks he brought together, all new music that he regularly plays in his sets. This is what he had to say.