Spring is in the airs… and in the jigs, reels, and songs as we put out a musical welcome mat for the first signs of the season. Artists featured in this episode include Nightnoise, Kim Robertson and The Whistlebinkies.

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Singer Duncan Laurence from the Netherlands has emerged victorious at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest. The finals were held Saturday night in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The 25-year-old Laurence won the international competition with a song called “Arcade,” which he co-wrote. The song is a sweet, emotional ballad that stands in contrast to Israeli singer Netta’s wacky “Toy,” which won in 2018.

Laurence, whose real name is Duncan de Moor, participated in the Dutch version of “The Voice” in 2014. He’s also been writing for other performers, including the K-pop band TVXQ.

In all, 41 countries started out in this year’s competition. The 26 finalists’ songs included a number of power ballads alongside Duncan’s, as well as perky, anodyne pop from artists like the Czech Republic’s Lake Malawi and Denmark’s Leonora; and aspiring club bangers from the artist Tamta, the singer representing Cyprus, and Belarus’ Zena, among many others.

But because this is Eurovision, where camp appeal often outweighs other factors, there was also Serhat — a dentist turned-television impresario-turned singer, who channels Leonard Cohen at the disco and represented tiny San Marino — and Iceland’s Hatari, which describes itself as an “anti-capitalist performance art group inspired by BDSM and anti-authoritarian dystopic aesthetics.”

Hatari reportedly “tested the patience” of the European Broadcasting Union, which mounts Eurovision, in the week leading up to the finals by repeatedly speaking out against the Israeli government.

More widely, this year’s event has been partly overshadowed by politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On Tuesday, hackers interrupted the Israeli live webcast of the first semi-final to warn, falsely, that the city of Tel Aviv was under attack. Israel’s national broadcaster, Kan, blamed Hamas for the hacking. Palestinian activists unsuccessfully urged performers to boycott Eurovision 2019.

Organizers said the Eurovision finals were being watched by 200 million people across the globe. However, the show was not broadcast in the United States this year after the Logo TV network, which carried the 2016 to 2018 editions, chose not to pick up this year’s contest.

Along with this year’s competitors, other performers at Eurovision 2019 included previous winners Netta from Israel, who won in 2018, and 2014’s winner, Conchita Wurst from Austria — as well Madonna, who performed “Like a Prayer,” as well as her new, reggae-flavored song “Future” with Migos’ Quavo.

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Step into springtime by tuning into some of the fresh new music that recently arrived at The Thistle & Shamrock offices in the U.S. and Scotland. We feature exciting new recordings form Dervish, Liz Carroll and Flook.

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In 1996, Omara Portuondo was working on an album at Havana’s famous recording studio, Egrem. Upstairs, American musician Ry Cooder was laying down tracks for Buena Vista Social Club, a project with veteran Cuban musicians like Compay Segundo. Portuondo was invited to come up and sing a duet with him. They sang “Veinte Anos,” a song Portuondo learned as a child.

“Without rehearsal, this was a live recording. One take. It’s unbelievable,” says Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez. He had scouted and rediscovered the older musicians for Buena Vista Social Club. But he says Portuondo was still a star on the island, and bringing her into the project was a dream.

“I remember that once, Mr. Ry Cooder told me, ‘Omara is the Cuban Sarah Vaughan.’ And I said to him, ‘No, Sarah Vaughan was the American Omara Portuondo,'” Gonzalez says.

NPR met up with the legend herself at a downtown Los Angeles hotel the day she began her latest world tour, deemed “The Last Kiss.” Now 88 years old, Portunodo sometimes sings answers to questions about her long career.

“Por eso, yo soy Cubana, y me muero siendo Cubana,” she sings: “I’m Cuban, and I’ll die Cuban.”

Portuondo’s first gig for her latest world tour was at LA’s Regent Theater. Even though she was sitting, she had the audience clapping, dancing and singing along.

“Omara is the most important singer of our culture,” Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca, who performs with Portuondo on the tour, says. “She’s able to do any Afro-Cuban style, Latin jazz, jazz, boleros, traditional Cuban music, rumba. She’s magical, intense, pure, strong.The audience … the public … they are crying, smiling, dancing. All the time, she’s making jokes.”

“Yes, she’s flirting with the audience the whole time,” Alicia Adams, international program director for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. says. Adams brought Portuondo to the center’s Cuban Arts Festival last year, and recalls seeing the singer peak out from beneath the curtain to wave to her fans. Adams says as relations between Cuba and the U.S. have morphed over the decades, Portuondo has always been a cultural ambassador.

“She spans before the revolution and after the revolution,” Adams says. “From before, when there was much more ability to go back and forth, until later years, after the revolution, when things were not so easy in terms of that kind of travel.”

Unlike some other Cuban musicians — including her sister Haydee and her old friend, the late Celia Cruz — Portuondo chose not to defect to the U.S. She says she comes and goes from her home in Cuba as she likes, pretty much like her father, Bartolo Portuondo, did. He’d been a black professional infielder for both the Cuban League and the Negro Leagues in the U.S. Portuondo says that he was a great baseball player and that her mother, who was white, scandalized her upper-class family by marrying him.

When she was a little girl, Portuondo dreamed of being a ballet dancer. But she says in those days, you could only dance ballet if you were white. Instead, she and Haydee danced and sang at Havana’s famous Tropicana. Later, in 1945, the sisters formed a quartet with two other women, Elena Burke and Moraima Secada (the aunt of singer Jon Secada’s.) The Cuarteto D’Aida danced and sang in nightclubs and on television. The quartet even backed Nat King Cole when he performed in Havana.

Portuondo sang with the quartet for 15 years before launching a solo career in 1963. Since then, she’s sung with everyone from Pablo Milanes and Chucho Valdes to Los Van Van and reggaetoners Yomil Y el Dany. She even sang in the 2009 Spanish version of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. For years, Portuondo was associated with Cuba’s movimiento filin — the feeling movement that celebrates singers who interpret lyrics with great emotion.

Portuondo remained a star in Cuba, but it was the Buena Vista Social Club that introduced her to an even bigger audience in the U.S. and around the world. Audiences wept for her duets with Ibrahim Ferrer, who Portuondo sang with in the 1950’s. He’d been long-forgotten until the Buena Vista Social Club. The group’s first album won a Grammy award in 1998. And an Oscar-nominated documentary by Wim Wenders chronicled the group’s journey from Cuba to an historic concert at Carnegie Hall.

Portuondo never stopped recording or performing. Gonzalez says for many years, Portuondo also sang with his band, the Afro-Cuban All Stars. As for this tour being her “last kiss”? Gonzalez says that’s just marketing ploy . “She’s going to die on the stage. That’s what she wants,” he says. “She’s the Cuban diva.”

And Portuondo agrees. “Despedida? No.” This is not goodbye, Portuondo says as she breaks into song: “Lo que me queda por vivir será en sonrisas“: “What I have left to live for is smiles,” she sings, adding “Me queda tiempo todavia,“: “I still have time.”

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Celebrate the coming of summer, the fertility of the season and the greening of the earth as Fiona Ritchie invites you to gather around the fires of “Beltane,” one of four ancient, annual Celtic festivals that mark the passage from one season to the next. Artists featured include Loreena McKennitt, The Poozies, and Jim Malcolm.

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Follow the historic migration from Scotland through Ulster into Pennsylvania and on down the Great Wagon Road to a final destination in the Southern Appalachians. Artists featured in this session include Patrick Street, Cara Dillon, and Sheila Kay Adams.

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Baloji is an artist who finds strength in his roots but freedom in between genres. He was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but has lived in Belgium most of his life. The rapper is a well-known name in Belgium and France. He’s received music honors for his work, but his life has been a journey of struggle and perseverance.

At 3 years old, Baloji’s father took him to Belgium without telling his mother. After dropping out of school and leaving home at 14, Baloji discovered hip-hop. Performing under the name MC Balo, the young upstart joined the hip-hop group Starflam. As the group began to gain popularity, Baloji received a letter from his mother that changed the course of his life and career.

“I was 26 years old when I received that letter for my mom. I thought at first it was fraud,” Baloji says. But his mother knew his birth date and sent him photos of when he was a baby. The letter impacted him greatly.

Baloji’s mother had seen him on TV performing with Starflam. “Your dad told me that he brought you to Belgium … to the land of Marvin Gaye,” she wrote. The American artist used to reside in Ostend, Belgium, the same city Baloji first moved to. Gaye’s music became the inspiration for his first solo project, especially the song “I Am Going Home.” “That really stuck in my head and inspired me to do my first album, which is dedicated to my mom,” Baloji says.

Baloji’s debut album, 2008’s Hotel Impala, was a collection of all his life experiences leading up to seeing his mother again. Ten years later, the artist’s 2018 album, 137 Avenue Kaniama and his upcoming follow-up, Kaniama: The Yellow Version, relate back to the message of Hotel Impala. For example, on “La Derniere Pluie,” the centerpiece of the album, Baloji remembers meeting his mother for the first time as an adult in the DRC and realizing their cultural differences.

“This song is talking about how we met physically, how it happened, how I was feeling, how she was feeling and how we were both nervous,” Baloji explains. Baloji had invited his mother to an upscale restaurant, but the expensive menu made his mother uncomfortable. “Every meal costs at least 20 dollars, we can buy a pack of rice for that price that will last a month,” she told him. “I was expecting us to hug and be in a loving relationship, and for her — I had to take care of her and his siblings,” Baloji adds.

Baloji music tackles issues large and small. From his family history, to the experience of refugees in Europe, to our dependence on smartphones. His goal, he says, is to create art that lasts and he can be proud of.

Listen to the conversation at the audio link.

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