For the past three decades, Dervish has been at the forefront of reinventing traditional Irish folk songs. The Sligo-based band is “breathing new life” into the beloved music of its homeland with The Great Irish Songbook, an album pulling from an eclectic range of genres and the voices of over a dozen featured artists.

Collaborators on the album include Steve Earle, David Gray and Rhiannon Giddens and this project encompasses everything from traditional dance music to love ballads, including a W.B. Yeats-penned serenade “Down by the Sally Gardens” and the classic “The Rocky Road to Dublin.”

The Great Irish Songbook is out now. Founding Dervish member Shane Mitchell and longtime vocalist Cathy Jordan spoke with NPR’s Scott Simon about the band’s unlikely beginnings, the soul of Irish music and the making of The Great Irish Songbook. Hear the radio version of their conversation in the audio link and read on for interview highlights.

Interview Highlights

On the origin of Dervish

Mitchell: We basically were a group of friends that were growing up together. We were asked to make a recording of local music one time and we had to come up with a title for the album pretty quickly. And we were just called The Boys of Sligo.

Jordan: I wrecked it. [Laughs] They couldn’t be The Boys of Sligo anymore!

It was about ’91 when when I joined. I was, at that time, making cakes and making pastries in County Longford and singing on the weekends. I had known the guys for quite some time and they decided that it was time to get a singer and I decided that I was fed up making cakes. I hitchhiked down to Sligo with my rucksack on my back and never came back.

On why the Irish excel at songs about heartbreak

Jordan: The heartbreak, I guess, comes in many forms. It can come in immigration, leaving loved ones behind, of course, the affairs of the heart. We have far more songs about love unrequited than songs with happy endings, which I found [out] one time when I was asked to sing as somebody’s wedding. They wanted a lovely traditional Irish ballad with a happy ending and I couldn’t find one. There’s usually somebody dead by the third verse and betrayed by the fourth or whatever. So, I’m not quite sure, there could be many reasons for it, but we have a few happy endings songs, you’ll be delighted to know on The Great Irish Songbook.

On how beloved Irish music is around the globe

Mitchell: We continue to be surprised by how loved Irish music is. I suppose when we started this project nearly two years ago, the idea was to try and find people who had a love for Irish music from different genres of music. We found a lot of closet Irish folk music fans. In fact, we have enough to make three albums, somebody said at one stage.

I am so proud of our music, that there’s so much love and people get emotionally attached to us. It’s a very positive genre of music and this was one of the reasons why we looked at this project. These are iconic songs that we all grew up with. You know, Irish pub music, people come together and it was a great sense of camaraderie when people would sing together. We just think that this was a great way to approach an album — breathe new life into these wonderful old songs.

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Angélique Kidjo now has a pair of albums that are essentially covers of other artists, but interpreted with an African sensibility so majestic as to render the originals almost as source material.

On 2018’s Remain In Light, Kidjo made the implicit African influences of Talking Heads’ original vision explicit. Kidjo didn’t channel New Wave, or even rock and roll, as a starting point; instead, she used West African polyrhythms to reinterpret the band’s take on then-modern life in America. It was one of my favorite albums of last year.

Courtesy of the artist

Somehow Kidjo had the time to record a second tribute album, this time dedicated to an individual artist.

Celia refers to Celia Cruz, perhaps the most well-known vocalist to come from Cuba during any era. The ten tracks span several decades of Cruz’s career, from before she left Cuba in 1960 to her groundbreaking recordings for the celebrated Fania Records label in New York in the 1970s, to “La Vida Es Un Carnaval,” the 1998 song that became her late career hit and anthem. Kidjo’s reinterpretations rearrange the molecules of songs that many of us know by heart. The results are glorious.

The tongue twister “Cucala” becomes a rhythmic pattern for both guitar and hand drums as Kidjo sings the Spanish-language lyric that is an ode to joy of dancing. It’s a brilliant take on a song that I honestly thought couldn’t get any better.

Cruz never shied away from the island’s African culture, especially on songs like”Yemaya” and “Elegua.” These two tracks on Celia strip away the classic, horn-driven guaracha feel of La Sonora Matancera’s 1950s-era orchestrations and become deeply emotional prayers to the two Afro-Cuban deities.

“Quimbara,” one of Cruz’s most well-known anthems, serves as Celia‘s mission statement. The original was based on guaguancó, which was a bold move at the the time. Why? Mambo and cha-cha-cha were the ruling Latin dance rhythms of the day, and here was an Afro-Cuban folkloric beat. On Celia, Angélique Kidjo changes the rhythm from a solid 4/4 to a languid, yet powerful 6/8. Afrobeat-style guitar approximates the West African koraand punctuates it all with a funky, horn driven, stop-time statement of its massive chorus.

What puts the song over the top is the call-and-response improvisation of the title. It’s done at twice the speed of the rhythm underneath (what musicians call double time) and it never clashes. Kidjo has so expertly tied the original guaguanco to her 6/8 that it serves as a point of cultural pride that Africa could claim Celia Cruz as one of their own. And that is the point of every track of this album.

Celia Cruz’s music and her entire being was a reminder of the presence of Africa in Cuba. Angélique Kidjo’s Celia musically closes that circle with reverence and more than a little love.

Courtesy of the artist

First Listen: Angelique Kidjo, ‘Celia’

01Cucala

3:19

02La Vida Es un Carnaval

4:33

03Sahara

4:37

04Balia Yemaya

2:54

05Toro Mata

4:30

06Elegua

3:06

07Quimbara

4:34

08Bemba Colora

3:44

09Oya Diosa

3:27

10Yemaya

1:37

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At 22 years old, Tamino possesses a voice that carries the hypnotic, immediate power of something much more ancient. Born Tamino Moharam Fouad and named after a prince in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the Belgian-Egyptian artist explores his heritage by combining his own sound with Arabic influences of his Lebanese and Egyptian ancestors. Tamino’s debut album, Amir, out now, melds together the artist’s eccentric vocal style with Arab musical theory.

When Tamino was a kid, he found an old guitar gathering dust in a cupboard while visiting family in Cairo, and brought it back home with him to Belgium. The guitar was once played by Muharram Fouad, Tamino’s grandfather and a famous Egyptian singer who starred in Hassan and Nayima, which is, as Tamino tells it, “the Romeo and Juliet of Egyptian cinema.”

“The songs played in that movie became hits, not only in Egypt but the whole Arabic world, actually,” Tamino says. “He had a very long career until the ’80s, but he died unfortunately when I was 5, so I don’t really have memories of him. I only have his music.”

Left behind for Tamino were cassettes of his grandfather’s music. Tamino was able to incorporate the music on the cassettes into his own music for the album with the help of a friend.

“She takes the cassettes…she makes new sounds with them,” Tamino says. “You cannot recognize them anymore, but for me, it was symbolically very important that these sounds came from these cassettes that I had all my life.”

Amir also features Nagham Zikrayat, an orchestra of Middle Eastern instrumentalists, many of whom are refugees from Iraq and Syria. “They capture the essence of Arabic music from like the ’50s and the ’60s — we call it the golden age of Arabic music,” Tamino says about working with Nagham Zikraya. “They add this individuality and charisma in what they are playing.”

Tamino says there’s a lot he still has to discover about the country and culture of Egypt. Though he’s visited many times, he has yet to play there.

“The language is gonna be hard. I know it’s gonna be hard, but the one thing that’s not hard is the music,” he says. “It’s the one thing I’ve always had a connection to. It’s the one thing that just feels like it’s in me — like a homecoming.”

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Circumnavigate the world of Celtic music as we listen to progressive, crossover Celtic roots recordings influenced by Latin, Balkan and African music and rhythms. Artists this week include the Afro Celt Sound System, Eileen Ivers, and The House Band.

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From my vantage point — a white kid growing up on the blistering guitars of my ’60s guitar heroes like Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton — Mdou Moctar has made the most insane psychedelic guitar album of the 21st century. From his perspective, growing up in a small village in central Niger, Moctar may not even know what I’m talking about. In fact, in a press statement, he says, “I don’t know what rock is exactly. I have no idea. I only know how to play in my style.” And that style is Tuareg guitar: Saharan music that takes the electric guitar into trance territory with its frenetic and often repetitious guitar lines.

Courtesy of the artist

After a chance meeting with engineer Chris Koltay, with whom Moctar bonded over the music of ZZ Top (especially the band’s 1973 album Tres Hombres, with its own repetitive boogie guitar), the two made their way into a Detroit studio, pulled in a live band and made Ilana (The Creator). That band included Ahmoudou Madassane, known his meditative and acid-tinged soundtrack to the Saharan western Zerzura in 2018. With fiery performances, and later overdubs and rhythms recorded in Niger, a modern classic was born.

At home, Mdou Moctar is a gifted musician and a performer of wedding music. He writes songs with influences that include diverse influences such as Takamba trance rhythms and the guitar-tapping technique of Eddie Van Halen, as learned from YouTube videos. (And, like Jimi Hendrix, Moctar plays a left-handed Fender Stratocaster guitar.) So feel free to come at Ilana (The Creator) any way you wish, but do it with the volume cranked.

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Mdou Moctar’s Ilana (The Creator) comes out March 29 via Sahel Sounds.

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First Listen: Mdou Moctar, ‘Ilana (The Creator)’

01Kamane Tarhanin

5:08

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02Asshet Akai

4:50

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03Inizgam

1:24

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04Anna

4:32

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05Takamba

2:49

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06Tarhatazed

7:27

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07Wiwasharnine

3:37

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08Ilana

4:45

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09Tumastin

4:45

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Salif Keita, one of the best African singers of the past century, had a 40-plus-year career that took him around the world and produced some 25 albums. Now, Keita is retiring from recording and in October 2018, he released his final album is Un Autre Blanc, or Another White.

In 1987, Keita introduced an iconic voice to the world with his album Soro. Keita sang to his father, a master hunter in his native village in Mali, “O, Sina, your son is lost far away from home.” Living then in Paris, Keita may have felt lost, but he was also finding himself. As someone born an albino to a royal family, his early choice to become a singer was both taboo and an act of courage for a young man who considered himself an outcast. After years of singing in urban African bands, Keita made his own statement and launching a movement of modern African music.

All these years later, Keita returns to the studio with confidence, passion, pride, gratitude and still, that incredible voice. The song “Were Were” praises the great leaders of Africa, from Lumumba to Mandela and is the grandest subject Keita addresses in the album. The album title “Another White” is more personal. It refers to Keita’s albinism, a defining feature of his life that he has sung and spoken about often.

The album’s title, Another White, meanwhile, is more personal and refers to Keita’s albinism, a defining feature of his life that he has sung and spoken about often.

Many of the songs are also about the virtues and hardships that women face in Africa. In the song “Itarafo,” Keita and Afropop star Angélique Kidjo sing about a woman resisting pressure to abandon her child as she joins a new household.

For his farewell recording, Keita invited a rich cast of African singers to contribute. On the song “Gnamale,” he weaves in the vocal polyphony of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, mixing Bambara and Zulu in praise of Mande hunters like his late father.

Keita ends this album with a serene reggae number thanking God for his blessings and warning those who misuse his name. This plays as a sly jab to Islamic fundamentalists currently destabilizing Mali and it perfectly encapsulates the complexity that has made all Keita’s work so satisfying over the years. Never content with simple formulas, always breaking new ground, always authentic and sincere, Keita is himself a blessing. If this truly is his last recording, his creative force will be sorely missed.

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It’s been 50 years since Woodstock Music & Arts Festival. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of three days of peace, love and music, Woodstock 50 will take place this Aug. 16–18, 2019 in Watkins Glen, N.Y. Festival co-founder Michael Lang has announced the official lineup for the anniversary festival with Jay-Z, Dead & Company and The Killers as headliners. Rounding out the list of performers are Miley Cyrus, Imagine Dragons, The Black Keys and Chance The Rapper as well as acts like Santana who performed at the seminal fest five decades ago. But what makes this 50th anniversary lineup special among a saturated field of music festivals this?

“They’re trying to recreate the magic and some of the cultural dominance that the original Woodstock did,” NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson says, noting that organizers are not only working in the shadow of the behemoth that was the original event, but also in the shadow of “the debacle that is Woodstock 99” which was notorious for violence, destruction and sexual assault cases.

In the years since the original Woodstock, the festival’s symbolism of peace and love has been romanticized in pop culture. As Thompson notes, no matter who’s on the bill, carrying on the legacy of the original Woodstock is incredibly hard. “They’re trying, I think, to feed a lot of mouths at once,” Thompson says of the variety in this year’s lineup compared to the gathering of 400,000 people back in 1969. “In order to attract 400,000 in this market place, you have to please a lot of people at once.”

As for clear comparisons to the original fest? “In the announcement of this new Woodstock lineup, there was conversation about the parallels between the political situation in 1969 and the political situation in the present,” Thompson notes. “So, I’m sure there’s going to be an attempt to sort of tie the two together and bring out some of the activism.”

Even though summer festival season is more crowded than ever, Thompson thinks Woodstock 50 will stand out because of its historical name recognition and reverberations to be a “siren song to anyone who feels some kind of attachment” to the word ‘Woodstock’ and it’s music history.

Listen to the entire conversation at the audio link.

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I struggled to balance the conflicting emotions of enjoying the musical celebration that is the annual SXSW Festival with the pain of the devastating loss of life in Friday’s terrorist attack in New Zealand. It was an emotional push and pull that I kept completely to myself.

But as I reflected back on the week of interviews and performances I was reminded that many of the musicians I cover on this beat often include messages in their music about respect and dignity for people who are different. They lend their musical gifts to movements that fight for social justice in their home countries. And as I reported on NPR’s All Things Considered, sometimes they put themselves in danger by refusing to be silenced.

It was a reminder that what happens in Austin every year can be much more than a bunch of bands looking for their next big break. It’s really a celebration of the freedom of expression. For some bands, the members are indeed looking for their next big break so they can carry their messages of social justice and inclusion even further.

I left Austin grieving but also comforted by the fact that music can indeed challenge and change the world we live in. I’m thankful that it’s my job to help spread that healing energy. Join AltLatino contributors Marisa Arbona- Ruiz and Catalina Maria Johnson and I this week as we retrace which bands gave us joy and also inspired us.

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Ask anyone in Dublin to recommend a pub with traditional Irish music, and you’re likely to hear about The Cobblestone. For our last World Cafe dispatch from Ireland, we pop into the cozy spot in Smithfield and can immediately see why this place is beloved by locals, tourists and musicians from far and wide. It’s warm and welcoming with a big, long bar filled with people leaning over each other and laughing and clinking glasses. And at the front of the room there are about a dozen musicians packed into this little nook — it’s a jigsaw puzzle of fiddles and guitars and pints resting precariously between elbows on tables.

Tom Mulligan, who has owned the pub for 30 years, says,”Conversation is the greatest thing that was ever invented.” Mulligan hopes people talk to each other as much as they listen to the music at The Cobblestone. He also tells the story of that time Steve Martin popped by to play some banjo and left on his private jet. Come along for a pint, in the player.

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