One of the things I learned quickly when I started doing my Music Time in Africa radio show last April was that there always seems to be a shortage of good female artists. “How can this be?” I asked myself and colleagues in our English to Africa Division. I know from experience living on the […]
Afropean Women Raise the Bar in Contemporary African Music
Posted November 26th, 2012 at 9:02 pm (UTC-5)
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Today’s Beat in Burkina Faso
Posted June 28th, 2012 at 2:45 pm (UTC-5)
Since June 10th, I’ve been exploring contemporary music from Burkina Faso. Vocalist/lyricist Mai Lingani is a dynamite artist and performer and I’ve been following her since 2005 when we performed together at Floyd Fest, an annual world music festival that takes place in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Central Virginia. We performed together again in […]
Welcome to the New African Music Treasures
Posted June 11th, 2012 at 4:08 pm (UTC-5)
In case you haven’t noticed, the VOA radio show, Music Time in Africa, and this companion blog has a new face; and it’s me! So let me begin this new chapter in the history of VOA’s longest running show to introduce myself. I’m Heather Maxwell and am delighted to be taking up the reigns from […]
Sufi Sounds, volume four
Posted October 8th, 2008 at 4:08 pm (UTC-5)
This fourth, and for now, final, installment of African Islamic music features recordings from the Cote D’Ivoire, Benin and Nigeria. (I think I will wait until next year to present the Islamic recordings we have in our collection from Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Niger, Northern Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Egypt. My original plan to highlight […]
Recent nuggets from the Cote D’Ivoire
Posted December 17th, 2007 at 10:40 pm (UTC-5)
Over the last several years it has been difficult to escape music from the Cote D’Ivoire. Throughout all of West Africa, and much of the rest of the continent, it seems like every nightclub and radio station has been going heavy on the Coupe Decaler and it’s many offshoots (the grippe aviare, the decaler chinois, […]
