world | Musicosity

Dhafer Youssef

A small seaside town in Tunisia in the 1970s. A boy walks along a deserted shoreline picking up the odds and ends he finds lying around: A broken fishing net; a few discarded sardine cans; spokes from an old bicycle. His heart and mind are full of music and he wants to play. It's as much as his father can do to put food on the table for Dhafer and his seven brothers and sisters. There certainly isn't spare money for music lessons, let alone for an instrument. So Dhafer makes his own oud, the traditional middle-Eastern lute, using whatever he can find.

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Abaji

Abaji is a Lebanese-born multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer. "When I was ten or eleven, I got really involved with sounds. Not just the guitar, but the sounds themselves.” From a musical family—Abaji’s Armenian grandmother played the oud (lute), his great-grandmother the kanun (zither), and his six maternal aunts were all passionate and contentious musicians. Abaji started playing and experimenting on an inexpensive Chinese-built guitar alone in his Beirut bedroom...

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Archie Roach

Archie Roach (born 1956, Mooroopna, Victoria) is an Australian musician. A singer, songwriter and guitarist, he survived a turbulent upbringing to develop into a powerful voice for Indigenous Australia, a storyteller in the tradition of his ancestors, and a nationally popular and respected artist. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

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folk

australian aboriginal

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Faiz Ali Faiz

Faiz Ali Faiz (born 1962 in Sharaqpur, Pakistan) is one of the main singers of qawwali, a devotional musical expression of the Sufis, a mystical offshoot of Islam. Faiz Ali Faiz comes from a family of qawwals from seven generations in Pakistan. He started his professional career in 1978, at age 16, creating at the same time his own qawwali ensemble. Though Faiz is from Lahore, he practices the doaba style from eastern Pakistan. He stated in recent interviews he has been influenced by Sham-Chaurasi, a famous Khayal singing school where Ustad Salamat Ali Khan belongs to.

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Hanggai

Hanggai is made up of young musicians from Beijing and from the Inner Mongolia Mongol Autonomous Region in modern day People's Republic of China. Satisfying the demand for the romanticized and mysticized Mongolian music in China, Hanggai presents Mongolian folk songs in conjunction with western and Chinese influenced drumming and other techniques (albeit with some sacrifice to lyrical clarity), hence makes the traditional Mongolian art more comprehensible to foreigners in China and the west.

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Nitin Sawhney

Nitin Sawhney (raised in Rochester, Kent, England) is a london-based composer and dj of various styles of music, including jazz, drum and bass, hip-hop, flamenco and modern orchestral compositions. His major works include Beyond Skin, Prophesy, Human, and Philtre. He is considered one of the pioneers of what is known as the Asian Underground music scene, defining a music genre that mixes south-asian musical influences with western electronica and breakbeat style. He does however dislike the tag of "world" music, describing it as musical apartheid.

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The Crooked Fiddle Band

The Crooked Fiddle Band are a four-piece from Sydney, Australia who formed in late 2006. acoustic and mainly instrumental, tCFB are influenced by / include Eastern European, Celtic and USA traditional material in their punked up compositions. Instrumentation includes violin, double bass, drum kit, guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, charango, hand percussion, cello. Free downloads are available from the Triple J Unearthed site and their Myspace. Links for buying their music are available through their official website: http://www.crookedfiddleband.com.

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Kodo

<a href="http://www.last.fm/music/%E9%BC%93%E7%AB%A5" class="bbcode_artist">鼓童</a> (Kodō) is one of the elite taiko drumming groups today. Based in Sado Island, Japan, they have been a major force in the post-World War II revitalization of taiko drumming, both in Japan and abroad. They regularly tour Japan and the United States. Although the main focus of the performance is taiko drumming, other traditional Japanese musical instruments such as fue and shamisen make an appearance on stage as do traditional dance and vocal performance.

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Te Vaka

Te Vaka is a unique group of ten musicians and dancers from Tokelau, Tuvalu, Samoa, Cook Islands, and New Zealand brought together under the inspired leadership of Opetaia Foa'i. They have been wowing international audiences since 1997, presenting a rich, luscious mix of Polynesia's ancient culture, to the modern world and in 2008 won the “Best Pacific Group” award. The language they sing in is usually Tokelau but more recently they have been singing in Samoan and Tuvaluan too.

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Waiting for Guinness

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