African Artists

Baaba Maal has proved to be one of the most inventive and enduring artists to come out of Senegal. For well over a decade, he's explored music...

Malika, the dancer and lead singer with B'net Marrakech, appears onstage with a metal tea tray. It's full of flowers and lit candles. As the music...

Boubacar Traore is a contented man. After a difficult life, the Malian singer, guitarist, and songwriter is happy again, the happiest he's been since...

Clotaire K is a man who's found himself. Born and raised in France to Lebanese parents, his Middle Eastern heritage and his love of hip-hop have...

Cameroonian singer Coco Mbassi has been a long time developing her sound. She won the Radio France Discovery Award in 1996, but it's only in 2003...

Before the images of starvation, things were different in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa, the capital, rocked, and small labels, notably Amha, released a...

Nigeria's Femi Kuti has broad shoulders. To be the son of the late Fela Kuti, the man who essentially invented Afrobeat, a man as much legend as...

With the release of Fight to Win, Nigeria's Femi Kuti has completely stepped out of the large shadow left by his later father, Fela. Whereas his...

"I'm a very traditional person inside - the way I write my words, my phrasing, the way I write the songs, that's me." "I'm a very traditional...

Mali's produced more than its share of great musicians, but in Habib Koité it has someone who might be able to achieve the kind of crossover that...

Sha'bi is the music of Cairo. The street pop form with its rough roots has always captured the bustle and clamor of the massive cosmopolitan city. It...

South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela is best known for his 1968 feel-good worldwide smash, "Grazin' In The Grass." But he's always been far more...

"We want to make musique mondaine, music of the world," says Awa Sangho,one third of the Ivory Coast band Les Go. And with their second album, Dan...

Look at a map of Africa and try to find Tanzania. For a lot of people, it only exists in the shadowy world of new stories on terrorism. But it's...

Many bands go through hard times, but South Africa's veteran Mahotella Queens underwent more than most last year. Not only did their guitarist, Marks...

No matter where you're live, money's important, even in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. It's the reason the fabled, trance-y Master Musicians of...

There aren't many people who you can say loom large in world music. But with a career spanning more than four decades, Miriam Makeba deserves a place...

He's the biggest-selling artist ever in his native Zimbabwe, even putting people like Thomas Mapfumo in the shade. Bonnie Raitt loves him. But Oliver...

Throughout her career, Malian diva Oumou Sangare has been a woman with a mission. Sangare, whose 1993 album Ko Sira (World Circuit/Nonesuch) was...

RachidTaha might be in his 40s, but he's still fueled by anger. His fire is all to evident on his new album, Made in Medina. "About music,...

Homer Simpson might have said that a woman can't resist a man who knows how to mambo, but for Ricardo Lemvo, it's the rumba that captured his heart....

Every once in a while someone comes along to give a push to a country's music. In Mali, West Africa, right now that someone is singer and songwriter...

They say you can never go home again. But sometimes, it seems, you can. Mali's Salif Keita, celebrated as one of the world's great singers, has...

Salif Keita is one of the great African voices, a man whose pipes have been praised for decades. The Malian rejected his heritage to become a singer,...

Sometimes a record blindsides you. The musicians are unknown, the idea seems unlikely, but you put it on, and the result is like a bolt from the...

It's not just a Malagasy thing any more... Take California, add some 50%, and you've got Madagascar, one of the biggest islands in the world,...

Some stories take a long time to be told. In the case of South Africa's Manhattan Brothers singing quartet, the tale has taken almost three decades...

The three mbira players of Blacks Unlimited work at their thumb pianos, creating hypnotic, interlocking riffs. Then the band kicks in over the top...

If you want to talk about desert blues, it doesn't come any sandier or rawer than Tinariwen. Members of the nomadic Tuareg people who've roamed back...

Like many immigrants, Senegalese musician Vieux Diopcame to America to "experience new things. I wanted to come over, see the U.S., and try my luck."...

Long before soukous filled dancefloors in Europe and Africa, even before there was Congolose rumba, there was Antoine ‘Wendo' Kolosoy. He was one of...

Senegal's Youssou N'Dour is, perhaps, the biggest name in world music. Now 40, his eerie voice, high and keening, has barely lost a step from when he...