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  • LIFE

    Lift up your voice

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 10/10/2023

    » South Africa has a long tradition of harmony singing, stretching back to Soloman Linda's famous 1933 song Mbube, which created a genre of its own to isicathamiya folk singing that led to one of the country's most potent popular genres, mbaqanga and on to gospel choirs.

  • LIFE

    All there at the square

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 05/03/2019

    » Busy Victory Monument, with its buses, taxis and motorcycles, is one of Bangkok's few traffic circles (or roundabouts, as we call them where I come from). It's a busy intersection of roads that lead to all points on the compass.

  • LIFE

    Farewell to a punk pioneer

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 11/12/2018

    » Manchester in the mid- to late-1970s was dark and moody. The International Monetary Fund bailed out the UK economy with a £3.5 billion loan in 1976 as the pound sunk to record lows. There was bitter infighting in the Labour-led government and strikes were in the news headlines.

  • LIFE

    Revolutionary's road

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 02/04/2019

    » Poet, novelist, piano player. And that was before Gil Scott-Heron had reached 20. He wrote and recorded his best known song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, in 1971, and from then on produced a unique and polemical body of prose, poetry and music that led him to be dubbed the "Father of Political Rap", the originator of "nu soul" and many more titles. He preferred being called a "bluesologist".

  • LIFE

    The beat goes on

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 19/12/2023

    » Molam continues to evolve with time. Musicians, especially from Isan, are experimenting with new musical combinations, creating new hybrids and sounds.

  • LIFE

    Stories of migration and hope

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 12/09/2023

    » In 2016, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto invited musicians, mainly immigrant musicians, to audition for a new global orchestra.

  • LIFE

    A smoother blue from North Mississippi Allstars

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 13/04/2021

    » In 2014, I wrote a review about the unique sound of blues rockers North Mississippi Allstars (NMA), whose music is rooted in the "fife and drum" culture of North Mississippi. Unlike in the Mississippi delta, which has a distinctive brand of guitar-driven blues, North Mississippi African-American hill country musicians use fifes (a small shrill flute used in 19th-century military bands), fiddles, banjos, tambourines, snare drums and a huge bass drum to create their local sound.

  • LIFE

    Travel notes

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 23/05/2023

    » Cambodia, like many Southeast Asian countries, enjoyed a golden era of popular music during the 1950s and 1960s, when Phnom Penh, known as the "Pearl of the Orient" became an important cultural centre, a breading ground for the meeting of Western rock and pop and Cambodian music. Author Dee Peyok in her fascinating new book Away From Beloved Lover: A Musical Journey Through Cambodia (Granta, UK, 2023) notes that "the music of East and West merged across Southeast Asia to the most fascinating mélange of instruments, attitudes and expressionism".

  • LIFE

    Holy trinity

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 14/02/2023

    » The banjo is a key instrument in Western folk music -- from US bluegrass to Irish trad -- and over the past 20 years, research into the roots of this three-stringed instrument have revealed its west African lute origins, with two instruments, the ngoni and the ekonting, now understood to be the closest ancestors to the banjo.

  • LIFE

    When East meets West

    Life, John Clewley, Published on 17/01/2023

    » In 2017, the Japanese band Minyo Crusaders released their debut album, Echoes Of Japan (P-Vine, Japan), to great acclaim. The band's reworking and updating of Japanese folk music, or minyo, on a rhythmic bed of Caribbean, Latin and Afrobeat was truly inspired, and perhaps pointed the way for other fusion bands in East and Southeast Asia. The aim was to revive minyo as "music for the people", as quoted by World Music Central.

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