Tag Archives: Music
Digitized field recordings of Lorenzo Dow Turner
This newly available digital resource includes 40 hours of audio field recordings by the African American academic and linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, the “Father of Gullah Studies,” relating to: African American History / Studies, Black History / Studies, Languages, Linguistics, Music and Music History. The recordings were made 1932-1952, relating to Nigeria, Cameroon, Brazil and […]
George Fortune manuscripts open for research
I’m delighted to announce that the George Fortune Papers, 1869-2006 (2013 accretion with significant updates to the original finding aid) now are open for research. A small selection of items from the collection are available online. This has been a fascinating collection to work with and has the potential to support a variety of research projects. I’m personally charmed by the […]
Obituary for Tabu Ley Rochereau
Tabu Ley, “King of Congolese Rhumba” will be remembered at a funeral service today. A report at http://www.worldmusiccentral.org includes the following tribute: Throughout his career, Mr. Rochereau wrote some 3,000 songs and produced some 250 recordings. He also earned the Honorary Knight of Senegal and Officer of the National Order, the Republic of Chad during his […]
Kwabena Nketia Book Prize
The African Music Section (AfMS) of The Society for Ethnomusicology invites submissions for the 2014 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize [link currently broken] to recognize a book of significance in English on a topic relevant to African musical performance. Books published in 2010-2013 are considered for the 2014 prize. No book may be submitted more than once […]
Afropop’s Hip Deep Kickstarter campaign
From the organizers of this worthwhile project: Despite all challenges to arts funding and public radio, Afropop’s Hip Deep marches on. The NEH grant we won this past summer continues a great new tradition for the series we began in 2011: combining scholarship with original field work. Next month, we will travel to Ghana to research […]
Beat Making Lab, Goma, Congo
A brief video on the Goma, Congo Beat Making Lab is an inspiring promotion for the PBS Digital Studios digital music Beat Making Lab project. Beat Making Lab is an electronic music studio small enough to fit in a backpack. We build Labs in collaboration with communities all around the world; donating laptops, microphones and […]
Recording a Revolution: Hiphop and Social Change in Africa
Originally posted on Hausahomevideoresourcecentre's Blog:
Hausa hiphop artist Ziriums (Nazir Hausawa) will take part in an African Hip Hop event at the Alachua County Library Headquarters, in Gainesville, Florida, USA, on Saturday 23 February 2013. Ziriums was featured in the documentary Recording a Revolution, by Alex Johnson and Saman Piracha, which will screen 10am-11am.…
Graceland vs the South African cultural boycott
I enjoyed a PBS (US) broadcast this week of Joe Berlinger‘s documentary Under African Skies (2012). It centers on the 25th anniversary of Paul Simon‘s release of the Graceland record album. From Lucy Jones in The Telegraph: The current of the film is a conversation between Dali Tambo, founder of Artists Against Apartheid and son of the […]
Music and Nation in Luanda
From the Afropop Worldwide show on the US Public Radio International network comes a series titled Hip deep with two episodes from the lesser known, seldom visited country of Angola (listen here for Hip Deep Angola, Part 1: Music and Nation in Luanda and Hip Deep Angola Part 2: Kuduro and Beyond available via SoundCloud): Hip Deep is a media project […]
Awesome Tapes from Africa
Awesome Tapes from Africa From David Pescovitz via bOING bOING “Brian Shimkovitz was on a Fulbright scholarship in Ghana when he got hooked on the cassette culture of the region. Street vendors hawked West African recordings in myriad genres, from highlife to African disco, old left-field soul to curious local pop. Shimkovitz started a blog, […]
African Studies library 