Amid Black History Month celebrations in February, some local musicians say they are finding more opportunities at various venues to share their work and stories. One Bay Area man who plays an unusual ...

“How come we’ve never heard of this beautiful instrument until now?” This was posted by a first-year college student to my world music course discussion board recently. He voiced what many of his ...

The djembe drum dates back roughly between 400 and 800 years, created during the Malian Empire by the Mandé people across regions including Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast. Picture a goblet ...

Early on in his new book, “Custodians of Wonder,” BBC Travel writer Eliot Stein tallies some recent effects of globalization, a process that seems to only speed up. Nine languages, he notes, are lost ...

African instruments are rich and unique in their sounds. With such uniqueness in sound, they have influenced music from other parts of the world. Here are 7 musical instruments whose origin dates back ...

The soul-shattering abuses suffered by enslaved Africans, who were forcibly stripped of their languages, religions and other key aspects of their culture, were fortunately no match for their ...

A master of the kora who worked with Herbie Hancock and Philip Glass, his career was powered as much by experimentation as by reverence for tradition. By Giovanni Russonello Foday Musa Suso, a griot, ...

EVERETT — A nonstop flight from Seattle to Africa will take close to 20 hours and cost thousands. But life on the continent can be experienced for free this weekend in Everett. The first-ever Sounds ...

Toumani Diabaté left a legacy as enormous as the west African Mande music tradition he was born into. He took west Africa’s Mande music to a new level of global recognition, often collaborating with ...