The Nigerian percussionist together with US soul singer OC Tolbert, in 1982.
A grippingly odd couple of sides: Happiness is slow-burning gospel; Nwanne is terrific, stampeding Afro-disco, with popping bass, echoing shout-outs and drums on fire.

Two-thirds from the townships of the copper mines of Katanga Province, showing the early urbanisation of traditional sounds, the guitar taking over the thumb-piano parts.

Music written for Angelopoulos’ film, featuring the viola of Kim Kashkashian, alongside oboe, accordion, voice, trumpet, french horn and cello.

Kikuyu ‘liquid soul’, Luo benga with its rat-tat-tat beat and layered guitars, Swahili afrobeat, Congolese rumba, plus influences from SA and Zambia, disco and funk, coastal rhythms like chakacha. Mostly from 45s.

Luo, Luhya, Kipsigis, Kikuyu, Nandi, Swahili, Wanga and Giriama tribes. Choirs and songs with string accompaniment on guitar, oud, mostly lyres — like the thum, with eight strings, made of cow-tendons.

Fat, glorious mid-seventies South African afro-jazz classic from the vaults of As-shams.

King Ayisoba is a star in Ghana. His kologo-playing is both melodic and percussive. With his producer Panji Anoff he changed the Accra music scene by using traditional instruments together with the beats, bleeps and bass drawn from hip-hop and dancehall by the local, mid-90s ‘hip life’ scene.
‘King Ayisoba’s Modern Ghanaians is the fastest selling cassette by an artist from the northern part of Ghana. The album’s popularity started in Bolgatanga where the artist is from, but has spread through the other regions like harmattann bushfire’ (Ghana Gazette, 2007).

‘The geomungo is a six-string zither with sixteen frets. The resonating board is made of paulownia wood. Its origins trace back to the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo (37 BCE to 668 CE), which dominated the territory of present-day North Korea and a large part of Manchuria.
‘The geomungo makes dramatic sounds, through the friction created by the plectrum striking the strings, or the rustling created by subtle movements of the left hand over the strings.
‘Here Lee Jae-hwa performs the suites Geomungo Hoesang and Geomungo Sanjo, in the respective styles of the south and north of the Korean peninsula: distinct forms, techniques and rhythms, with a shared subtlety, sensitivity and emotional power.’

The unlikely Hawaiian-influenced Xabagies music of 1930s Greece: surrealist guitar portraits blurring Athens and Honolulu, haunting tropical serenades, wild acoustic orchestras, and heartbreaking steel guitar duets. With a 28-page booklet.