Afropop Worldwide
Saturdays at 11 p.m. on 88.5 NEPM
This Peabody Award-winning radio program is dedicated to music from Africa and the African diaspora. Hosted by Georges Collinet from Cameroon, Afropop Worldwide bridges continents and cultures through the power of pop, telling some of the most important stories of our time along the way.
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I remember just where I was when I first heard Swiss Movement, the concert album by Les McCann and Eddie Harris recorded at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival. I was with a group of friends, mostly high school classmates, and we were skipping school.
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The birthdays of two of the most soulful alto saxophonists of all time bookend the weekend. Friday was Houston native Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s 98th; Monday is the 81st of Memphis-born Hank Crawford.
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Lalama was born into a musical family in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, 65 years ago today. He told All About Jazz that his mother was a professional singer who performed until she was eight months pregnant with him. “I was in her womb hearing these tunes live on the stage. I was hearing that vibration. It happened naturally…the…Songbook…is in my blood.”
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Sir Charles Thompson died on June 16 near Tokyo, where he’d lived since 2002. He was 98, and was playing gigs up until a few years ago when he became ill with colon cancer.
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Yesterday was Kenny Burrell’s 85th birthday. I heard him first on Jimmy Smith’s Back At the Chicken Shack, and first heard his great original “Chitlins Con Carne” on Junior Wells’ 1966 album, Hoodoo Man Blues.
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Hear music and field recordings from bassist, composer, and fashion icon Jamaaladeen Tacuma's residency in North Carolina, where he explores his familial and musical roots.
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Tertulia was honored with the presence of two artists from Connecticut who shared music and talked about Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, in Mexico, which happens on November 1.
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Hard to define, for one thing. But in our disorienting digital age, these image-savvy, genre-fluid, proficient yet irreverent artists can seem like the only ones who've gleefully cracked the code.
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Seven months after it debuted at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Tyshawn Sorey relaunches his work Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) on a monumental new scale in New York's Park Avenue Armory.
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Dr. Hubert Benitez is the new president of American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts.