Afro Celt Sound System are a European and African group who fuse electronic music with traditional Gaelic and West African music. Afro Celt Sound System were formed in 1995 by producer-guitarist Simon Emmerson, and feature a wide range of guest artists. In 2003, they temporarily changed their name to Afrocelts before reverting to their original name.
Ska is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. It combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. Ska is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off beat. It was developed in Jamaica in the 1960s when Stranger Cole, Prince Buster, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and Duke Reid formed sound systems to play American rhythm and blues and then began recording their own songs. In the early 1960s, ska was the dominant music genre of Jamaica and was popular with British mods and with many skinheads.
Passion is an album released in 1989 by the English singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel. It was the first Peter Gabriel album to be released on Real World Records, Gabriel's second soundtrack, and his eighth album overall.
Baaba Maal is a Senegalese singer and guitarist born in Podor, on the Senegal River. In addition to acoustic guitar, he also plays percussion. He has released several albums, both for independent and major labels. In July 2003, he was made a UNDP Youth Emissary.
Ernest Ranglin is a Jamaican guitarist and composer who established his career while working as a session guitarist and music director for various Jamaican record labels including Studio One and Island Records. Ranglin played guitar on many early ska recordings and helped create the rhythmic guitar style that defined the form. Ranglin has worked with Theophilus Beckford, Jimmy Cliff, Monty Alexander, Prince Buster, the Skatalites, Bob Marley and the Eric Deans Orchestra. He is noted for a chordal and rhythmic approach that blends jazz, mento and reggae with percussive guitar solos incorporating rhythm 'n' blues and jazz inflections.
Hand on the Torch is the debut studio album by British jazz rap group Us3. It received much attention because of its mixture of jazz with hip-hop music, with material from popular jazz musicians of the 20th century being reimagined. All samples used on the album are from old Blue Note Records classics: the most famous was Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island", which Us3 used on the track "Cantaloop ". It came out as a single having two different music videos.
Sly and Robbie were a prolific Jamaican rhythm section and production duo, associated primarily with the reggae and dub genres. Drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare teamed up in the mid-1970s after establishing themselves separately in Jamaica as professional musicians. Shakespeare died in December 2021 following kidney surgery.
Firin' in Fouta is an album by the Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, released in 1994.
Djam Leelii is an album by the Senegalese musicians Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, released in 1989. It was recorded in 1984. A 1998 reissue from Palm Records raised the number of tracks to twelve.
Leroy Sibbles is a Jamaican reggae musician and producer. He was the lead singer for The Heptones in the 1960s and 1970s.
Palm Pictures is an American entertainment company owned and run by Chris Blackwell. Palm Pictures produces, acquires and distributes music and film projects with a particular focus on the DVD-Video format. Palm places an emphasis on such projects as music documentaries, arthouse, foreign cinema and music videos. Palm Pictures' entertainment properties include a film division, a music label, sputnik7.com, epitonic.com, Arthouse Films and RES Media Group, publisher of RES magazine.
fRoots was a specialist music magazine published in the UK between 1979 and 2019. It specialised in folk and world music, and featured regular compilation downloadable albums, with occasional specials. In 2006, the circulation of the magazine was 12,000 worldwide.
Colin Patrick Harper, better known by his stage name Collie Buddz, is a Bermudian reggae artist best known for his single "Come Around".
Night Song is a collaborative studio album by Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Canadian ambient musician, guitarist and producer Michael Brook. Recorded in 1995 and released in 1996 on Real World Records, it was Khan's last album released on the label during his lifetime. Khan and Brook had previously collaborated for Mustt Mustt (1990), a critically acclaimed world fusion album said to have led Pakistani youth to discover Sufi religious music. The two had not worked for some time but collaborated again for a new album in 1995, naming the album Night Song. The album was produced by Brook, who developed an innovative but difficult production process for the album. Khan recorded improvisations for the album, and Brook had to decide which sections, some of which were an hour long, were the best and how they were going to fit together, without having a structural point of reference to start with or aim towards. He had components recorded on multi-track tapes, and created each track part by part, overdubbing his instrumentation atop of it, a manual process that predated easy forms of digital editing.
The Skatalites are a ska band from Jamaica. They played initially between 1963 and 1965, and recorded many of their best known songs in the period, including "Guns of Navarone." They also played on records by Prince Buster and backed many other Jamaican artists who recorded during that period, including Bob Marley & The Wailers, on their first single "Simmer Down." They reformed in 1983 and have played together ever since.
George Nooks, a.k.a.Prince Mohamed, Prince Mohammed, or George Knooks is a Jamaican reggae singer who initially found fame as a deejay.
Fredrick “Freddie” McGregor is a Jamaican singer, musician and record producer. His music career began when he was seven years old.
Son Egal is the second album by the Malagasy band Tarika, released in 1997. It was the band's first widely distributed album. Tarika promoted it with a two-month North American tour. Son Egal was a hit in Madagascar, as well as on American and European world music charts.
The Message is an album by the Guinean-born Canadian musician Alpha Yaya Diallo. It was independently released in Canada in 1998, with an international release in 1999. The Message won a Juno Award, in the "Best Global Album" category. Diallo supported the album with a Canadian tour.
Yard Movement is an album by the Jamaican American musician Monty Alexander, released in 1996. Alexander supported the album with a UK tour that included Ernest Ranglin; Alexander also undertook a North American tour. With Ranglin's Below the Baseline, Yard Movement was the first album from Island Records' Island Jamaica Jazz label. The album peaked at No. 25 on the Official Jazz & Blues Albums Chart. Alexander subsequently formed a band he named Yard Movement.
