Reviews

Nostalgique Armenie: Songs of Love, Hope, Exile and Improvisations (1942-1952)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

This is a homage to the music of the Armenian diaspora. The liner notes state that the Caucasus is the...

Reviewed in issue May/2018

Duo

Ahmet Aslan & Kemal Dinç

Ahmet Aslan, born in Dersim – an eastern Turkish province sadly best known for a 1937 Kurdish uprising and its...

Reviewed in issue May/2018

Turkey on the Edge (Soundtrack)

OME

Turkey, ruled since 2002 by an increasingly autocratic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, experienced an unsuccessful military coup on July 15 2016....

Reviewed in issue May/2018

Odoïa

Ensemble Mze Shina

This is the second album from the Ensemble Mze Shina, which means ‘Inner Sun’ in Georgian. e four singers, Denise...

Reviewed in issue April/2018

Chants Mystiques d’Algérie

Houria Aichi

Four years on from Renyate, her tribute to great, if sometimes marginal, Algerian female singers such as Meriem Fekkai, Fadela...

Reviewed in issue April/2018

Intersection

Tania Saleh

Where do you even begin to start with the situation in the Middle East? So many artists have tried to...

Reviewed in issue April/2018

Ahwar

Nadah El Shazly

This album is here, there and everywhere. Meaning it is jazz; it is traditional Arabic folk; it is avant-garde; it...

Reviewed in issue April/2018

Neotolian Song

Neotolia

Had Kate Bush come from Cappadocia, she might have sounded something like Turkish-born, Boston-based singer-songwriter Nazan Nihal. With her musical...

Reviewed in issue March/2018

Endless Path

Mahsa Vahdat & Coskun Karademir

A while ago, the Secret Ensemble from Istanbul invited Iranian singer Mahsa Vahdat to make a recording, the critically acclaimed...

Reviewed in issue March/2018

Jedid

Osama Abdulrasol Quintet

Osama Abdulrasol is a qanun (zither) player and composer whose fusion style blends Middle Eastern, Western classical and jazz influences,...

Reviewed in issue March/2018