After conquering Europe, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba are now moving on to the United States of America. Their debut album Segu Blue had already laid a solid foundation for Bassekou’s reputation with African music fans in the U.S. (where it was released via Out Here Records/ Forced Exposure). This has lead to a sensational U.S. tour with more than 60  dates starting out in February 2010 opening for nine-time Grammy winner Bela Fleck and goes on for three months taking them from New York’s Central Park down to the New Orleans Jazz festival.
 
 Just in time for the tour Out Here Records announced a new label partner in the U.S.: Seattle-based indie rock label Sub Pop has now licensed Bassekou Kouyate’s second album I Speak Fula. The album will be the first release on their newly founded sub label Next Ambiance, a collaboration between Sub Pop Records and Jon Kertzer, presenter of the ‘Best Ambiance’ show on Seattle-based public radio station KEXP.

The Havana Cultura live band will celebrate the album release of Havana cultura on November 20th of 2009 at New Inn Yard in London. BBC Radio 1’s Gilles Peterson teamed up with the award-winning Cuban jazz pianist Roberto Fonseca to find the very best up and coming musical talent in Havana. Twelve months in the making, it represents the biggest collection of contemporary Cuban musicians in a single musical initiative since the highly acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club project in 1997.
 
 The result is a double CD album which celebrates Cuba's freshest musical talent from Latin, Afro jazz and fusion to hip hop, funk, reggaeton and R&B, featuring contributions from Gilles’ favorite new discoveries. New talent such as vocalist Danay (described by Gilles as “Cuba’s Jill Scott”) and Doble Filo, in addition to international award-winning artists such as rapper Kumar and pianist Roberto Fonseca.

Zimbabwean band Mokoomba will be performing in Brussels for the first time on the 12th of November 2009 at 19:00 at Excantina. On the 24th of June 2009 Mokoomba, winners of the Music Crossroads IRF 2008 were denied the opportunity to tour Europe after visa bureaucracy forced the cancellation of their 8 country European Summer Tour (a tour that was financially supported by the Swedish International Development Agency, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO).

Following this incident, Jeunesses Musicales International launched the ACCESS DENIED campaign to raise awareness and gain support around the issue, which received an enormous response, confirming the vast number of music industry professionals impacted by Europe's ever tightening visa regulations.

The year 2009 turned out to be a record year and a successful event for WOMEX 2009. There have now been 15 editions of WOMEX, the World Music Expo, that began with about 200 delegates and has now expanded to over 2700. During that time, this fledgling movement has expanded to become a diverse, multicultural, increasingly popular expression of interest in world culture. And, in the process, WOMEX has become the premier professional event in the international world music calendar.
 
 With the recorded music industry crisis surpassed by the overall world economic crisis, WOMEX organizers were indeed surprised to see its WOMEX 09 numbers:

Planetwize announced the release of ‘The Best of the Black President’ on the Actiontrax music platform, where every album supports a social or environmental project. NextAid, a Planetwize non-profit partner that works with children in Africa who have been orphaned by AIDS, will receive a portion of the proceeds from every digital download from the catalog of Fela Kuti sold on Planetwize.
 
 Fela Kuti was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, pioneer of afrobeat music, human rights activist, and political maverick. He has been compared to Bob Marley and Bob Dylan for the impact and importance of his music on society. Fela sang in Pidgin English so that his music could be enjoyed all over Africa, and he was seen as a hero in struggling communities across the continent. He died in 1997.

Bassekou Kouyate  & Ngoni Ba have signed to Sub Pop Records for North America, one of the most celebrated and successful indie-rock labels of the last two decades, releasing Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, St. Etienne, The Shins, Flight of the Conchords, L7 etc in an illustrious catalog. The second album "I Speak Fula" will be released in early 2010.

Senegalese star Baaba Maal has launched yourmediaisthefuture.tv, an online interactive art piece that maps out global media consumption by time and location. Users are invited to submit screenshots of their television, computer or PDA monitors to the database, which is then displayed across a world map to create an ever-changing visual, depicting trends in media viewing across the globe throughout the different hours of the day.
 
 The project is run in partnership with BaabaMaal.tv and users from all corners of the Earth are encouraged to participate. The hope is that this community-based project can bridge the gaps between continents and cultures as the new media revolution offers us an unprecedented opportunity for a global exchange of ideas.

[image1_left]The Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage, chaired by Awadh Ali Saleh Al Musabi (United Arab Emirates), identified  Vietnamese Ca tru singing an intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding during its recent 2009 session in Abu Dhabi.

Ca tru is a complex form of sung poetry found in the north of Viet Nam using lyrics written in traditional Vietnamese poetic forms. Ca trù groups comprise three performers: a female singer who uses breathing techniques and vibrato to create unique ornamented vocal sounds, while playing the clappers or striking a wooden box, and two instrumentalists who produce the deep tone of a three-stringed lute and the strong sounds of a praise drum.

[image1_left]The Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage, chaired by Awadh Ali Saleh Al Musabi (United Arab Emirates), identified  the traditional music of the Tsuur of Mongolia an intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding during its recent 2009 session in Abu Dhabi.

Tsuur music is based on a combination of instrumental and vocal performance – a blending of sounds created simultaneously by both the musical instrument and the human throat. Tsuur music has an inseparable connection to the Uriankhai Mongolians of the Altai Region, and remains an integral part of their daily life. Its origins lie in an ancient practice of worshipping nature and its guardian spirits by emulating natural sounds.

The UNESCO Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage, chaired by Awadh Ali Saleh Al Musabi (United Arab Emirates), identified The Cantu in paghjella of Corsica an intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding during its recent 2009 session in Abu Dhabi.

The paghjella is a male Corsican singing tradition. It combines three vocal registers that always enter the song in the same order: segonda, which begins, give the pitch and carries the main melody; bassu, which follows, accompanies and supports it, and finally terza, the highest placed, which enriches the song. Paghjella makes substantial use of echo and is sung a capella in a variety of languages including Corsican, Sardinian, Latin and Greek.