Afropop Worldwide

Fri. 4/19 10p: Big Night in Little Haiti is a lively monthly party showcasing top Haitian musical talent that happens in the courtyard of the Haitian Cultural Center in Miami’s Little Haiti.

Fri. 4/5 10p: Afropop is celebrating 25 years on public radio! With some of our favorite live concert recordings made over the years in Zanzibar, Morocco and New York City.

Fri. 3/22 10p: Franco is a towering figure in the cultural life of Africa. Guitar wizard. Prolific composer. Bandleader who groomed the who’s who of Congolese singing royalty. Called “the Balzac of Africa” for his ear and way with a story. He passed in 1989. We’ll revisit Afropop’s 1985 chat with Franco in Kinshasa, hear from some of his contemporaries and relish recording highlights from the 50s to the 80s.

Fri. 3/8 10p: Many fans in America first got hooked on Afropop through the landmark 1982-83 tour by Nigeria's King Sunny Ade and his African Beats: the propulsive polyrhythms of traditional drums mixed with sophisticated guitar arrangements and pedal steel.

Fri. 2/22 10p: Singer, composer and bandleader Joe Cuba passed. We honor him with this encore portrait of bugalu, also variously described as "Latin soul," that hit the scene in 1966 with an original and organic concept of combining black and Puerto Rican music.

Fri. 2/15 10p: Vieux Farka Touré's self-titled debut album “both honors and extends the life work of his father, Ali Farka Toure," according to afropop.org Senior Editor, Banning Eyre.

Fri. 2/8 10p: This Hip Deep episode picks up the story of Zimbabwe's most consequential popular singer in 1980, when the country celebrated its independence from white colonial rule. 

Fri. 12/14 10p: The 27 year-long Angolan civil war was also an international crossroads of the Cold War, involving Cuba, the Soviet Union, Zaire, South Africa, and the U.S.

Fri. 12/7 10p: Winter is coming on…time to fire up your travel imagination.

Fri. 11/30 10p: Join us for a festive Afropop Worldwide ritual, as Georges Collinet sits down with Banning Eyre to mull over the best new releases of 2012. 

Fri. 11/23 10p: To make this unprecedented program, producer Ned Sublette traveled to Mbanza-Kongo, the ancient seat of the Kongo empire located in present-day northern Angola, where he spoke to Dr. Bárbaro Martínez Ruiz, professor of art and art history at Stanford.

Fri. 11/16 10p: In the latest in our annual pilgrimage to New York City for the Latin Alternative Music Conference we meet artists from all over Latin America who make their marks as creating genre bending mash ups using local roots and international sounds.

Fri. 11/2 10p: A vast, new world of DJs, record collectors and producers are going to far reaches of the Earth to find forgotten records and new styles of music. 

Fri. 9/28 10p: Join producer Ned Sublette on the streets of Angola’s big, smoggy, oil-booming capital city of Luanda. 

Fri. 9/21 10p: Special edition of our travels to Mali's legendary Festival in the Desert from 2003.

A vast, new world of DJs, record collectors and producers are going to far reaches of the Earth to find forgotten records and new styles of music. Their discoveries are then brought back home, remixed, repackaged and re-released to be heard by an entirely new audience.  We speak to some of these globetrotting DJ and producers like Chief Boima and Geko Jones to hear about their experiences, the music they’ve discovered and how they go about remixing some of these styles in order to create a new and updated sound.

Fri. 7/22 at 10pm: It's no secret that the distant roots of American jazz lay in Africa. But how did Afro-America's revolutionary sound reshape African music? On this Hip Deep edition, we examine how African artists found a modern, global voice using jazz as inspiration.

Fri. 7/1 at 10pm: In a new edition of Afropop's popular music-in-diaspora series, we catch up with a wide variety of US-based acts playing African music.

Fri. 6/24 at 10pm: Afropop Worldwide takes us into the world of the globalistas, a far-flung grouping of polyglot hipsters, bass freaks, and digital beatsmiths who rally around the sounds of the 21st century dancefloor - rhythms such as Angolan kuduro, Brazilian funk carioca, reggaeton and dancehall, Indian bhangra and Argentine electro-cumbia. Featuring interviews with DJ Rupture and Wayne Marshall.