Cafe International

On this week's Cafe International, our guest is Alan Tigay, from the website, World Listening Post. We'll speak about his new project: The 500 Greatest Global Songs of All Time, a remarkable list that he curated. We'll count down the top ten, which includes music from Aretha Franklin, Fela, Miriam Makeba, Juan Luis Guerra, and more!

Our guest this week on Cafe International is is Ukrainian singer Jamala. She has a new album called QIRIM – or Crimea, dedicated to the folk music of Crimea. In 2016, Jamala won the Eurovision Song Contest with her song, 1944, about the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Crimean Tatar population from that peninsula that year. One of those deported and sent to Central Asia was Jamala’s Great-Grandmother.

We will also hear from professor Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College) about the history of Crimean Tatar music.

With host Dan Rosenberg

On this week's episode of Cafe International, recorded in Bern, Switzerland, our guest is award winning singer and yodeler, Christine Lauterburg. In 1994, she became the first woman to win the Bäredräckpris from the City of Bern.

With host Dan Rosenberg

On today’s show, we visit Neuchatel Switzerland, a beautiful lakeside town – that in the middle of every August, is transformed by a remarkable buskers festival. But there aren’t jugglers or acrobats on unicycles, Instead, its pedestrian zone in the centre of the city becomes a huge global music festival – and on our show, we’ll hear music from Georgia, Sardinia, Syria, and Brazil. Our guests include founder of the Neuchatel Buskers Festival Georges Grillon plus members of the Lusophone group Ayom, the Sardinian polyphonic quartet Andhira and more!

On our program this week, our guest is Noam Vazana – or as she’s better known, Nani. She’s one of the very few artists in the world composing new songs in the nearly dead Ladino language – this is the language originally spoken by Sephardic Jews in Spain and Portugal before the time of the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 – and today, it’s spoken rarely, except for some communities in the Sephardic diaspora. Nani’s grandmother was one of those speakers, but Nani’s father prohibited them from speaking the language during Nani’s childhood.

We’ll hear music from Nani’s new album "Ke Haber" ("What's New"), featuring new music – often about contemporary subjects in Ladino – the language she was banned from speaking as a child. Later in the show, we’ll hear how Nani discovered an ancient poem that describes the transformation of a transgender teenage girl who came out to her parents, and wanted to be recognized as a boy. Nani found the poem when she was looking for material in an old library within a synagogue in Leiden, in the Netherlands.

With host Dan Rosenberg

On today's program, we speak with Marko Halaneyvich and Iryna Gorban of the Ukrainian group DakhaBrakha. After Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, DakhaBrakha has performed over 200 concerts around the world in the past 500 days, including six concerts in Ukraine as its cities were being bombed.

We recorded this interview at the Sunfest in London, Ontario – much more than a typical summer arts festival, its mission includes presenting music that is threatened.

With host Dan Rosenberg

Our guest this week is Alfredo Caxaj, founder of the Sunfest in London, Ontario. We’ll learn how Afredo Caxaj came to Canada in 1985 as a refugee from Guatemala, and founded the Sunfest, Canada’s largest free world music festival. We’ll also hear music from some of the performers at the 2023 Sunfest, including Bejuco from Colombia, The Garifuna Collective from Belize, Sara Curruchich from Guatemala, DakhaBrakha from Ukraine, Jupiter and Okwess from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Frander from Sweden.

With host Dan Rosenberg

An interview and samba guitar workshop with Roge: He was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and now lives in Los Angeles. We'll hear music from his new album Curyman, learn how to play samba on guitar - and how he created "Samba Funk."

with host Dan Rosenberg

On this week's episode of Cafe International, we will learn about preserving Garifuna history, culture and music from Emilio Thomas and Al Ovando – members of the Belizean group, The Garifuna Collective, and how until as recently as the 1990s, Garifuna children were discouraged from speaking their language in school.

The Garifuna are descendants of escaped African slaves – in 1635, a slave ship crashed near the Caribbean Island of St Vincent. The survivors mixed with the local indigenous community – but in 1796, the British ethnically cleansed the island, deporting the population to Central America.

With host Dan Rosenberg

An interview with qanun virtuoso Maya Youssef. She grew up in Syria and has become one of the world’s leading performers of this 78-stringed instrument. On the program, a special radio workshop on how to play the qanun. We will also learn what it has been like for Youssef living in London, England, separated from her family amidst a horrific war and the devastating recent earthquakes.

Host Dan Rosenberg interviews singer Lena Chamamyan about creating music in exile. She was born in Damascus, with Syrian and Armenian heritage. When Chamamyan arrived in Paris in 2011 after civil war broke out in Syria, she was already a star, having performed in many of the world’s top concert halls, her videos had millions of views on YouTube, but none of that mattered, as she, like so many Syrians, was defined by her passport.

We look at the question of what is the harm of giving a megaphone to fascists? In the wake of Donald Trump’s dinner with a neo-nazi, with twitter welcoming back white supremacists to their platform, we revisit an interview with klezmer singer and composer Daniel Kahn that we recorded just after the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville Virginia. One of his most powerful songs, originally written 90 years ago is, “Embrace the Fascists”  which deals with this very subject: the debate over free speech when that speech is calling for genocide.

With host Dan Rosenberg

On this week's show, an interview with the legendary Senegalese singer, Baaba Maal. We will hear how he began his career in West African folk music. After completing his education in Senegal in 1981, Baaba Maal travelled across West Africa with his friend, blind guitarist Mansour Seck, going village to village to learn the region’s folk music. In 2 years, they visited to more that 300 places in Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Mauritania and Ivory Coast

In the decades since, the Grammy nominated singer has used his voice to fight against female genital mutilation, worked with the United Nations Development Program to combat the spread of AIDS/HIV, served as an Oxfam global ambassador to combat the food crisis in the Sahel region of West Africa and is now a UN Ambassador to combat desertification. 

We speak with Daniel Hamar of the group Muzsikás about what it was like performing Hungarian folk songs in Eastern Europe under communist rule when some politicians feared folk music could be subversive and lead to nationalist revolutions. And later, we’ll hear how Muzsikás travelled to Transylvania in the 1990s to research Jewish music – songs nearly lost to history after Transylvania’s Jewish community was massacred during the Holocaust. Muzsikás collaborated with elderly Romani musicians from the region who still remembered pre-war Jewish songs.

With host Dan Rosenberg

We look back at the career of South Africa’s Johnny Clegg who tragically passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2019 at the age of 66.  Artists have often music as a means to document crimes against humanity. Johnny Clegg shined such a huge spotlight on the apartheid policies in South Africa that he helped change public opinion, both around the world, and within South Africa, despite having his music banned and facing the constant threat of arrest.  On our show today, we’re featuring an interview with Johnny Clegg that we recorded in September 1996. Clegg left an incredible legacy showing how artists can fight racist government policies, raise awareness about crimes against humanity and bring about social and political change.  

With host Dan Rosenberg

Our guest on today’s program is Jimmy Carter from the legendary gospel group, The Blind Boys of Alabama. Carter was born in 1932 in the segregated south. The group, which was founded at an Alabama school for the blind in the 1940s, has gone on to win five Grammy awards and has performed at the White House for three different presidents. But for decades, they couldn’t eat at white restaurants or stay in white-only hotels when touring. On the program, Carter discusses the Blind Boys' incredible career, the progress America has made because of the civil rights movement, as well as the important work that still needs to be done.
With host Dan Rosenberg

On today’s program, we look back at the remarkable but tragically short career of Lhasa de Sela. Her groundbreaking album, La Llorona – which went on to go platinum in Canada - turns 25 this year. Her music is haunting and captivating - and as fresh as when it was recorded in 1997. We’ll feature an interview with Lhasa from just after La Llorona was released, and hear how she grew up, living on the back of a school bus, traveling across Mexico and the United States before moving to Montreal. 

Also on the program, two special guests look back on Lhasa's influential career: Philly Markowitz, former host of the CBC's radio program "Roots and Wings" and award winning singer and actress, Amanda Martinez.

With host Dan Rosenberg

Cafe International's series on Ukrainian music continues with a look at one of one of the giants of Yiddish folk music, Arkady Gendler – who was considered a living Alexandrine library of Yiddish song from Ukraine and Moldova.

Arkady Gendler was born in the town of Soroke in 1921 near the border of Moldova and Ukraine. During World War II, he served in the Red Army and helped liberate Ukraine from the Nazis, only to discover that most of his friends and family had been murdered during the Holocaust. After the war, He worked as a chemist in the town of Zaporizhzhia – the city with Europe’s largest Nuclear power plant.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gendler spent his final decades teaching younger generations about the Yiddish culture in Ukraine and Molodova that was nearly destroyed during the Holocaust – and that is what we will hear about on today’s show  - with guests Avia Moore (Artistic Director of KlezKanada, and assistant producer of Arkady Gendler's album "Yidishe Lider"), Eric Stein (Artistic Director of the Ashkenaz Festival and mandolinist who performed and recorded with Gendler), Sebastian Schulman (Executive Director of the KlezKanada Festival) and Christian Dawid (clarinetist and producer of Arkady Gendler's final CD, "Yidishe Lider").

On this program the bandura master Julian Kytasty talks about the history of the bandura, shows how the instrument is played and discusses what we can learn from songs written in prior centuries when Ukraine was attacked. With host Dan Rosenberg

On today’s show, our guest is Yuriy Gurzhy, a DJ, music producer and writer who grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine and now lives in Berlin, Germany. We’ll hear about what it was like recording his album, Foxtroty, in Kharkiv in the weeks before Russia started bombing the city – and much of Ukraine.  Foxtroty is based on poetry from the Executed Renaissance - a golden age of Ukrainian poetry in the 1920s before Stalin's brutal crackdown in the following decade where many leading poets were sent to the gulag and killed.

Cafe International's Series on Ukrainian music continues: This episode features Dan Rosenberg's interview with Yuri Bukovynets from the Hudaki Village Band, speaking about the lives of musicians during wartime, and how they’re helping those who are internally displaced and have lost everything due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mariana Sadovska: “If I’m asked to describe what my family and relatives are going through in Ukraine, I actually don’t have words. It’s hell. When I get a chance to have a video conversation and I see their eyes and their faces. They’re tired.”  In this moving interview, we will hear about her role as a cultural ambassador for Ukraine amidst Russia's horrific unprovoked war, how she is performing benefit concerts and sharing with the world the incredibly diversity of her country's folk music.