Afropop Worldwide

🇦🇴 HIP DEEP ANGOLA PART 1: MUSIC AND NATION IN LUANDA

Music became a weapon in the struggle for independence in Angola. In this episode, we explore how musicians, dancers, radio broadcasters, and poets helped forge a new Angolan consciousness during the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s and ’70s after centuries of Portuguese colonial rule.

Our guides are producer Ned Sublette, reporting from Angola, and historian Marissa Moorman, author of Intonations: A Social History of Music in Luanda, Angola from 1945 to Recent Times.

Featuring the legendary Ngola Ritmos, semba-era voices, and blazing 1960s guitar instrumentals, the episode traces how artists faced censorship, surveillance, imprisonment, and exile under Portuguese colonial authorities while their music became the soundtrack of liberation.

Listen now on Afropop Worldwide >>> https://www.afropop.org/audio-programs/hip-deep-angola-music-and-nation-in-luanda


Angolan Music
African History
Decolonization
Portuguese Colonialism
World Music

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Percussion by the master sagar percussionist and composer

Musical improvisation comes in many forms. A jazz player creates within the harmonic structure of a composition. A Shona mbira player in Zimbabwe improvises interactively with another player, and the audience, in some cases, an ancestor spirit. An Arabic maqam musician works within the elaborate set of rules governing the movement of melodies within one or more particular maqamat, or modes. How are these musicians’ experience the same? And how are they different? Musicians and scholars weigh in on this Hip Deep program. Produced by .

Listen: https://www.afropop.org/audio-programs/the-art-of-improvisation-part-2
Artists featured:

Farid el Atrache
Munir Bashir
Simon Shaheen
A.J. Racy
John Coltrane
Baba Larab
Randy Weston
Hakurotwi Mude
Mhembero Mbira Ensemble
Thelonious Monk
Miles Davis
Mubayiwa Bandambira
Cosmas and Alexio Magaya
Eric Dolphy

Countries:

🇺🇸 United States
🇪🇬 Egypt
🇮🇶 Iraq
🇱🇧 Lebanon
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe

Genres:

at on May 1, 2026! Rocking the (donkey jaw) and the (little alms box)! 🔥🫏📦🎶

Fantastic night of and electronic music — check their tour dates for a show near you!