Funk is the personal favorite of many music lovers. In this panoramic history of the grooviest of genres, we hear track after track of absolute boogie-down classics. Everything from Sly and the Family Stone to James Brown, with a few stops to hear legends like the Meters, Kool and the Gang, and Parliament. We’ll also hear the great Bobby Byrd explain the rhythmic motor behind the JB’s, and Georges Clinton talk about the roots of his funk.

Produced by Ned Sublette

APWW #124

Ghazi and Boom.Diwan with Arturo O’Farrill is about as unlikely a group as you could imagine. Ghazi Al-Mulaifi is a rocking guitar player and an ethnomusicologist who studies the music of Arabian Gulf pearl divers, among them, his own ancestors. Boom.Diwan is an ensemble based around the Kuwaiti percussionists who preserve the vanishing art of pearl diving music. How they came together with Arturo O’Farrill, leader of New York’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra is a story for the ages. This podcast tells that story and samples the astounding music that resulted. Produced by Banning Eyre.

PA 032

New Orleans, Louisiana is home to some of America's greatest musical traditions, and plays an outsized influence on the evolution of everything from jazz through to r&b, rock and funk. Today, the city is still legendary for its second line brass bands and brightly costumed Mardi Gras Indians. But if you've rolled through New Orleans on pretty much any night in the last 30 years, you've probably heard another sound—the clattering, booming, hip-shaking, chant-heavy roll of bounce, a form of hip-hop music, dance and culture unique to the Crescent City. Pulling from the national mainstream but remaking it the way that only New Orleans can, bounce has become a sonic touchstone for an entire generation of residents. For this Hip Deep edition, Afropop digs into the close-knit scene, talking to dancers, producers, MCs, and managers from over 30 years of bounce, all to explore the beat that drives New Orleans—and to find out what it means to the people who bring it to life. Produced by Sam Backer and Jessi Olsen.

APWW #761

In this edition of Planet Afropop, our newest producer Stella Hartman reports on the UK/Nigerian group Ibibio Sound Machine’s venture into gospel music. Then Georges, Mukwae and Banning preview the annual Syli D’Or battle of the Afropop bands in Montreal by profiling the two winners of the 2024 Afropop Award. Boubé is a young Tuareg composer/singer/bandleader from Niger who now makes his home in Montreal. And Less Toches is a powerful, pan-Latin American ensemble with a fresh, global take on cumbia and more.

PA 031

The Amazon River basin has long been a mystery to Brazil. Located far from the centers of business and power in the nation's southeast, the jungle provinces of the Brazilian north have long been ignored by the nation at large. But recently, Brazilians have discovered that the cities and waterways of the Amazon are home to some of the nation's hottest music. In this Hip Deep episode—a musical history of Pará state, where Afro-Caribbean influences have created a unique local flavor that connects the dots between Brazilian music and the rest of Latin America, we check out the guitar heroes of old-school Amazonian dance bands, investigate the origins of the early '90s lambada dance craze, and explore the bubblegum bass culture of tecno brega. Featured interviews with singer Gaby Amarantos, lambada revivalist Felipe Cordeiro and ethnomusicologist Darien Lamen, among others.

APWW #691

Lead Producer: Marlon Bishop

Assistant Production: Saxon Baird, Joe Dobkin

In this episode, our new producer, Lauren Williams, revisits an old genre through a new lens. Classical music, a historically exclusionary space, is going through changes. We explore the process of writing and performing boundary-pushing classical music with Seth Parker Woods, a Grammy-nominated cello player who pulls from the sounds and stories of the Black diaspora to write otherworldly compositions, and Curtis Stewart, a Grammy-nominated Violinist who experiments with beats and electronics in his virtuosic arrangements. We get a taste of how far the genre has come — and how far it has to go — from Afa Dworkin, a violinist and the creative director of The Sphinx Organization, which supports emerging composers of color. To wrap up the episode, we hear from Abel Selaocoe, a classical cellist from South Africa who has gifted the genre something new to play by tapping into ancestral memory.

PA 030

In this program you will the hear the African music roots of famed American blues and rock 'n' roll artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, the Isley Brothers, Robert Johnson, The Kingsmen and many more! Not everyone in this program is as well-known as the above mentioned juggernauts of music. Also included is Celia Cruz, Sexteto Habanero, Arsenio Rodriguez, and Baby Face Leroy. Co-produced by Ned Sublette and Robert Palmer, author of “Deep Blues”, regarded by many as the best book on the blues.

APWW #91

Botswana is a large, landlocked country in Southern Africa, a vast stretch of desert and savannah between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia with a population of only 2.2 million. While widely overlooked internationally for their music, over the past 20 years Batswana has steadily built a diverse and fruitful local scene that includes traditional choirs, hip hop and kwaito, R&B and jazz and even heavy metal. While the biggest star in the country, Franco, packs stadiums with his Congolese-derived Setswana kwassa kwassa, Vee Mampeezy, Charma Gal and a host of aspiring stars champion a distinctly local fusion called house kwassa: a mix of rumba guitars, house beats and kwaito vocals. In this program we hear from Kabelo Mogwe of the popular cultural troupe Culture Spears; hip hop star Jujuboy; the metal band Skinflint; Afro soul singer Mpho Sebina and reformed house kwassa badboy Mingo Touch. We also head to a midnight recording session with young producer Zolasko and singer Naisi Boy and learn the insides of the Botswana music video industry with videographer Jack Bohloko.

Produced by Lollise Mbi and Morgan Greenstreet

APWW #813

By the mid 20th century, Cairo had become the unrivaled center for music and film production in the Middle East. Producers, writers, composers, actors, musicians, star singers, and creators of every stripe flocked here to take part in the city's fervent, international, progressive artistic milieu. This was the heyday of the diva Umm Kulthum, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, and the beloved singer and composer Abdel Halim Hafez. But events of the 50s and 60s signaled an inward turn for Egypt and Cairo. The 70s saw the rise of a rougher, more street-wise music--sha'bi--and films began to lose their edge. And the 80s saw the emergence of a slick new pop sound that has resonated in the Middle East ever since. We hear from artists, producers, and scholars in this unique Hip Deep edition.

Produced by Banning Eyre

APWW #627

Our reporter from Texas, Akshaj Turebylu, triangulates the influences responsible for the irresistible, intercontinental, genre-bending, collaborative album called History of House. Our guides include Shimmy Jiyane, a founding member of the Soweto Gospel Choir, the pre-eminent African gospel performers in the world. We're also joined by Latroit, a Grammy-winning producer who got his start with the legendary techno wizards, Inner City. Akshaj speaks to Shimmy and Dennis to learn how Australian DJ Groove Terminator put the pieces together for this revelatory release blending Afro house, Amapiano, techno, gospel, and more into, as it were, a tapestry of "the (global) history of house." As we find out, Detroit and Johannesburg have been speaking to each other for much longer than you might imagine. In this episode we also preview Afrobeat artist Amayo’s 2025 album, Lion Awakes.