World Music: Africa & Middle East

Since The Rough Guide to World Music first appeared in 1994, the World Music scene has grown dramatically. Vast numbers of CDs are released each month, artists from across the world perform regularly in major concert halls in the “West”, and the BBC has created the annual Awards for World Music (The Planets). In addition, ease of travel makes it feasible for those in Europe and America to go and experience the music of the world, in person, in situ. Now African music enthusiasts don’t just hang out around Sterns record shop in London and listen to Andy Kershaw on the radio – they go to the Essaouira Festival in Morocco, which has become a sort of Gnawa Woodstock attracting 400,000 people each year, or to the celebrated Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu. Music can be a window on and a passport to the world. This third edition of The Rough Guide to

World Music reflects the music’s burgeoning popularity – most obviously in its size. The book has grown to fill three volumes, with this first instalment, Africa & Middle East, to be followed by Europe, Asia & Pacific and The Americas & Caribbean. All in allthe guide will be around three times the size of the original edition: close to a million words and in excess of two thousand pages. But then the Rough Guide has earned the tag of being the ‘World Music Bible’. We have strived in this new edition to chart the changing scene, including coverage, for instance, of African hip-hop, which has swept across the continent in recent years and is the music of choice for young Africans, often in genuinely local forms.

Also represented are the club and DJ scenes, which have been energized by global sounds, with dynamic fusions based on everything from Afro-beat to Sufi music. We have also addressed omissions in the last edition, with brand new chapters on Botswana, Namibia, Liberia, Libya, Lebanon and Iraq – as well as musical styles that have become particularly dynamic in the last few years, such as Touareg music and Arabesque. In this volume, our (impossible) aim is to cover African and Middle Eastern music of every style – popular and classical, religious and secular, new and traditional. It’s music you can buy on CD, see at festivals and concerts, and hear in villages, in clubs, at celebrations and on the radio around the world. The book attempts to represent all of these contexts, with nods to key venues, festivals, producers and record labels as well as singers and instrumentalists. How the Book Works This first volume of The Rough Guide to World Music is divided into two sections : Africa and the Middle East. Within each section the chapters are arranged alphabetically by country or sometimes by ethnic group – for instance with Kurdish, Sephardic or Pygmy music. There are running heads and an index to help you find your way. Each chapter consists of an article, discography and playlist. The articles are designed to provide the background to each country’s musical styles, explaining the history, social background, politics and cultural identity, as well as highlighting the lives and sounds of each country’s musicians. The discographies begin with reviews of compilation CDs and then move on to individual artists, each of whom gets a brief biography and recommended recordings. Please note these are selective and not comprehensive discographies, which we hope will lead you into an artist’s best work....