The recent death of French Algerian superstar Rachid Taha brought to mind the musical genre called raï, so I decided to feature it this week by highlighting a few raï artists. Algerian raï (pronounced ...
Cheb Mami’s name may not be on the tip of your tongue, but odds are his music is. Over the past decade, this Algerian native has skyrocketed to the top of the world’s Arabic rai (pronounced “rye”) ...
What happens when you combine Spanish, French, African and Arabic music? Bedouin shepherds frequenting the Algerian port of Oran first dived into this mixing bowl in the early twentieth century. What ...
In the 1930s no respectable Algerian woman dared to make music about sexual pleasure, alcohol consumption, poverty, oppression. Cheikha Rimitti sang anyway. The artist, whose pioneering recordings ...
Embed <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1135764/135764" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> NPR's ...
The only time I ever caught Rachid Taha live, at the Lincoln Center Arts Festival in 2002, I told my diary that the French-Algerian singer reminded me of another brazen rock usurper: Pink. An ...
The recent death of French Algerian superstar Rachid Taha brought to mind the musical genre called raï, so I decided to feature it this week by highlighting a few raï artists.… It’s not hard to ...