|
www.calabashmusic.com
A calabash is a utensil or cup made from a hard-shelled gourd. It's a fitting name for the Calabash Music website, which lets you dip into the music of dozens of different countries and taste sounds you might not find elsewhere.
Calabash Music offers more than just the usual NPR-friendly, ethnologically pure music you might expect. It features everything from Turkish hiphop hottie Sultana to a hard-edged reggaeton compilation from Puerto Rico to Fijian pop group Black Rose, who mix elements of modern club music with traditional Polynesian chanting.
Latin America and the Caribbean are heavily represented, along with African countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe. The site also features European folk music and its derivatives, traditional and modern Middle Eastern music, plus music from Asia, Oceania, and even North America.
Calabash Music is committed to "fair trade" music distribution — the artists get half the money from everything they sell through the site. A song preview pop-up makes it easy to find, sample, and buy music by different artists, and you can search by country, genre, or Calabash's list of "similar artists." This is a broad and ambitious online resource for hard-to-find music from everywhere.
Want to share a great music site? Email us or post it below.
–Elise Malmberg
Posted November 2006
Send to del.icio.us |
|
