Glory to Women: Groundbreaking Musicians From Around the World

As we said last year on International Women’s Day, it's always a good time to amplify women's voices and our music, not only to concentrate us in a separate box, and centered on just ONE day. That said, New Sounds delights in giving a little space to trailblazing musicians who happen to be women from around the world, some playing instruments traditionally reserved for men - like the mbira, the kanun, or the kora - all with remarkable stories. Here are just a few:

Stella Chiweshe, Mbira (Zimbabwe)

Stella Chiweshe is one of the great players of mbira, or thumb piano. The mbira is a handheld instrument with a wooden soundboard and staggered metal keys that one plucks. (It also goes by the name of kalimba in Uganda, likembe in Central Africa, and in Cameroon, it’s called sanza.) The mbira is a sacred instrument to the Shona people of Zimbabwe who use it to communicate with ancestral spirits.  

Stella Chiweshe grew up in the 1960's, at a time when women were generally forbidden to learn mbira - but her family allowed her the opportunity. Zimbabwe was also still a British Colony - called Rhodesia - at that time. And colonial authorities frowned upon anyone playing mbira - it’s said that she played at spiritual ceremonies even though she could have been arrested for doing so.  

Stella Chiweshe started releasing singles in Zimbabwe in the 70's and started her own band, the Earthquake. But after joining the National Dance Company of Zimbabwe in the 80's and touring around the world, she decided to move to Germany. In 1987, her international debut LP Ambuya on Berlin’s influential Piranha record label introduced the world to her distinctive and captivating style. And it got rave reviews, establishing Stella Chiweshe as a major player on the global world music scene. Since then she’s recorded multiple albums and performed around the world. (-Rob Weisberg)

This is music from Stella Chiweshe:

Juana Molina, Composer and Producer (Argentina) 

In the 1990's, Juana Molina was the Tracey Ullman of Argentina – star of a popular sketch comedy show playing a wide variety of goofy characters. Only Juana wasn’t satisfied being one of Argentina’s most popular comedians, so she gave it all up after seven years of TV stardom to try to make it as a minimalist electronic pop musician.  

That may seem like an unusual career choice, but Juana wasn’t your typical comedian. Her dad was a tango singer and composer and while her mom was an actress, she was also a big music buff with a diverse record library.

She had already fallen in love with music, and especially music from around the world, as a teenager in the late 1970's.  Her family had moved to Paris to flee the Argentine military dictatorship, and Juana Molina discovered and fell for world musics she heard on internationally-oriented Parisian radio stations.  

When she started her solo career in the late 1990's, Juana developed a cyclical and trance-like musical style. Her melodic and rhythmic sensibility drew on what she had heard in music from places like Asia and Africa - but you can’t boil any song down to any particular genre or style. She’s released a string of captivating intimate electro-minimalist albums starting with Segundo (2000) and Tres Cosas (2002) through, most recently, Halo (2017). Early on she also developed a distinctive live solo performance technique - aided by the discovery of some helpful tools like the Boss RC-20 Loop Station. (-Rob Weisberg)

Here's one of our favorite tunes from Juana Molina: 

Maya Youssef, Kanun (Syria/UK)

London-based composer Maya Youssef is a virtuoso of the kanun, a traditional Syrian 78-stringed plucked zither, an instrument played with two tortoise-shell picks, which usually leads and sets the pitch in traditional ensembles.

She grew up in her native Syria determined to become a musician. Initially, she played violin, until one day in a taxi where she heard a recording featuring an instrument that she HAD to learn. She asked what it was, and the taxi driver laid down a challenge, telling her that girls did not play the kanun; it was a man’s instrument played by men. He even laughed at her when she told him she would learn to play it.

After studying the kanun at the High Institute of Music and Dramatic arts in Damascus, Maya moved to London as part of an Arts Council program where 300 exceptional artists are selected each year from around the world to migrate to the UK.

The album Syrian Dreams by Maya Youssef is a translation of memories of her home and a way to bring people back to their heart’s centers. She sees the act of playing music as the opposite of death - a hope-affirming act and antidote to what is happening, not only in her homeland of Syria but all over the world.

This is music by Maya Youssef who leads an ensemble featuring oud, cello and percussion from her record, Syrian Dreams:

Cätlin Mägi, jaw-harp, bagpipes (Estonia)

Estonian traditional musician Cätlin Mägi plays bagpipes, parmupilli, whistles and flutes. This instrument, the parmupilli, or Jaw-harp, is one of the oldest instruments in the world and has been used in Estonia for centuries: 

Cätlin is also a player and member of the Torupilli Jussi Trio, Ro:toro and Vägilased as well as a teacher of traditional music at University and at the Estonian Traditional Music Center.

As a passionate parmupilli player, in 2011, Mägi assembled a comprehensive tune book, with accompanying history and instructions for playing the instrument, as well as biographies of sixteen other musicians, their playing styles, and recordings.

Her most recent record from 2018, Mu pill parmupill “My Harp – My Heart” is a declaration of love for traditional music and the jaw harp. On it, she samples her own singing voice and then also loops the “voices” of some fifty jaw harps – with their particular playing techniques, basically creating a jaw harp orchestra using electronics, to accompany and compliment her own voice.

This Estonian traditional music is surely unlike anything else you’ll hear anytime soon. Here’s a piece from Cätlin Mägi:

Sona Jobarteh, Kora (UK/Gambia)  

Sona Jobarteh is a modern pioneer of the kora - the 21-stringed harp-lute of the Manding peoples of West Africa- which was exclusively passed down from father to son. Until Sona. Jobarteh, who was born into one of the five principal West African Griot families, has become the first female to take up the kora professionally in a male tradition that dates back over seven centuries.

She has studied the Kora since the age of three, at first taught by her brother, the composer Tunde Jegede with whom she traveled several times a year to the Gambia as a child. Sona has since founded the Gambia Academy of Music and Culture, which provides music education and secondary education to Gambian children. She is also a skilled multi-instrumentalist as well as a film composer.

Sona’s music both embraces tradition and stretches it. On her soundtrack to the documentary film Motherland, she used the kora in non-traditional ways, as a bass instrument and tuned it to an Arabic scale and invented a new instrument called the Nkoni - a cross between the Kora and the Donso Ngoni. Sona Jobarteh released her most recent album, Badinyaa Kumoo in 2022.

Listen to some of the kora-based music of Sona Jobarteh:

Elza Soares, Vocalist (Brazil)

In a career racked by personal tragedy, the grand dame of Brazilian pop, Elza Soares, who passed in January of 2022, persevered as a singular voice for the voiceless, continuing to champion the oppressed.

She was a master of reinvention as well, active as far back as the 1960’s spanning jazz, samba, bossa nova with electronics, and most recently, the so-called “dirty samba”.

Her 2015 album, “The Woman at the End of the World,” was recorded with a group of musicians from São Paulo’s “samba sujo” (or “dirty samba”) scene and features Elza's weathered, yet defiant voice -growling, spitting, and soaring- with her strength and resilience over a delicate bed of samba-tronics.

Then there’s the provocative 2018 record by Elza Soares, Deus é Mulher or “God is a Woman,” which continues in the vein of “dirty samba” - or samba with punk and jazz innovation. The record also features the percussion group Ilú Obá de Min, the only-female Afro-Brazilian bloco de carnaval (street band for Carnivale), from São Paulo.

Elza Soares continued to evolve and innovate well into her eighties. Here’s some of that so-called “dirty samba”:

Park Jiha, Composer (Korea)

New music composer Park Jiha uses a combination of traditional Korean instruments, experimental strategies, and hypnotic minimalism in her music. Her main instrument is the Korean piri, a double reed bamboo flute that sounds like an oboe. She also plays yanggeum, a hammered dulcimer with metal strings, and the mouth organ called saenghwang.

Park Jiha then expanded her sonic palette and players to a small ensemble that includes saxophone, clarinet, jazz percussion, and vibraphone together with her voice, piri, saenghwang, and yanggeum on the recent record, Communion. However, on her most recent solo record, Philos, she again uses the Korean traditional instruments as well as her voice, with only space and time as extra ingredients.

This music by Park Jiha uses traditional Korean instruments, space, and time - sometimes with a little help from Western chamber and jazz instruments:

Rajna Swaminathan, Percussionist (USA)

Rajna Swaminathan is a composer, vocalist - and a player of the mrudangam - the barrel-shaped drum with two opposing heads. She leads her own ensemble, RAJAS, a band of New-York-based improvisers from the Indian classical and creative music circles. Rajna Swaminathan is also an established name in South Indian Carnatic music, one of the few female percussionists to have become so.

Swaminathan also plays with Amir ElSaffar’s 17-piece Rivers of Sound ensemble, Ragamala Dance, and groups led by pianist-composer Vijay Iyer - all while studying with Iyer in a special new doctoral program at Harvard University’s music department.

This is music from Rajna Swaminathan’s forthcoming record, Of Agency and Abstraction, her jazzy take on Carnatic music, featuring the mrudangam, and the cast of Rajas: 

Sussan Deyhim, Composer and Vocalist (Iran/USA)

Iranian-born composer, vocalist, artist, and activist, Sussan Deyhim, has been a performer since her teens. She caught the bug growing up in Iran, where she joined the Pars National Ballet in her early teens. But in order to continue her creative life after the revolution she had to leave the country. 

Diving into the creative hotbed of 80's New York, Deyhim and her recording partner Richard Horowitz combined traditional elements from Iran and the Middle East with electronics and vocal experimentation in ways that nobody had done before.   

She’s since collaborated with Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Ornette Coleman, and fellow Iranian expat, experimental filmmaker Shirin Neshat - to name just a few. Deyhim is now based in Los Angeles where she continues her genre-blending creative explorations.  (-Rob Weisberg)