It's said that only a thousand people bought the Velvet Underground's debut album when it was first released in 1967 -- but every one of them started a band. Veneno may be the Andalusian Velvet Underground, at least in that regard. Coming a decade later, Veneno's lone album didn't bear much musical relation to the VU, but it marked a similar ...

The word prodigal is hardly enough to capture Razia Said's winding journey to the making of her new album, "Zebu Nation," which celebrates her rediscovery of both the cultural diversity and biodiversity of her native Madagascar. And nor does rich life seem enough to convey the experiences accumulated along the way, with stops in France, Italy, ...

Like many artists who have explored and embraced music from across cultures, guitarist Lionel Loueke is wary about bringing exotic, unfamiliar sounds to mainstream audiences. Of course, in his case the audience in question is in Benin, where Loueke was born and raised. And the sounds are those of the modern jazz he embraced as a music student in ...

Chhom Nimol remembers hearing a song on the radio in the '80s when she was a child in Cambodia. "It was very sad, slow romantic," she says. "Sounded like a ghost voice." She's not sure, but it may have been the insinuating 'Flowers in the Pond,' by singer Ros Sereysothea, or perhaps something else by the Cambodian star. Ros Sereysothea, ...

Márta Sebestyen is straining to hear a little as she gets on the phone from her Budapest home. Her young son, she explains, is "doing horrible music next door." Seems he's a DJ/producer wannabe who crafts his own mixes and mix tapes but has no interest in traditions stretching back more than a few, oh, minutes. "The child of a folk ...

A big pig has been freshly butchered. The constituent parts are divvied up to the various specialists in and out of the newly constructed barnlike dance hall just outside the town of Eunice, in the heart of Louisiana Cajun country. Over here, someone's making backbone stew. Over there, meat is being ground and mixed with rice and seasonings to be ...

Jacob Edgar was in Buddha Jayanti Park in New Delhi, filming a segment for his upcoming TV series, 'Music Voyager.' It's a locale in which young couples come to (as he put it) canoodle -- rather innocent hand-holding and kissing, but still a breach of the general Indian cultural prohibitions of public displays of affection. This, though, is where ...