Burna Boy

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• Top 6 World Music Artists of All Time

  Currently #6 · score 0

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• Fela Kuti

  Fela Kuti pioneered Afrobeat, a genre fusing traditional Yoruba music and jazz with American funk and highlife influences, and his extended, politically charged compositions, often stretching past 20 minutes per track, directly criticized Nigeria's military governments through pointed, satirical lyrics delivered in pidgin English. His outspoken political activism made him a repeated target of Nigerian government crackdowns, including a notorious 1977 raid on his communal compound, the Kalakuta Republic, during which soldiers reportedly beat Kuti severely and threw his elderly mother from a window, an assault that ultimately contributed to her death. Kuti's massive band Africa 70, and later Egypt 80, incorporated dozens of musicians simultaneously, and his extended live performances at his own Lagos nightclub, the Afrika Shrine, combined dense polyrhythmic musical arrangements with his direct political commentary delivered between and during songs. His combination of genuinely innovative genre-blending musicianship and fearless political confrontation with Nigeria's authoritarian government has made Kuti one of the most significant and influential musicians in the history of African popular music, and Afrobeat's continued global influence traces directly back to his foundational work.

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• Youssou N'Dour

  Youssou N'Dour helped bring Senegalese mbalax music, a genre built around dense traditional percussion combined with contemporary pop and jazz influences, to international audiences beginning in the 1980s, becoming one of the most globally recognized African musicians of his generation. His 1994 collaboration with Neneh Cherry, "7 Seconds," became a major international hit, giving N'Dour one of the broadest mainstream Western crossover successes achieved by any African musician up to that point in popular music history. N'Dour's distinctive, powerful vocal style, rooted in Senegalese griot musical storytelling traditions, has been praised by numerous prominent Western musicians, including Peter Gabriel, who featured N'Dour prominently on several of his own internationally successful albums and tours during the 1980s. Beyond music, N'Dour entered Senegalese politics, running for president in 2012 before being disqualified on technical grounds and subsequently serving in a government cabinet position, extending his public influence from music into direct national political engagement.

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• Miriam Makeba

  Miriam Makeba, widely known as "Mama Africa," became one of the first African musicians to achieve major international recognition, and her outspoken opposition to South Africa's apartheid government led the regime to revoke her citizenship and passport in 1963, forcing her into a 30-year exile from her home country. Her 1967 song "Pata Pata" became an international hit, introducing many Western audiences to South African music, and Makeba's testimony before the United Nations about apartheid's brutality made her one of the most prominent international voices raising awareness of South Africa's racial oppression during the Cold War era. Makeba's marriage to Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968 led to significant professional backlash in the United States, including canceled bookings and record deals, reflecting the political controversy surrounding both her own activism and her husband's more radical political associations. She finally returned to South Africa in 1990 following Nelson Mandela's release from prison, performing at his inauguration ceremony years later, and Makeba's combination of musical innovation and sustained anti-apartheid activism made her one of the most politically significant musicians of the 20th century.

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• Ravi Shankar

  Ravi Shankar is widely credited with introducing Indian classical music, and the sitar specifically, to mainstream Western audiences, and his teaching relationship with George Harrison of the Beatles directly led to the sitar's incorporation into several of the band's mid-1960s recordings. His 1967 performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, playing an extended traditional Indian classical raga to an audience largely unfamiliar with the form, received an unusually enthusiastic standing ovation from the rock and counterculture audience, helping establish Indian classical music's serious artistic credibility among Western listeners. Shankar organized the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh alongside George Harrison, one of the first major benefit concerts in popular music history, raising funds and awareness for refugees during the Bangladesh Liberation War and establishing a template for subsequent benefit concerts across popular music. His combination of deep technical mastery of Indian classical musical tradition and his significant role introducing that tradition to Western popular music audiences made Shankar one of the most historically significant cross-cultural musical figures of the 20th century, and his daughter Anoushka Shankar has continued his musical legacy as an accomplished sitarist in her own right.

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• Cesária Évora

  Cesária Évora, known as "the Barefoot Diva" for her habit of performing without shoes on stage, popularized morna, a melancholic musical genre from her native Cape Verde, bringing international attention to the small island nation's musical tradition beginning with her breakthrough international success in the early 1990s. Her deep, weathered vocal style and morna's characteristically bittersweet themes of longing and separation, reflecting Cape Verde's long history of emigration and diaspora, gave Évora's music a distinctive emotional register that resonated with international audiences well beyond the specific Portuguese-Creole language her lyrics were sung in. Évora achieved her major international breakthrough relatively late in life, not gaining widespread global recognition until her forties, after decades performing primarily within Cape Verde's own local music scene without broader international attention. Her combination of morna's distinctive emotional depth and her own remarkable late-career international breakthrough made Évora the single most significant musical ambassador for Cape Verdean culture globally, and she remains the artist most responsible for bringing international attention to the small island nation's musical traditions.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.