World/Reggae

Few musical traditions are more peculiar and compelling than the katajjaq throat singing of the Inuit, a 25,000-strong native population concentrated in Canada's Nunavut territory. It's as much a game as a form of music: pairs of women face and embrace one another, unleashing a wild torrent of grunts, exhalations, inhalations, and all manner of guttural, rumbling low-end noises. Each woman rapidly follows her partner, so that their streams of sounds are almost like fun-house reflections of each other--this is made easier, one presumes, because the singers hold their faces so close together that they can use each other's mouths as harmonic resonators. A "song" ends when one of the women is reduced to laughter or simply runs out of breath.

A few years ago a singer calling herself Tagaq (aka Tanya Tagaq Gillis), who'd grown up in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, largely ignorant of the tradition, began to attract notice by radically recontextualizing katajjaq for the pop world. Homesick while attending art school in Halifax in the late 90s, her mother sent a care package that included some katajjaq cassettes that inspired to experiment with the style while in the shower. Over the next few years she refined her practice and eventually began performing, adapting the tradition for solo voice, with a DJ.

The Deal: "Reigning King of Afrobeat," son of Fela, releases first studio album in seven years.

The Good: Afro-beat's closest sonic relative may be reggae, but on Kuti's latest release, he does what he can to infuse a jazz influence and bring the music to its Nigerian roots. His 17-piece band may be in full-force, but Kuti spent some of his time off from recording learning to play piano and reintroducing himself to the trumpet. Themes of peace flow throughout the disc's 12 tracks. The album is definitely music with a message, but the influence is as much on the music. There's plenty of instrumentation on the seven-and-a-half minute "Demo Crazy." A mostly instrumental track, "Do You Know," calls out a number of jazz greats, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis among them.

Is it election time at last? I guess these events may be celebratory or commiseration central, depending on how the election goes -- and how you want it to go.

Here's something I'd like to see more of: A fun local band with enough of a draw to headline a local club twice in one night -- and the second show only costs $5.