World Music with Deirdre Saravia

Each week on World Music (Saturday nights from 8-10 on KSTX 89.1 FM), I take a look at celebrations happening around the world. This week, a cheesy festival in England.

COOPER'S HILL CHEESE ROLLING

Every Tiny Desk Concert provides its own particular thrill, but it's not every day that we get to welcome one of NPR's 50 Great Voices to our offices. With the visit of the incredible, honey-voiced Mohammad Reza Shajarian from Iran, we lucked out by having him sing on not just any day, but on the biggest holiday of the Persian calendar: Nowruz, the New Year.

Ásgeir Trausti hoped to be a professional track and field athlete but his plans were detailed by various sporting injuries. He became a professional musician instead and quickly rose to to top of the Icelandic music scene.

All the words to his songs are composed by his 72-year-old father and are filled with lyric romanticism.

His first album, "Dyrd I Daudathogn," (In The Silence) is sung completely in Icelandic, he hopes to reach a broader audience with an all English version of the album currently in the works.

Each week on World Music (Saturday nights from 8-10 on KSTX 89.1 FM), I take a look at celebrations happening around the world. This week, a fragrant festival in Morocco.

ROSE FESTIVAL

Imagine the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu, in the 1980s. You can't, right? Neither can most music critics. That's why the recent re-release of a record by a popular '80s-era Mogadishu dance band has caught the attention of critics lately.

The founders of Dur-Dur Band now live in Columbus, Ohio. Weekends on All Things Considered asked members Abdinur Daljir and Sahra Dawo to go to a studio there — accompanied by an interpreter — to talk about the newly reissued record and the story that precedes it.

"'The World Is Changing' is groove with a message." That quote, a pretty good summary of the music of Femi Kuti in just nine words, comes from Juan Gélas, the creative director of a new video for Kuti's new song. Femi Kuti is a saxophonist, trumpeter, keyboard player and singer and songwriter. The son of legendary afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, he carries on the tradition of mixing Nigerian beats along with jazz and a healthy dose of politics. Juan Gélas says, "Femi Kuti continues to be a leading protest artist out of modern Africa and his voice talks to us all."

"I got used to notoriety early," said Carla Bruni in an interview with the British newspaper, The Telegraph. So there's nothing holding her back as she sings little songs about her former life, and romantic entanglement with a very famous pop star of the sixties.

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