Ammar Kalia

Scullery Department (from Jazz Epistle Verse 1, 1960) Born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town in 1934, Abdullah Ibrahim spent his six-decade career defining the heartfelt sound of South African jazz. Making his professional debut as a pianist at 15 under the name Dollar Brand, it was his co-founding of the group the Jazz Epistles in 1959 that laid the groundwork for his journeying career. South Africa’s first Black jazz group, featuring trumpeter Hugh Masekela who would go on

Walk down the specialist aisle in most British supermarkets and you will find a red jar with the kindly face of a middle-aged Chinese woman staring back at you. Branded Lao Gan Ma, meaning “old godmother”, these jars contain chilli crisp – a spicy, crunchy and moreish umami condiment that has made made hundreds of millions for Tao Huabi, the woman on the label. Doused over steaming dumplings, fried eggs, noodles and even ice-cream, Lao Gan Ma’s chilli crisp has become a socia

‘Curry might have come from India, but balti was born in Birmingham,” says Zaf Hussain. The 40-year-old’s family business, Shababs, has been on this site on the bustling Ladypool Road in south-east Birmingham since his father opened it in 1987. Settled in between the Indian sweet shops and south Asian bridal boutiques, Shababs is one of the last remaining restaurants in the city that still makes an authentic balti curry – a dish that, if Hussain and other campaigners have the

Matías Aguayo – Anenoa Over the past two decades, Chilean-German vocalist and producer Matías Aguayo’s mutable, instinctive singing has been an instantly identifiable ingredient of leftfield electronic music. On Battles’ 2011 track Ice Cream, he squealed and tripped through syllables against a thunderous synth backing, while Japanese synth-pop group Crystal’s 2017 track Kimi Wa Monster saw Ayuayo singing a keening, childlike melody over instrumental. His own releases featured

Serokolo 7 – Maramfa Musick Pro South Africa pulses with electronic music. From the slow-bubbling feel of amapiano to the frenetic pace of Durban’s gqom, Soweto’s marimba-heavy shangaan electro and the sample-heavy 90s house of kwaito, each region seemingly lays claim to its own sound. The latest subgenre to reach international ears is mapanta. Originating in villages of the Marota people in Limpopo, this intensely fast and highly compressed music was originally an adrenaline

“Photography has always been a way to meet people, a way for me to be in touch with the world,” Sohrab Hura says. “The joy is in the process of meandering without a precise destination and when it came to photographing Kashmir, it was the people who became the most important focus of all.” The 44-year-old Indian photographer and visual artist has spent the past decade documenting the personal and deeply human stories taking place throughout his country. A member of Magnum Ph

Chala Chala Nav Bala (Maze Baal, 1943) With more than 12,000 songs to her name, Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle is one of the most recorded and well-known voices in Bollywood cinema. Born into a musical family, with her father Deenanath Mangeshkar working as a singer for regional Marathi theatre and film throughout the 1920s and 30s and her older sister Lata Mangeshkar becoming a Bollywood playback singer in her own right, Bhosle entered the industry at just 10 years old w

Listening to Peter Cat Recording Co is to be transported into a musical world without a sense of fixed time or place. The group’s funk-inflected guitars and warm reverb of humming basslines might recall a West Coast ‘70s analogue feel, while their sharp trills of strings could take us to the ‘80s disco, crooning vocals to the Vegas strip of the ‘50s and buzzing synth lines into the globalised 21st Century. You might be forgiven for thinking you are listening to a lesser-known

Sanaya Ardeshir – Hand of Thought A s Sandunes, Indian producer Sanaya Ardeshir has spent the last decade exploring the melodic side of electronic music with three ebullient albums that drew on the bright instrumentation and pop references of contemporaries such as Bonobo. Now releasing her first record under her own name, Ardeshir explores entirely new territory, namely expansive piano compositions that supplant dancefloor rhythms with slowly unfurling minimalist repetition.

O n a cold night in east London, 21-year-old performance poet Sam Browne is telling a packed room of strangers about his second bout of psychosis. “I was in Morocco at 18, completely alone, and I started to feel that things weren’t real,” he says. “It got so bad that one day I turned to a random person and told him I was thinking of killing myself. He just said back to me: ‘Don’t do that – you’ll miss the sunset.’” The room falls quiet and Browne breaks the tension by launchi