Ammar Kalia

In the room is where it happens. On an icy November night in London, drummer and producer Makaya McCraven is commanding the dark club space of KOKO, pounding muscular grooves behind his kit while bassist Junius Paul interlocks with rooted rhythm, Matt Gold provides wafting reverb-laden melodics through his guitar and trumpeter Marquis Hill punctuates with soaring harmony. Each drum-hit, note-strike and button-push is attuned to the specificity of the present moment, improvisi

Words are more than just a means of communication for Yasir Razak, they are a way to experience the world. As the frontman of the Arabic indie band Nabeel and a teacher of English as a second language, this thread runs through most every aspect of his life.  “There’s a unique quality to all languages and they each colour the feelings we express,”  says Razak, 35. “My parents moved from Iraq to the US when I was a kid and so I grew up speaking Iraqi Arabic at home. When I spe

‘I want to be the slowest sitarist on the planet,” Rishab Sharma says. “Everyone is trying their gimmicks and playing as fast as they can...

“My grandmother always used to say, ‘New things are good but don’t let go of the old ones.’ That’s something that’s forever stayed with...

I n May 2020, a month into the first Covid lockdown in Miami, Florida, 20-year-old student Cameron Mofid found his obsessive-compulsive...

On a muggy summer day, Adam Buxton is talking me through the songs on his debut album, Buckle Up. “There’s one on there called Standing...

G rowing up in the icy Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, singing was as natural as speech for Enkhjargal Erkhembayar. “Every day after my...

Joe Armon-Jones is thinking about the end of music. On his latest, third album as bandleader, the 32-year-old pianist is imagining a...

“All my life, I’ve been on an adventure – I’ve experienced the trials and tribulations of what it means to be human,” Lonnie Holley says....

In the 28 years since the death of qawwali master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan , the centuries-old Sufi devotional music tradition has...

F or the past five weeks, Joshua McGuire has been in a whitewashed room in north London pretending to be a rhinoceros. The 37-year-old...

Over the past 15 years, trumpeter and composer Yazz Ahmed has been using her music to connect with her Bahraini heritage. Finding her...

‘If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to raise a rapist,” Jackson Katz says. “Perpetrators aren’t individual...

P at Metheny is pretty much everywhere. For the past four decades, the 70-year-old guitarist has been crisscrossing the globe, playing an...

Nubya Garcia is feeling more free than ever before. Spending much of 2023 and 2024 taking a break from her previous schedule of playing...

It has been just over a year since this writer last spoke to saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis for the cover feature in...

Over the past few years a rich seam of US-based artists has emerged, drawing upon and creating innovative fusions of classical South...

“If you ask people from the Arab world about classical music, the first thing that will come to their minds is Mozart, Beethoven and...

It has been over four decades since saxophonist Courtney Pine first emerged onto the British jazz scene and his motto has remained the...

“Being modern is often associated with becoming western,” says kora virtuoso and vocalist Sona Jobarteh. “What I’m trying to bring to...