Bohemian Betyars

(HU)

There are bands that turn chaos into celebration, and Bohemian Betyars are living proof of this. Formed in 2009 in Miskolc, in north-eastern Hungary, this sextet has become synonymous with infectious energy, irreverent humour and a sound that transcends borders.

Their name, which combines the free-spirited ‘bohemian’ with the Hungarian term betyár (outlaw, the noble vagabond who rejects the established order), serves as their manifesto: to live and play without constraints, in an eternal invitation to dance and joyful resistance, reviving the spirit of Balkan and Gypsy village celebrations with punk-inspired audacity.

From an early age, their paths crossed with 1990s ska, Central European punk rock and the Balkan frenzy popularised by names such as Goran Bregović, Emir Kusturica, Fanfare Ciocărlia, Gogol Bordello and Dubioza Kolektiv. But the Betyars have something unique: a spontaneous relationship between chaos and musical precision. Their songs shift between the euphoria of fanfares, the sway of Gypsy rhythms, the revelry of ska parties and the melancholic lyricism of the violins of the Austro-Hungarian plains. Often described as speed-folk freak-punk, the Bohemian Betyars’ music reconciles tradition and modernity in a turbulent embrace. It is music of travel and uprooting, of memory and the future all at once.

The songs, often sung in Hungarian, evoke rural dances, uninhibited love affairs and a certain spirit of freedom that has always been present on the fringes of Central European culture.

In a performance that is as intense as it is theatrical, with colourful costumes, improvised choreography and an energy that seems to feed directly off the crowd, the audience does not merely watch; they take part. And when the wind instruments begin to set the tempo, the concert transforms into a collective ritual of anarchic joy.

At MED, the Betyars show that continuing to dance is a form of resistance and that the party can also be a political weapon.

Tiken Jah Fakoly

(CI)

Some sing to entertain, and some sing to awaken. Tiken Jah Fakoli comes from an ancient lineage, that of the griots, the guardians of African memory. Like them, he does not merely tell stories: he conveys knowledge, hope and resilience. His music is both chronicle and manifesto, depicting everyday life and denouncing the injustices that persist amongst peoples. On a continent where the spoken word has always been power, Tiken stands as a herald of political and social consciousness, heir to an oral tradition which, through reggae, finds new strength and global reach.

Born Doumbia Moussa Fakoly in 1968 in the small town of Odienné, in north-western Ivory Coast, he grew up listening to the cadence of the drums and the stories of the elders. These rhythms and narratives shaped his critical spirit and sense of belonging. While still a young man, he witnessed ethnic tensions and glaring inequalities, and realised early on that music could be a tool for unity and protest.

Tiken Jah Fakoli’s musical journey is a map of modern Africa: from the streets of Abidjan to the diaspora in Bamako, Paris or Montréal, each stage reflects encounters and transformations. Inspired by Jamaican icons such as Peter Tosh and Burning Spear, yet rooted in mandingas traditions, he created a reggae with an African identity, infused with corás, ngonis and tribal percussion. From the album Mangercratie (1996) onwards, his voice became a continental benchmark. This was followed by works such as Françafrique (2002) and African Revolution (2010), in which he combines political critique and spirituality, always with an irresistible swing and lyrics that resonate like secular sermons.

Tiken Jah Fakoli’s musical identity is a bridge between worlds: Jamaican roots reggae and the ancestral pulse of West Africa. In him we find Bob Marley’s spiritual legacy, but reinterpreted through the lens of African geography and struggle. If Marley proclaimed ‘One Love’ as a universal call, Tiken adds context and urgency: ‘One love, yes, but also justice and truth.’ In his music, the deep bass is a compass, the voice is a flame, and the words are peaceful weapons. Like Marley, he believes in the transformative power of song and the artist’s responsibility to their people.

At a time when noise often drowns out the truth, seeing Tiken Jah Fakoli on stage is an act of clarity. Because he reminds us that dancing can also be a political act, and that joy is not an escape. It is resistance. His reggae does not numb; it awakens.

Arooj Aftab

(PK)

There are voices that come from a place hard to pinpoint on a map. Arooj Aftab’s is one of them. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised between Saudi Arabia and the United States, she is the product of an inner geography as vast as it is contradictory. It is precisely from this tension that her music is born.

She grew up surrounded by Islamic devotional chanting, by the classical Urdu poetry her grandparents recited as if in prayer, and by pop music that found its way in through unexpected channels. None of it was lost. It all remained, settling, waiting to take shape. As a child, she was a curious self-taught musician, fascinated by the recordings of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen and Mehdi Hassan. As a teenager, she began reinterpreting ghazal and qawwali classics with a subtlety that broke with convention.

Later, when she arrived at Berklee College of Music in Boston, she found the technical language for what she already carried within her. She also discovered modal jazz, minimalist music, ambient electronic music and modern composition.

What has emerged from this journey is a body of work that defies categorisation. His albums, particularly Vulture Prince, released in 2021 and dedicated to the brother he lost far too soon, are works of rare emotional depth. In them, the ghazal and Sufi qawwali meet string arrangements that seem to breathe, electronic layers that function like mist, and a voice that never strains, that competes with nothing, yet fills everything.

In 2022, the Grammy for Best Global Performance, and Barack Obama’s decision to include the song Mohabbat on his summer playlist, confirmed what the most attentive listeners already knew: Arooj Aftab is not a rising star. She is a presence.

Since then, Aftab has collaborated with figures such as Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily and Meshell Ndegeocello, building bridges between spiritual jazz, neoclassical and Sufi roots. The trio Love in Exile (2023) cemented this aesthetic of contemplative improvisation. Music as shared breath.

Night Reign (2024) confirmed that the award had not been a fluke. It was simply the world catching up with what she was already doing.

Her sonic identity is made up of productive paradoxes: it is ancient and contemporary, intimate and cosmic, restrained and utterly devastating. To listen to Arooj is to accept being led into a time that is not quite our own. A suspended time, where pain and beauty coexist without cancelling each other out.

At MED, she will present a performance that is at once ritual and confidence.

MArio Lucio & The Pan African Band

(CV)

Mario Lucio & The Pan African Band surgem como uma chama viva da crioulização cabo-verdiana, celebrando a fusão de África, diáspora e independência num tempo em que a identidade ainda é luta e festa. Cantor, compositor, poeta e ex-ministro da Cultura, Mario Lucio encarna a visão de um arquipélago que se fez na encruzilhada dos mares, onde ritmos proibidos renasceram livres e pan-africanos.

A 5 de Julho de 1975, Cabo Verde tornava-se independente. Era o segundo território de expressão portuguesa em África a libertar-se do jugo colonial e Mario Lucio Sousa tinha dez anos. Crescia no Tarrafal, ilha de Santiago, a mesma ilha onde o regime de Salazar instalara um campo de concentração para presos políticos das colónias. Um miúdo de dez anos guardava memórias de danças que regressavam, de músicas que voltavam de um exílio silencioso, de um povo que punha o corpo a celebrar o que durante décadas fora proibido. Cinquenta anos depois, esse miúdo regressou às memórias para fazer o disco da sua vida.

Lúcio Matias de Sousa Mendes, o nome completo que o mundo conhece como Mario Lucio, nasceu em 1964. Perdeu o pai aos doze anos e a mãe três anos depois, ficando com sete irmãos à guarda do exército cabo-verdiano, no quartel do Tarrafal. Foi o exército que lhe pagou a escola secundária; foi uma bolsa do governo cubano que em 1984 o levou a Havana a estudar Direito. Regressou seis anos depois, exerceu advocacia, foi assessor cultural do Ministério da Cultura, deputado ao parlamento entre 1996 e 2001, e de 2011 a 2016 ocupou o cargo de Ministro da Cultura de Cabo Verde. Nesse papel, criou o Atlantic Music Expo, um dos mais importantes fóruns de música da diáspora atlântica, e o Fesquintal de Jazz, o festival de jazz internacional do arquipélago. Um homem de muitos chapéus, todos levados a sério.

Mas antes de tudo isso, e durante tudo isso, havia a música. Mario Lucio fundou a Simentera, banda que marcou o regresso da música cabo-verdiana às suas raízes acústicas e reivindicou a cultura africana continental como parte integrante da identidade cabo-verdiana. Compôs para a saudosa Cesária Évora, para Ildo Lobo e para muitos outros. Publicou seis álbuns a solo antes de chegar ao sétimo e mais ambicioso: Independance, lançado em janeiro de 2025, exatamente cinquenta anos após a independência.

The title Independance deliberately contains the word dance. It is a play on words that Mário Lúcio does not explain; he leaves it to be understood. The album is a celebration of memory and consciousness at the same time: a record that celebrates the return of folk dances banned by colonialism and the archipelago’s opening up to urban music from Angola, Congo, Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal: afrobeat, soukous, rumba, coladeira, funaná, all blended with the ease of someone who knows the traditions so well that he can play with them. To perform it live, he formed the Pan African Band: Jery Bidan, from Guinea-Bissau, on guitar; Ricardo Campos, from Angola, on bass; and Dilson Groove, from Congo, on drums. A band that is, in itself, a political statement. The Black Atlantic in miniature, gathered on stage.

Mario Lucio é cantor, guitarrista, compositor, poeta, romancista, pintor, legislador e pensador. Em palco, tudo isso está presente ao mesmo tempo, sem que nada pareça demais. É um dos raros artistas que consegue ser simultaneamente sábio e festivo, profundamente político e completamente dançável. A Pan African Band que o rodeia não é adorno, é argumento: a prova viva de que o Atlântico que durante séculos transportou escravos pode hoje ser o mesmo oceano que transporta alegria e dignidade. No Med, cinquenta anos de independência celebram-se assim. A dançar, com consciência.

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

(NG/FR)

Some people confuse the terms afrobeat and afrobeat, and it is important to clarify the distinction, particularly when discussing Seun Kuti. Afrobeat, created by Fela Kuti in 1970s Lagos, is a powerful and expansive genre: a blend of Yoruba rhythms, jazz, funk, soul and fearless political courage. Every track was a manifesto; every note, a spark of rebellion. Afrobeats (in the plural), on the other hand, which today dominates urban dancefloors from Lagos to London, is a more pop- and electronic-oriented movement, born of an aesthetic lineage but with less militant edge. Seun Kuti remains faithful to the former. The original afrobeat, the body and nerve of an Africa that thinks, dances and resists.

Seun Anikulapo Kuti was born in 1983 in Lagos. The youngest son of the legendary Fela Kuti and the activist and performer Fehintola Anikulapo Kuti. He literally grew up on stage and in the rehearsal rooms of the Shrine, the legendary headquarters of the Egypt 80 orchestra, where he learnt early on that music and politics could speak the same language. By the age of nine he was already accompanying his father on tours; at fourteen, following Fela’s death, he took over the leadership of the band. An almost mythical gesture of continuity.

Since then, Seun Kuti has been touring the world with a visceral energy. From his early albums Many Things (2008) and From Africa with Fury: Rise (2011, produced by Brian Eno) to Black Times (2018), he builds a bridge between contemporary Nigeria and his father’s legacy, infusing it with his own urgency and passion. Influenced by Coltrane’s rebellious jazz, James Brown’s political groove and the poetry of resistance from modern African artists, Seun cultivates a sound that is not merely a tribute. It is living reinvention.

At the helm of Egypt 80, the band of relentless brass and ever-vigilant percussion, Seun Kuti preserves the DNA of Afrobeat: the expansive rhythmic structure, the hypnotic repetition, the social commentary at the heart of the dance. But there is also room for reggae, spoken word and jazz improvisation. Every concert is a rite of liberation. Fela’s legacy runs through the stage, but Seun inhabits it as a new leader: fierce, electrifying, deeply contemporary.

Fifteen years on, MED revisits a hurricane of energy that sweeps the orchestra and the audience into a celebration of African and universal freedom.

Daniel Kemish & Friends

(UK)

The heartland of America isn’t confined to America alone. It exists wherever a man picks up a guitar, gazes at the horizon with the resignation of those who have lost much and the stubbornness of those who carry on regardless, and decides to put it all into a song. It exists in Nashville, in Bakersfield, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, but it also exists, more improbably and therefore more interestingly, in a childhood spent in Portugal, in a British boy who grew up between the Atlantic and the Alentejo and remained forever convinced that he was born on the wrong continent.

Daniel Kemish was born in the UK, but it was in Portugal that he grew up, and this dual identity shaped in him something that genuine Americans rarely achieve: the necessary distance to view tradition clearly, without the pressure of having to defend or betray it. He began playing in British bars and clubs in 2006, performing other people’s songs, searching for his own voice. In 2011, he decided it was time to have something of his own to say. He had accumulated stories of roads travelled, of nights in nameless countries etched in his memory, of people met and left behind.

Daniel Kemish’s music is American American in the noblest sense of the term. The kind that precedes trends and survives them. Blues, country, alternative folk, all filtered through the lens of someone who knows the tradition because he loved it before he studied it.

The debut album Fools & Money, recorded at the legendary Ocean Way Studios in Nashville – where Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and R.E.M. had previously recorded – was released in 2016 and immediately set the tone: a raspy baritone voice, observational and sombre lyrics, and country music filtered through the sensibilities of 1970s outlaw rock. The influences are clear and acknowledged. Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Bob Seger. But what Daniel Kemish does with them is his own: not imitation, but lineage. The second album, Under The Same SkySky, was written in radical isolation, in a refuge in the Austrian mountains with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, heated only by a wood-burning stove and the urgency to create. In 2023, Hard Times, recorded entirely on analogue tape at Welcome to 1979 Studios in Nashville, mixed live without a computer, cut directly to vinyl from analogue masters, arrived as a statement of principle: that the honesty of the sound matters just as much as the honesty of the words.

Daniel Kemish has built much of his reputation as a solo artist. Just him, his guitar and the room. But over the years he has gathered trusted musicians for those moments when the songs called for more than a voice and six strings. The Friends accompanying him at MED are not mere decoration: they are the natural extension of a sound that grows when shared.

Expresso Transatlântico

(PT)

There is a Lisbon that cannot be captured on a postcard. It cannot be summed up in verses of longing or on a tourist brochure. It is a melting pot, constantly on the move, open to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the rest of the world. From this Lisbon, Expresso Transatlântico transforms the Portuguese guitar into the leading character of a musical film that is equally at home in an intimate club as it is at a major rock or world music festival.

At the heart of the trio is Gaspar Varela, an exceptional Portuguese guitarist and great-grandson of the legendary fado singer Celeste Rodrigues, an heritage that ensures a direct link to the fado house and the legacy of Amália. Alongside him, his brother Sebastião Varela takes up the electric guitar and Rafael Matos the drums, shifting fado into a territory where tradition engages, without blind reverence, with the city of today. They do not come to ‘evangelise’ fado, as they like to emphasise; rather, they come to prove that the DNA of fado can survive and flourish beyond the boundaries of the genre.

Following a debut EP presented at WOMEX 2022 (the world’s largest music fair), they released the album Ressaca Bailada in 2023. A work described by critics as a ‘dance of beauty and fury, longing for the future’, where fado intersects with rock, blues, funaná, samba and echoes of Portuguese-style westerns, amongst references ranging from Dead Combo to Zeca Afonso.

On stage, Expresso Transatlântico is something else entirely. The music takes on a life of its own, an urgency, a physicality that the recorded versions merely hint at.

They bring to MED their second and latest album, released in January this year. Trópico Paranóia, produced by Paulo Furtado (The Legendary Tigerman), takes on more risk and tension, looking squarely at a world in decline, without losing the festive pulse that defines it.

At a time when walls are being erected and diversity is viewed with suspicion, Expresso Transatlântico responds with a humanist celebration. Their diversity is a source of richness, not a threat.

Omar And the Eastern Power

(MA/EG/KR)

South Korea is the last place one would expect to find the blues of the Sahara Desert and the spiritual gnawa music of North Africa. But the 21st century is full of such beautiful ironies. In a world where globalisation breaks down borders whilst politics rebuilds them, there are musicians who choose to live precisely in the space between these two movements: inhabiting countries that are not their own, singing in languages other than those of their childhood, turning the migrant experience not into a problem, but into a language. Omar Benassila arrived in Seoul from Morocco. The drummer Zaky Wael came from Egypt. The Korean members grew up on the other side of the world.

It all began in Jeju, the volcanic island in the south of Korea, known for its lava fields, its female fishing divers and its constant wind. It was on this unlikely island, in a small fisherman’s cottage, that Omar Benassila settled in 2015 to write songs. He had arrived in Korea a decade earlier, becoming part of the live music scene in Seoul’s Hongik district, playing jazz, rock and classical music with Korean musicians, and taking part in artist residencies. In Jeju, he found the tranquillity needed to hear what he had to say: something that evoked the Sahel, Morocco, gnawa trance and the Sahara desert. He shared the songs with Zaky Wael, the Egyptian percussionist living in Seoul. Wael fell in love with them immediately. Two Korean musicians joined them: Oh Jin-woo on guitar and Tehiun on bass. The band formed in 2016, with a name that is, in itself, a statement of identity: Omar and the Eastern Power.

The music of Omar and the Eastern Power is what happens when nostalgia for the desert meets the percussion of the Nile, both filtered through Korean musical sensibility: disciplined, precise, with a deep connection to rhythm rooted in millennia-old traditions. Moroccan gnawa blues provides the trance and spirituality; afrobeat provides the groove and collective energy; dub creates space and silence; psychedelic rock makes everything explode when needed. The lyrics, written by Omar, are chronicles of migrant life. Joy and sorrow, hard work and love, longing and the wonder of discovering that the world fits into a song. Omar himself summed it up perfectly:‘We believe that music is one. And genres and styles are a bit like borders between countries. That’s why we try to go beyond them.’

In a fragmented world, Omar and the Eastern Power unite the Maghreb, the Nile and the Far East in an irresistible dance.

Tó Trips & Fake Latinos

(pt)

Portugal has a complicated relationship with its own Latin identity. It is Latin in language, history and temperament, yet has always felt somewhat on the fringes of the other Latin nations, more restrained, more nostalgic, more averse to the exuberance that Brazil, Colombia or Cuba display without a second thought. It is in this uncomfortable space, between what we are and what we deny being, that Tó Trips has always lived: a guitarist from Greater Lisbon who never settled for Lisbon, who always had one foot in and one foot out, and who chose to name his new band after a contradiction: Fake Latinos.

With this new quartet, he opens a new chapter where music is ‘dissidence’ against the obvious, a journey between what we were and what we are yet to be. Joining him on this latest journey are Alexandre Frazão on drums, António Quintino on double bass and Helena Espvall on cello. A band that evokes the sonic migrations of the Portuguese-speaking world, from Brazil to Cape Verde, via Spain and Latin America, celebrating cultural fusion as a living force.

Tó Trips has nearly four decades of experience on the guitar. A rare case in Portuguese music of benign resilience and constant inventiveness. He began with Amen Sacristi, then moved on to Lulu Blind and Dead Combo, the band he founded in 2003 with double bassist Pedro Gonçalves and which, for sixteen years, created instrumental compositions marked by rock, the blues and Portuguese tradition, with influences extending to Africa and Latin America.

In 2025, whilst on the road on yet another imaginary musical journey dubbed Club Makumba, he released Dissidente as a quartet with the Fake Latinos. The name is a nod both to Portugal’s peripheral Latin heritage and to the condition of being an outsider within the tradition itself. The album has sixteen tracks and a map stretching from Havana to Alfama, from the East Village to the Tagus river, from Chet Baker to Jack Kerouac, whose voice appears on a loop in one of the songs, talking about roads and escapes whilst the music unfolds slowly in the background. It is an album of places and ghosts.

Med is a place Tó Trips knows well. Having performed there solo, with Dead Combo on two occasions, and with Club Makumba in 2025, he now returns with yet another chapter in this long refusal to stay still.

Dima Libre – Labess Trio

(DZ/CA)

In 2003, Algeria was a country recovering from its most recent wounds. The civil war of the 1990s, which claimed between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand lives, had left deep scars on society. Many left. Some took with them only a guitar and the certainty that there was something to be said that their country of origin was not yet ready to hear. Nedjim Bouizzoul was eighteen when he emigrated to Quebec with his mother and sisters. He arrived in Montreal in the summer of 2003 with no money, no network, no plan. Just a rough voice and an instrument in his hands.

The beginning was humble to the point of poetry: Nedjim started playing in the Montreal metro to earn money for food. The city, however, has ears, and other professional musicians on the local scene soon took notice of him. Collaborations multiplied. He soon realised that exile is not experienced in the singular: ‘exile, when lived intimately, is in the plural.’ From this understanding, the band was born, and with it, the name. Labess means, in Algerian Arabic, ‘all is well’. It is what you say when someone asks how you are, regardless of how you really are. In these two small words lies a whole philosophy of joyful resistance.

Labess’s music is what happens when Algerian chaâbi —the music of the working-class neighbourhoods, the music of Nedjim’s ‘older brothers’ in Hussein-Dey —meets Gypsy rumba, flamenco, the gnawa sounds of the Maghreb, the Afro-Latin rhythms of Colombia and the cosmopolitanism of Montreal. Nedjim sings in Algerian Arabic, Spanish and French, sometimes within the same song, sometimes without warning which language comes next, because exile is also this: the impossibility of inhabiting a single language. His voice is deep and committed, possessing that quality of someone who has never sung to convince anyone, but simply to ensure that what needed to be said was not silenced. The krakeb, the metal castanets of the gnawatradition, intertwine with clarinet, trumpet, guitar, bass and percussion in an orchestra that is, in itself, a map of the world.

Before arriving in Québec, Nedjim lived for two years in Colombia, where the rhythms resonated with the memory of the first African slaves exiled to Latin America, where the Spanish and Arabic guitars share roots deeper than the atlases suggest. That Colombian immersion was kept in reserve, and emerged in 2021 with Yemma (“mother”), the fourth album, dedicated to the woman who sacrificed everything to give him wings.

Labess arrives at Med in the midst of celebrating 20 years on the road. The latest album Dima Libre (2024) fuels an even more collective show. The concert is conceived as a journey: from childhood in Algiers to exile in the Americas, to a present in which the band asserts itself as a pan-Mediterranean and transatlantic voice. On stage, it is living proof that, in a world of borders, music remains a place where ‘everything is alright’.