Bonga

(AO)

When Bonga first made his voice heard, Angola was still a nation struggling to assert its freedom. His songs resonated in the hearts of those who dreamed of an end to colonial rule and the birth of a distinct identity. He sang semba at a time when it was already a form of resistance: a hybrid rhythm, with Afro-Lusophone roots, where body and words moved as one. At a time when music was both a weapon and a refuge, Bonga raised his voice as a symbol of unity and liberation. He was persecuted, exiled, but never silenced. His singing travelled from Luanda to Lisbon and from there to the world, carrying the memory of a people.

Born José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho in Kipiri, on the outskirts of Catumbela, in 1942, Bonga grew up amidst the batuques of Angola and the records arriving from across the Atlantic. Before becoming a musician, he was a top-level athlete and even represented Portugal in the 400 metres. But when the winds of change began to blow across Africa, he swapped the name of a runner for that of a messenger: Bonga Kuenda. That is to say, ‘he who crosses borders running’. From then on, he did indeed run, but in pursuit of freedom. Bonga set off for the Netherlands, for France, for the exile that so many knew and few were able to transform into a life’s work.

Having settled in Europe in the 1970s, Bonga became a leading voice of the Angolan diaspora. His debut album, Angola 72, blended acoustic guitars and reco-recos, saxophone and melancholy, and gave semba a new horizon: urban, poetic, universal. Influenced by Liceu Vieira Dias, Rui Mingas, morna and fado, he reinvented semba as a hybrid language, somewhere between lament and an invitation to dance.

Over more than five decades, he has built a body of work that is also an archive: from the influences of batuque and rebita to the dialogue with jazz and Cape Verdean music, and the Kimbundu language, which he insists on singing. His songs are home to stories of fishermen, of women who wait, of children who grow up too quickly, of a continent that the West stubbornly refuses to listen to with due attention. Bonga’s voice is unmistakable: hoarse, earthy, almost ancestral. It carries the salt of the dirt roads and the sweetness of Luanda’s backyards.

At 84, with over half a century of songs and resistance behind him, Bonga returns to MED, eight years after, with the same vigour as ever.

Manuel de Oliveira & Bianca Gismonti

(PT/BR)

There are encounters that only music can explain. Portugal and Brazil share an ocean, a language and a particular kind of melancholy, that ability to transform longing into beauty. But they also share something less often spoken of: a tradition of instrumental music that refuses to be merely an accompaniment, that insists on having a voice of its own, on telling stories without words. It is within this tradition that Manuel de Oliveira and Bianca Gismonti find their place, and it is from this that they forge their own path.

When a guitarist from Guimarães and a pianist from Rio de Janeiro sit together on stage, without a score or a roadmap, they are doing more than just making music: they are renegotiating that long and sometimes painful history, in real time, with two instruments and all their accumulated life experience.

Manuel de Oliveira learnt the guitar from his father, Aprígio Oliveira, and it was through his own efforts that he travelled the world in search of other traditions: flamenco, South American music, fado. Largely self-taught, he has built a language that is immediately recognisable in its constant evolution, always exploring the same themes: borders, identity, territory, community. What does it mean to belong to a place? What remains when one leaves? In 2022, the album Ibéria 20|22, recorded with Jorge Pardo and Carles Benavent, the same musicians with whom he made his debut twenty years ago, earned him the Carlos Paredes Prize, the highest honour in Portuguese instrumental music.

On the other side of the ocean, Bianca Gismonti, daughter of pianist, guitarist and composer Egberto Gismonti and actress Rejane Medeiros. She grew up surrounded by music just as one grows up in a house, inevitably, without choice and without regret. At the age of nine she began studying the piano; by fifteen she was already accompanying her father on tours around the world. The legacy of Egberto Gismonti, one of the most unique architects of Brazilian instrumental music, who fused European classical music, American jazz and Amazonian rhythms into a body of work of rare depth, is in every note Bianca plays. But the voice she has forged is entirely her own.

Over the course of a two-decade career, Bianca has toured Europe, Asia and the Americas with the Duo Gisbranco and with her own trio; she has collaborated with Chico César, Jacques Morelenbaum, Nana Vasconcelos and Mônica Salmaso; and has released a discography that grows in depth and daring with every instalment. Manuel de Oliveira, for his part, has built a solid European reputation over more than twenty years. He has performed alongside Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, Mike Stern and Richard Galliano.

The partnership between the two emerged with the naturalness of things that should have happened sooner. In early 2026, they gave eight concerts in Brazil: Florianópolis, Blumenau, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo. In every venue, the same experience is described by the audience: the sensation of witnessing a dialogue in which silence matters just as much as sound.

The repertoire is entirely original, situated somewhere between fado, jazz and MPB without fully belonging to any of the three. Guitar and piano breathe together, explore polyrhythms, and construct soundscapes where improvisation is not ornament but structure. Between them, silence becomes a landscape. Sound transforms into an encounter that Med is honoured to host.

Natacha Atlas

(EG/BE)

In the 1990s, as the global music scene began to embrace fusion and hybrid identities, a voice emerged that defied boundaries: Natacha Atlas. She is the defining symbol of a generation that sought to unite East and West. From London’s urban electronic scene to the melismatic echoes of ancient Cairo, her music was, and continues to be, a space where cultures meet, engage and reinvent themselves.

The daughter of a father of Arab origin (with Egyptian, Moroccan and Palestinian roots, and some Sephardic ancestry) and an English mother, Natacha grew up between Brussels and the UK, moving between worlds with ease. Her artistic breakthrough came in the mid-1990s, in the multicultural epicentre of London, through the label Nation Records, a bastion of daring fusions between electronic, dub and Arabic music. It was also there that she crossed paths with Transglobal Underground, a collective that opened the doors (and with whom she continues to perform) to a boundless sonic imagination. This collaboration established her signature style: an alchemy of machines and maqams, synthesizers and derbakes, beats and baladi.

From her solo debut Diaspora (1995) to albums such as Gedida (1999) and Ayeshteni (2001), Atlas has forged a coherent and adventurous career. Her voice moves freely between Arabic dialects, English and French; she blends the Egyptian vocal tradition of Umm Kulthum with the cosmopolitan drive of trip-hop and electronic music. She has collaborated with masters such as Nitin Sawhney, Jean-Michel Jarre and Ibrahim Maalouf, and has successfully reinvented herself towards a more acoustic, chamber-music sound, where the lute and Arabic violin coexist with the double bass and piano.

Natacha Atlas’s music is, above all, a place of plural belonging. Her warm, translucent voice acts as a bridge between continents and historical eras. Each song is a journey: from the Maghreb to the Levant, from Andalusian melancholy to electronic vibes, from Sufi spirituality to pop desire.

Nine years after performing at the Ciclo Mundos at the Teatro da Trindade, Natacha Atlas returns to Portugal with a luminous maturity. Her voice continues to exude the same hypnotic power, now more refined, more wise. Accompanied by musicians who move between jazz improvisation and classical Arabic phrasing, the artist transforms the concert into a sensory ritual: ancestral and futuristic, intimate and universal.

calle mambo

(CL)

Calle Mambo emerged in 2013 on the freezing streets of Munich, when Chilean musicians, including singer Jhon Valle, guitarist Erkki Nylund, Guillaume Laumière on the charango and Jankely Felix on percussion, got together to play on the street. Migrant musicians seeking both a livelihood and a sense of belonging. The name came about as a joke: ‘mambo na calle’, capturing the spontaneous, street-wise spirit that has defined them from the start.

The starting point is the immense richness of Latin American folk music. Not just the most internationally renowned genres, but those that globalisation has pushed to the margins: the huayno of the Peruvian Andes, the Bolivian caporal, the Cuban timba, and the Colombian and Chilean cumbiain their many dialects. It is upon these roots that Calle Mambo fuses electronica, rap and contemporary beats, and the result is what the band has dubbed ‘electro-urban folklor’: a language that bridges generations without betraying any of them.

Inspired by pioneers such as Celso Piña, who revolutionised cumbia with hip-hop and rock energy, they have recorded albums such as their 2015 self-titled album, Electro Pachamámico (2020) and the recent Retumba la Tierra(2025).

Their instrumental arsenal is, in itself, a statement of intent. On stage, Calle Mambo plays over ten instruments, including the quena, quenacho, charango, ronroco, zampoña, Colombian gaita, Venezuelan cuatro, tiple, timbales, synthesizers and electronic percussion. Each track is a journey that begins in the Andes and ends on the dance floor. The lyrics are every bit as powerful as the sound. They speak of forced migration, the destruction of ecosystems, oppression and resilience.

Calle Mambo arrive at MED with the vigour of a band on a continuous tour and with the most mature repertoire of their career, with the energy of those who feel an urgency to communicate not just rhythms, but memories, territories and identities that resist oblivion.

Ëda Diaz

(CO/FR)

Colombia is a country with a wealth of music too vast to count. Vallenato on the Caribbean plains, bambuco in the Andean mountains, currulao on the black Pacific coast, the bolero that arrived from Cuba and never left, and the tango that Medellín has embraced with a devotion that even the Argentinians envy. All this coexists in a land of dizzying diversity that the Western world has, for far too long, reduced to a single image: the cumbia. Eléonore Diaz-Arbelaez grew up knowing there was so much more. She also grew up knowing that this ‘so much more’ coexisted within her alongside Paris, alongside Brittany, alongside European conservatoires and concert halls. And that the only honest way to make music was not to choose, but to be everything at once.

Her stage name, Ëda, is both an abbreviation of her first name and a declaration of uniqueness: that diaeresis over the e that exists in neither French nor Spanish, that belongs to no canonical alphabet, that is purely hers. She was born in Paris, the daughter of a Breton mother and a Colombian father from Medellín. From a very young age, her life has been a constant journey between two continents, two languages, two ways of hearing the world.

Throughout her artistic career, Ëda has explored choirs, electronic experimentation and hybrid bands, eventually arriving at her own unique universe, which encompasses bambuco, bullerengue, cumbia, vallenato and other Latin American rhythms, reimagined with synthesisers, drum machines machines and an almost cinematic sensitivity. In her music, one hears both the echo of the mountain peasants’ voices and the shadow of Bristol’s smoky trip-hop, French alternative pop, and a certain kind of electronic music that relishes detail and space. Each song is an exercise in reconciliation: between tradition and futurism.

Ëda Diaz’s sound is a body in constant flux: the double bass, laden with effects, traces bass lines that resemble underground rivers; above, the voice oscillates between a confessional whisper and ritual chant, in Spanish, French or somewhere in between where the languages meet.

In 2024 she released the album Suave Bruta, a perfect title for the music it contains: soft and raw at the same time, just as Ëda herself described her identity: ‘two rich and complementary aspects that I have always seen as opposites”. The double bass is the insistent pulse upon which everything else unfolds: raw salsa, electrified currulao, Colombian dembow, old-school bambuco layered with synths, ghostly boleros. The influences are stated without hierarchy: Björk and James Blake alongside Miles Davis and Juana Molina, García Márquez and Pablo Neruda in lyrics that speak of love, death and the torments of the modern world. Samples of the noise from a hairdressing salon, of tropical birds, of classic Latin American melodies cut up and pasted together. A production that evokes both the city and the savannah simultaneously, elegant and raw, introspective and undeniably danceable.

Ëda Diaz brings to Med a vibrant portrait of a mixed-heritage generation, which no longer sees itself reflected in rigid boundaries and invents other ways of being.