Los Van Van

(CU)

In 1969, the sound of Havana’s streets pulsed with a blend of tradition and hope. Juan Formell, who had previously been part of the Orquesta Revé, set out to create an orchestra that would translate everyday Cuban life into music. He drew inspiration from the classic charanga ensemble, consisting of flutes, violins and a light rhythm section, but also added electric bass, drums and keyboards. The result? An irresistible hybrid: the modern charanga , which transformed the island’s musical landscape. The very name ‘Van Van’ echoed the popular slogan of the time, ‘¡Vamos a andar!’. A symbol of movement, progress and vitality inspired by the iconic Soviet ‘van’ trucks of that era.

Since the 1970s, Los Van Van have become much more than just a band: they have become a national institution and a transcontinental phenomenon. They were pioneers of songo, a genre that blended traditional flavour with the electric pulse of pop, funk and jazz.

The arrangements of Juan Formell and his charismatic trombonist Pupy Pedroso, combined with the raw, street-wise voices of Pedro Calvo, Mayito Rivera and so many others, defined a musical identity that has influenced orchestras and salsa musicians all over the world. From NG La Banda to Irakere. In New York and Cali, salsa musicians admit that Los Van Van changed the grammar of Latin American dance music.

In 2014, following the death of Juan Formell, his son Juan—who had already been musical director of Los Van Van for a decade, took up the baton and modernised the orchestra without losing its authentic groove, incorporating subtle samplers, more pop-inspired harmonies, and an energy that transforms the stage into a universal dance floor.

Los Van Van are an orchestra that does not rest on its laurels. They possess the rare gift of sounding both classic and forward-looking at the same time. To see them at the MED is to witness the living memory of Cuba in its entirety. It is to feel the pulse of Havana, the murmur of the Caribbean and the DNA of the Latin groove passed down from father to son.

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.

koza mostra

(gr)

Greece in 2012 was a country in a state of shock. The sovereign debt crisis had turned austerity into state policy: pensions slashed, hospitals closed, an entire generation without work and without prospects. In the streets of Athens, protests followed one after another. In Thessaloniki, the second city, life went on with that peculiar blend of despair and Mediterranean resilience that the Greeks have known for centuries. It is against this backdrop that Ilias Kozas, a veteran guitarist with bands such as Cabaret Balkan and the Motherfunkers, decides that the time has come to find his own voice. And that this voice, rather than lamenting the crisis, will dance right over it.

Thessaloniki is not Athens, and Koza Mostra has never hidden that peripheral pride. The port city on the Thermaic Gulf is a melting pot of Balkan, Ottoman, Jewish and Greek influences, where music has always been more hybrid and more working-class than the capital allowed. It was there that the band was formed in 2012, with a name that is already a statement of character: koza mostra means, in colloquial Greek, ‘what a spectacle’. An exclamation of admiration in the face of something excessive, extraordinary, impossible to ignore. The name, they said, came about because that was exactly what they wanted to be.

Less than a year after forming, Koza Mostra were selected to represent Greece at the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, alongside the legendary Agathonas Iakovidis. A rebetiko singer since 1973, he has never agreed to sing any other style. The Greek genre of the interwar period, born in the poor neighbourhoods of the ports, music of marginality and emotional resistance, a close relative of the blues and fado. Together they took a song called ‘Alcohol is Free’ to the biggest stage in European popular music. A blend of ska punk and rebetiko, with lyrics about shipwrecks and wind-swept alleyways, a transparent metaphor for the Greek condition. They finished in sixth place.

For almost fifteen years, Koza Mostra has been creating music that happens when rebetiko meets ska, punk, hard rock and Macedonian and Balkan rhythms. The bouzouki and saxophone blend seamlessly with the electric guitar and drums, as if it had always been this way. On stage, the band members sometimes wear the fustanella (the traditional white Greek men’s kilt) in an ironic and proud appropriation that says: we are excessive, we are old-fashioned, we are modern, we are everything at once. ‘I wanted to create an imaginary bridge linking Greece to the rest of Europe,’ said Ilias Kozas. ‘In Spain they have flamenco, in Ireland they have the jig, we have rebetiko. It’s the same thing.’

In 2024, Koza Mostra released their third album, Malaka, a Greek word difficult to translate directly, something between ‘idiot’, ‘fool’ and ‘dear friend’, depending on the tone and context. The title is a calculated provocation: in a world that takes itself too seriously, calling yourself malaka is an act of freedom. The album includes the single ‘Elvis’, which blends heavy metal with bouzouki, and features collaborations with Pedro Erazo of Gogol Bordello.

Med will savour the Mediterranean ethno-punk that transforms a stage into a global tavern.

Fidju Kitxora

(PT/CV)

Fidju Kitxora is a collective in motion between Lisbon and Cape Verde: an enigmatic group that transforms the dance floor into a laboratory of memory and the future. From funaná raves to Afrohouse beats, via semba and kuduro.

‘Fidju Kitxora’ means ‘crying child’ in Creole, a perfect image for a project born of mourning and longing for a land that, for years, existed only in the imagination. Following his grandmother’s death, this artist (son of a Portuguese father and a Cape Verdean mother) sets off for Cape Verde, walking hundreds of kilometres on foot between islands and families, recording voices, sounds, celebrations and silences, and realising that he wants to repay the love he has received through music.

From this raw material, he constructs a sonic architecture that does not ask permission from any genre: the torrential and untameable funaná of Cape Verde, with its ferrinho and accordion (as in Lobu na Sukuru, featuring Scúru Fitchadú), intertwines with Angolan semba, kuduro, afrohouse, echoes of techno and (other) electronic experiments, always interwoven with field recordings. From this alchemy was born Racodja, a debut album released in 2024.

On stage, partial anonymity (a hidden face, a focus on full-body performance) transforms the concert into a kind of living archive: light, dance and sound combine to allow the audience to lose themselves in the crowd whilst simultaneously rediscovering ancient questions about belonging and identity.

With their debut album Racodja opening doors and the new single Simbron heralding a second album scheduled for 2026, Fidju Kitxora is at a turning point. MED welcomes a living organism in constant flux, promising that the next stop will be even more profound on this journey through the post-diaspora.

Asian Dub Foundation

(UK)

There are bands that weren’t just born to play music. They were born to challenge the world with it. Asian Dub Foundation emerged in the early 1990s in South London, at the intersection of multicultural neighborhoods, squat houses, sound systems, anti-racist activism, and migrant youth who refused to remain silent. Children of the British South Asian diaspora, they grew up amid the reggae of Jamaican sound systems, political hip-hop, militant dub, combative punk, and cultural memories brought from India, Bangladesh, or Pakistan. From this tension emerged one of the most explosive and politicized musical languages of recent decades.

It all began in a music workshop linked to the Farringdon Community Music House, a community music education centre in London, where young people from diverse backgrounds learnt to transform social experience into artistic creation. It was there that Deeder Zaman, Dr. Das, Chandrasonic, Sun-J and Pandit G crossed paths. The band’s name was already a manifesto: ‘Asian’, because they refused to be invisible; ’Dub’, for the Jamaican heritage of deep bass and sonic resistance; ‘Foundation’, because they wanted to build something lasting from the margins.

From the early days, Asian Dub Foundation rejected any decorative notion of multiculturalism. Their music was a direct confrontation. Jungle, drum’n’bass, dub and ragga fused with Indian tablas, incendiary guitars, scratches, spoken word and seismic basslines. Their concerts quickly became legendary: physical, chaotic, political, almost insurrectionary. Somewhere between rave and street protest.

Albums such as Facts and Fictions (1995), Rafi’s Revenge (1998) and Community Music (2000) defined a distinctive aesthetic: dance music with a historical consciousness. They spoke of police brutality, structural racism, European fascism, colonialism, surveillance and social exclusion without ever losing the collective impulse of celebration. Songs such as ‘Naxalite’, ‘Free Satpal Ram’ or ‘Fortress Europe’ continue to sound alarmingly relevant on a continent that insists on erecting physical and mental borders.

But the Asian Dub Foundation was never just about anger. There is a deeply communal idea in their music: the dance floor as a space for gathering and resistance. The bass engages the body, but also stimulates thought. Like The Clash before them, they understood that popular energy and political consciousness need not go hand in hand.

Over more than three decades, they have collaborated with artists as diverse as Sinéad O’Connor, Iggy Pop, Radiohead, Chuck D and Primal Scream, composed soundtracks for silent films and continued to reinvent their musical vocabulary across electronic, dub, rock and South Asian music. Without nostalgia. Without submission.

Live, Asian Dub Foundation remain an electric force. There is something urgent and unruly about the way they take to the stage. The beats surge forward like urban protests, the basslines vibrate like sirens and the vocals burst forth like slogans. At a time when music so often shies away from conflict, ADF remind us that dancing can also be a political gesture. And that sound, when born on the streets, can still shake things up.

Groundation

(US)

Reggae was born of a wound. It sprang from the barren soil of Jamaica, from bodies that crossed the Atlantic in chains, and from generations who learnt to survive by transforming pain into rhythm and oppression into prayer. But the music that pain produces knows no geographical boundaries, and that is precisely what The Groundation did: take that flame off the island, feed it with other fuels, and return it to the world with an intensity that Bob Marley would surely recognise as his own.

Groundation was formed in 1998 on the campus of Sonoma State University in northern California, as part of a jazz programme. Harrison Stafford, its leader and vocalist, was studying jazz when he formed the group. The son and grandson of jazz musicians, he grew up listening to Count Basie with the same ease with which he discovered the Wailers.

This convergence of worlds was neither an accident nor a pose: it was the raw material for something genuinely new. Between 1999 and 2001, Stafford taught the first accredited course on the history of reggae at a Californian public university because, for him, before playing, one had to understand. And he understood so well that he helped redefine what American reggae could be.

The name ‘Groundation’ comes from a Rastafarian ceremony celebrating the connection to the earth and one’s origins. A perfect synthesis of what the group would come to represent: music as ritual and consciousness.

In 2002, the album Hebron Gate catapulted Groundation to international fame, and France, almost immediately, became a second home for the band. Since then, they have built a discography that blends traditional roots reggae with jazz improvisation, funk rhythms, dub effects and Afro-Cuban and Latin influences, always with the social consciousness that is the hallmark of roots reggae: the struggle for justice, criticism of greed, and the call for unity. Over the years, they have collaborated with legends such as Don Carlos, The Congos, Apple Gabriel and Israel Vibration, deliberately bridging the gap between generations.

In 2025, Groundation released their 11th studio album, Candle Burning A musical journey that does not dwell on the negative, but embraces the light, the fire and the life that burns within us. The album features collaborations with Alpha Blondy, Mutabaruka, Thomas Mapfumo and Mykal Rose. A council of sages from the African and Caribbean diaspora gathered around a message of serene resistance. Recorded on analogue tape at the legendary ICP Studios in Brussels, the album preserves the raw energy and organic sound for which the band is renowned, as if resistance to the digital were itself a political act.

In 2026, the group performs at Med in Loulé with the power of the classics and the freshness of those who have never surrendered to inertia. Each concert is a sonic ritual that spans genres and generations, from the purest roots to jazz improvisation, with the emotional intensity of those who make music a cause.

ANTHONY B

(JM)

SAMIFATI present TRANSE GNAWA EXPRESS

(MA/FR)