Cafe International Daniel Rosenberg

On this week's Cafe International, our guest is Alan Tigay, from the website, World Listening Post. We'll speak about his new project: The 500 Greatest Global Songs of All Time, a remarkable list that he curated. We'll count down the top ten, which includes music from Aretha Franklin, Fela, Miriam Makeba, Juan Luis Guerra, and more!

Our guest this week on Cafe International is is Ukrainian singer Jamala. She has a new album called QIRIM – or Crimea, dedicated to the folk music of Crimea. In 2016, Jamala won the Eurovision Song Contest with her song, 1944, about the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Crimean Tatar population from that peninsula that year. One of those deported and sent to Central Asia was Jamala’s Great-Grandmother.

We will also hear from professor Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College) about the history of Crimean Tatar music.

With host Dan Rosenberg

On this week's episode of Cafe International, recorded in Bern, Switzerland, our guest is award winning singer and yodeler, Christine Lauterburg. In 1994, she became the first woman to win the Bäredräckpris from the City of Bern.

With host Dan Rosenberg

On today’s show, we visit Neuchatel Switzerland, a beautiful lakeside town – that in the middle of every August, is transformed by a remarkable buskers festival. But there aren’t jugglers or acrobats on unicycles, Instead, its pedestrian zone in the centre of the city becomes a huge global music festival – and on our show, we’ll hear music from Georgia, Sardinia, Syria, and Brazil. Our guests include founder of the Neuchatel Buskers Festival Georges Grillon plus members of the Lusophone group Ayom, the Sardinian polyphonic quartet Andhira and more!

On our program this week, our guest is Noam Vazana – or as she’s better known, Nani. She’s one of the very few artists in the world composing new songs in the nearly dead Ladino language – this is the language originally spoken by Sephardic Jews in Spain and Portugal before the time of the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 – and today, it’s spoken rarely, except for some communities in the Sephardic diaspora. Nani’s grandmother was one of those speakers, but Nani’s father prohibited them from speaking the language during Nani’s childhood.



We’ll hear music from Nani’s new album "Ke Haber" ("What's New"), featuring new music – often about contemporary subjects in Ladino – the language she was banned from speaking as a child. Later in the show, we’ll hear how Nani discovered an ancient poem that describes the transformation of a transgender teenage girl who came out to her parents, and wanted to be recognized as a boy. Nani found the poem when she was looking for material in an old library within a synagogue in Leiden, in the Netherlands.

With host Dan Rosenberg

On today's program, we speak with Marko Halaneyvich and Iryna
Gorban of the Ukrainian group DakhaBrakha. After Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, DakhaBrakha has performed over 200 concerts around the world in the past 500 days, including six concerts in Ukraine as its cities were being bombed.

We recorded this interview at the Sunfest in London, Ontario – much more than a typical summer arts festival, its mission includes presenting music that is threatened.

With host Dan Rosenberg