If your playlist has gone stale, two new releases climbing the World Music charts offer very different escapes: one rooted in the Black Sea villages of northern Greece, the other in a big-band mambo revival stretching between Havana and New York.
First up is Protanixin by Greek composer and vocalist Stella Papalamprou, whose name means 'early springtime' or 'first spring shoots' in Pontic Greek. Papalamprou grew up in Grevena in Greek Macedonia and has been based in Barcelona since 2023, where she assembled an ensemble called Zafira around the traditional sounds of the Pontic Greeks — an ethnic Greek community historically centred on the Black Sea coast. The instrumentation is the star: Giorgos Vergos plays the Pontic lyra, a bottle-shaped three-stringed fiddle, plus the angion, a droneless bagpipe, while Nikos Filippides powers things along on the davul, a large double-headed drum.
The six-track, self-released album mixes Papalamprou's own compositions — touching on memory, migration, ecological decline and the emptying-out of mountain regions — with reinterpretations of traditional tunes. The title track, a swirling traditional love song, opens the record, but highlights include the catchy Seranta Mila and Trygona, a lovely ballad about a Black Sea woman who is both hardworking and alone, and beautiful and adorned. The singing has that aching, 'crying' quality you hear in Bulgarian choir music. It is a gorgeous gateway into one of Greece's most distinctive regional traditions — the kind of music you'll hear if you travel well beyond the islands.
Also charting is America!, the new album from Orquestra Akokàn, a Latin jazz outfit formed by musicians from Cuba and New York. Their name means 'from the heart' in Yoruba, the language of Cuba's Santeria religion. Signed to Daptone Records since their Latin Grammy-nominated 2018 debut, they channel mid-century mambo greats like Perez Prado, Beny More and Machito — but they're no covers band, folding boogaloo and Latin soul into a hot brass wall of son and salsa. New vocalists Mariam Elhaji and Caroline Oliveros front songs about loss and the immigrant experience, with No Me Voy, Mami Que Que and a cheeky closing cha cha cha standing out.
What's genuinely remarkable is how the album was made: the band recorded in Cuba despite the political and legal obstacles of US-Cuban collaboration — remember the trouble Ry Cooder landed in with Buena Vista Social Club in the 1990s. The gamble paid off, with players from the legendary Los Van Van and Irakere joining sessions.
Why should travellers care? Both records are passports to living musical cultures you can actually visit — the Pontic villages and mountain towns of northern Greece, where traditions of lyra and bagpipe still run deep, and Havana, where mambo's heirs are playing in the clubs right now. Put them on before you book.
