The month of May featured a big concert tour, the Cultural Caravan, in Ghana organized by the Cultural Affairs Services of the French Embassy in partnership with Vodafone. The Cultural Caravan was an initiative designed to challenge artists to develop entertainment by creating new ideas and material which will help the local industry grow.

The Culture Caravan is a musical in a contemporary context, with a DJ, a band, traditional musicians, dancers, artists and actors taking you through local fables, daily drama, current news and issues in a format that bears some resemblance to Concert Parties. Artistes on the bill included Reggie Rockstone, Kwaw Kese, King Ayisoba, Wanlov the Kubolor, DJ Black, Master Drummer Okyerema Yaw Kontor and his all female drummers and theatre starlet Abena Takyi amongst others.

Hungarian rapper, Marcus May is a perfect example for cosmopolitan. With the idea of a “global rap album” he started to organize a worldwide collaboration one and a half year ago. After hundreds of emails and several fixings his plan came true. The result talks for itself. 33 guests can be heard on his album, “Babel” in 33 different languages. These languages include Zulu (Firearms - http://www.myspace.com/firearmmusic)
and Swahili (Bcp Kachumbari - http://www.myspace.com/bcpkachumbari).

Through the organizing Marcus May became a real MySpace maniac. Soon he realized things aren’t that simple as he had to subdue some linguistic barriers. But with a great patience finally he could set off a project that hopefully becomes a movement.

A kind of movement that connects tongues, cultures and encourages people to use their mother languages.

You remember when we featured those kids from Guam (yes, look it up on Google) whose rendition of 2Face Idibia's African Queen became a Youtube phenomenon? We bring you a man from Germany who is gaining a lot of popularity by doing acoustic versions of different Nigerian songs. Nigerian music is reigning all over Africa and as if their swoops of the Channel O and MTV Africa Music Awards were not enough, Nigerian music is spreading far and wide and gaining staunch fans in placing you couldn't even imagine. Museke readers, meet Nicolas Georgakis (NG4Life), an African music fan who deserves all the props he is getting it.

Naija music don go Greek (international). Nicolas has many videos of him doing acoustic versions of 9ice's songs. He threw in a rendition of Olu Maintain's Yahooze as well. He asks that we pardon his Yoruba but for the most part, he has the lyrics on point. My guess is he learnt to sing the songs through Museke.com. :-)

Check out his acoustic cover for 9ice's Gongo Aso, he did well with the lyrics here

How do we as africans regard choral music?
Personally, i believe that choral music can be a way to keep african culture alive. apart from beating drums and dancing to it's sound, we can keep the oral stories told by our ancestors alive through choral music. There is nothing like listening to beautifull voices carrying a message. And in this case carrying the African story!!!!

My peoples my peoples we finally done DID IT!! After 2 years, 6 cities and 3 countries we have completed and released the latest Soulfège record “Take Back the Mic.” For a long time we’ve used the tag line “it’s more than music…it’s a movement.” Well if you listen to the record you’ll start to get an idea of what we mean. With contributions from a gang of musicians, producers and engineers representing expertise in everything from Rock to Dancehall we set out to create a soundtrack to the kind of world we want to live in.
And this is it.
Check out an album review on Museke.com

From guest blogger - Dominique

The Kotazo craze is sweeping the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's mixed with coupe decale (from Ivory Coast) but people from Kinshasa have created their own dance. It's kind of a reaction against coupe decale and traditional congolese dances described as too "quiet". So like in Coupe decale, people get crazy dancing on kotazo, mixing some capoeira dances, simulating fights. It's simple, you do what you can do ;) It's more aggressive than other Congolese dances.