This year's WOMAD Festival features World Village artists Son de la Frontera and Justin Adams with Juldeh Camara! Embracing fusion and juxtaposition this year, the festival includes popular acts as well as traditional, with a star-studded line-up, consisting of Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, Orchestra Baobab, Dengue Fever, Martha Wainwright, Toumani Diabaté, and Eddy Grant & The Frontline Orchestra, among many others. Both Son de la Frontera and Justin Adams perform on Sunday July 27th, at the Siam Tent and the BBC Radio 3 Stage, respectively. For the rest of the line-up, go here.

Swedish-born cellist Beata Söderberg makes her World Village debut this July with Bailata, an exciting collaboration between Söderberg and the Argentinian group JusTango. Söderberg began playing the cello at the age of eight, and later attended the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. She received a full scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music and moved to New York, there falling in love with the music emanating from the "milongas" or tango clubs in the city. Swept away by the intensity and passion of tango, she began collaborating with New York musicians, experimenting with traditional tango and Tango Nuevo, and soon began to compose original tangos of her own.

Söderberg released Beatitudes in 2004, a Buenos Aires-flavored début that was a huge critical success, earning her a nomination for the Carlos Gardel Prize, the Argentinean equivalent of the Grammy Awards. Joining forces with the group JusTango, Söderberg followed up with BeSo in 2005. World Village will soon be re-issuing these two previous albums as well as Bailata.

Catherine Russell's Fresh Air eplsode on NPR aired June 11th and is streamable online here. Sentimental Streak is currently #3 on iTunes' Top Jazz Albums, as well as #8 on Amazon.com, with her debut album Cat at #24 on iTunes. Sentimental Streak is also back on the June Jazz Week Charts, at 44, making it 17 weeks so far on the chart!

Catherine Russell: 'Real Thing' Gets Sentimental

* Audio for today's show will be available at approx. 3:00 p.m. ET.

Fresh Air from WHYY, June 11, 2008 - Her father was Louis Armstrong's music director and a noted bandleader in his own right; her mother was a member of the iconic International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

Critic Nat Hentoff says that pedigree -- and her own unmistakable chops -- make Cat Russell "the real thing" in a crowd of jazz wannabes "who couldn't lasted through a chorus in a contest with Ella Fitzgerald or Betty Carter."

Russell talks to Terry Gross about her musical roots -- and about her new album, A Sentimental Streak.

Russell is also playing some newWest Coast dates in her current summer tour schedule. Show dates include Portland OR on 7/16, San Francisco on 7/22, and San Diego and Los Angeles on the 24th and 25th respectively.

World Village is proud to announce that Robert Plant guitarist and Tinariwen collaborator Justin Adams, with Gambian musician Juldeh Camara, has just won Best Culture Crossing Album in the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards for new album Soul Science (available in the U.S. May 13). Already an international sensation, the album was also included in the Top 100 Albums of 2007 in fRoots and Songlines magazines. You can watch the BBC World Music Awards highlights video here, and check the dates above to catch Adams and Camara live on tour in the U.K. with Tinariwen.

Declared "an exceptional effort" by Songlines, the album also features percussionist Salah Dawson Miller and bassist Billy Fuller, and achieves a white-hot synthesis of blues from several continents, American rock n' roll, and desert evenings when the moon seems well within reach. With fat, buzzing bass lines, searing fiddle riffs and no-holds-barred guitar licks, Soul Science feels like less of a cross-cultural collaboration than an endlessly fascinating dispatch from a new nation entirely.

"It might be a minority view, but this sounds more exciting to me than a Led Zeppelin reunion." - The Times, London

"Justin Adams is one of the most intriguing, enthusiastic musicians in Britain." - The Guardian (UK)

Highly acclaimed carnatic singer Aruna Sairam brings her highly sought-after vocal talents to World Village in Divine Inspiration this March. This extraordinary album features varying songs by nine different poets, of different periods and speaking many tongues. The overall theme, however, is admirably the denunciation of distinctions between caste, creed, gender and sectarianism.

Carnatic music, stemming from ancient times in South India, centers around a system of melodic 'ragam' and rhythmic 'talam', much like the rags and talas of the more well-known Hindustani music of the north. In Divine Inspiration, these elements are created by violin, tampura, hand cymbals and a variety of hand drums, reigned by Sairam's rich and concentrated voice.

Aruna Sairam will also tour North America in April and May, in support of the album, including dates in Canada, New York, California and Texas.

"Very rarely does it happen that both the richness of the melody and the exponent herself mesmerizes you completely. Aruna Sairam is one such remarkable artiste, who commands respect, inspires admirations and exudes humility." - The New Woman