Although the Huelgas Ensemble has performed in some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls (including the BBC Proms, Lincoln Center, Cité de la Musique, Berlin Philharmonic, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) over the course of its 50-year prolific career, the group has chosen as its ‘natural habitat’ the ancient chapels, churches, and abbeys scattered throughout the various territories, in which architecture more fully reveals the polyphonies of its repertoire. Hence, this is a special privilege for us to hear the ancient music in which the Huelgas Ensemble specializes, in the magnificent setting of Évora Cathedral. The Huelgas Ensemble is committed to historically accurate interpretations of choral pieces from the Medieval and Renaissance periods. To open Imaterial, they bring a program dedicated to Vicente Lusitano, a black composer born in Portugal in the 16th century, regarded as a pioneer in European classical music, and who is believed to have studied in Évora.

If it is unlikely that an all-male group from Jajouka, a small village in the foothills of the Rif Mountains, about a hundred kilometres from the port city of Tangier, would become a major representative of roots music on a global scale, it is even more unlikely that they would have been discovered by a Rolling Stones musician who came to Jajouka one day in 1962 to meet them. Brian Jones was the first to introduce the world to the hypnotic and ancient musical heritage preserved by the Attar family, whose magnetism stems from having been passed on from parent to child in a remote place, and cultivated throughout the performers' whole lives. Their repertoire includes ancient themes (the oldest of which was played for the Sultan for centuries, both in his palace and on the battlefield) as well as new compositions. Listening to the Master Musicians of Jajouka is like leaning your ear against a music that has been blowing for centuries before finally reaching us.

Ana Lua Caiano grew up listening to José Afonso and Fausto on car trips with her parents; later on, as a teenager, she immersed in obsessive listening to records by Björk and Portishead. Almost everything is said. The urgent and blazing songs on her first EP, Cheguei Tarde a Ontem, come about like new visits to a familiar Portugal - melodies inspired by tradition, a bombo as the main rhythmic engine, and synths and electronics running between the lines. Because Ana Lua Caiano is tradition and contemporary in a single body, she is remote Portugal and the cosmopolitism of a world brought closer by technology in a single voice. She is a clear example of the way reinvented tradition can be touched by our days issues (the restlessness, the urgency, the abusive relationships, the desire to be everywhere at the same time). Ana Lua Caiano's music hits Imaterial at the moment she releases her long-awaited second EP, Se Dançar É Só Depois.

'Ibéria' is not just the territory we know as the land of Portugal and Spain together. Iberia (no accent) is also the ancient Greek and Roman name for Georgia’s eastern region. This is where the Iberi Choir comes from. It is a group dedicated to specific Georgian polyphonic singing, which has been inscribed in UNESCO’s representative list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Although Georgian singing has a trunk and a traditional repertoire common to various parts of the country, the members of the Iberi Choir take advantage of the improvisational qualities of this music to recreate, in a unique way, themes that are part of our collective heritage - which can be found in both sacred music and work songs. Basically, as is often the case, the Iberi Choir’s music is an extension of everyday life - of concerns, beliefs, and reasons to celebrate.

Kaito Winse grew up in a griot family in Lankoué, a small village in northern Burkina Faso. And, as is always the case among griots, it is his job to preserve tradition and pass on his people’s stories. Winse is a multi-instrumentalist who seems to need the variety of sounds he seeks around him to create a musical palette that fits his extraordinary voice, a vehicle of an inspiring poetic richness and a filigree in which one can hear an almost operatic quality. Mariana Duarte wrote in “Público” on Winse's passionate stage presence, calling him "one of the most electrifying vocalists we've seen in recent times - he sings, dances, and skips from instrument to instrument”. From Brussels, where he currently lives, Kaito Winse seems to perceive his home country more clearly, and to return there thanks to an incandescent music.

When the Malian Trio Da Kali released a record of their work with the outstanding Kronos Quartet in 2017, the world was introduced to their enchanting music. Ladilikan, the jointly created CD, would be included in the best of the year lists of magazines such as The Guardian, Songlines, Folk Roots, and Uncut, in a unanimous acclaim to the music of a group hailing from the Mandinka culture, in the country's south, and from a long griot lineage. Committed to the mission of rescuing forgotten repertoires and griot techniques of instrumental execution on the verge of extinction, the two musicians Fodé Lassana Diabaté (member of the Symmetric Orchestra of Toumani Diabaté, balafon) and Mamadou Kouyaté (ngoni bass), and the singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté are old acquaintances whom fate was slow to bring together. With their limited resources, they raise to its very essence a music that is a beautiful, subtle, and poignant recreation of a pre-colonial narrative legacy. As if going back to the past were the only possible destination for the future.

Not all cradles are the same – in some of them, music is present from the very first minute and leads the way. Sougata Roy Chowdhury is the son of Sarbari Roy Chowdhury, the eminent sculptor and also a great music connoisseur, with one of the greatest collections of Indian classical music; his mother is the amazing singer Ajanta Roy Chowdhury. His home atmosphere was dominated by Indian classical music, and at the age of ten Sougata took the next step and surrendered to the sarod, a central chordophone in this tradition; within a few years, his talent made him one of the most respected musicians of his generation. Having worked with several masters, Sougata Chowdhury is still a disciple - according to the notion that learning is an endless process - but his music has long been that of a true master too, trained in traditional Ragas, although his language is increasingly free and personal, capable of evolving in a few seconds from distended notes in a meditative tone to a stunning virtuosity. He will tell us all about this, with Nihar Mehta on the tablas.

Kayhan Kalhor is aware that today the role of a traditional musician is very different from what it was 100 or 200 years ago. If a traditional musician used to play in his village or region and grant a place for music in the context of the local community, nowadays he has broadened his scale and has become someone who not only preserves, but also discloses a particular tradition. In his case, an amazing interpreter of the kamancheh (a violin-like chordophone) and one of the most recognized global representatives of Iranian culture, his commitment is to Persian classical music, aware that change is a natural consequence of time - without change, tradition is almost inevitably doomed to extinction. In his magnificent trio ‘Art of Improvisation’, Kalhor is accompanied by Kiya Tabassian and Behnam Samani. All three shape the luminous expression of an enveloping musical experience, one that puts those who listen to it into an aesthetically pleasing trance.

Heartbreak is undoubtedly the most explored theme in popular music, regardless its geography. So, it is all the more surprising when an album like Marchita, the debut of Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada (if you ignore the on-disc collaboration with guitarist Charlie Hunter) causes such an earthquake in the music industry. Acclaiming reviews have come from all over the world, the Breakthrough Grammy was awarded at the end of 2022, and the certainty that we are dealing with one of the most passionate songwriters of the moment is now hardly open for discussion. After having studied in Venezuela (where she collected her inseparable cuatro), Silvana Estrada lived in New York and then returned to Mexico, the country that impregnates her creations. "When you grow up listening to Chavela Vargas," Estrada told the New York Times, "you realize that sadness is a vehicle for understanding the world." But life isn’t just about sadness; and after Marchita came the EP Abrazo, a celebration of love as a political force.

La Kaita (stage name of Maria de los Ángeles Salazar Saavedra), a Badajoz-born gipsy singer, is one of the most acclaimed voices of traditional flamenco, while also bringing to her music jaleos and tangos, typical genres of Extremadura. The former vocalist of the group ‘Pata Negra’, La Kaita sings as if she were pouring her soul out in each verse, with a voice entirely made of viscerality and emotions, with a rare intensity and the mirror of a full freedom that passes from life to her music. The filmmaker Tony Gatlif ( who is also present in this edition of Imaterial) was one of many to be dazzled by this shortcut found by La Kaita to the emotions of those who listen to her, and invited her to the films Vengo and Latcho Drom. La Kaita will perform in Évora with no artifice to distract the attention from her powerful vocal interpretations, accompanied by guitarists Miguel and Juan Vargas, father and son, expert musicians in tune with the almost wild register of the cantaora, who interprets a flamenco made actual by an urgency that can only be synonymous with present.

The Master Drummers of Burundi present a show that goes from birth to death. It may sound like an exaggeration or a metaphor well suited for texts introducing the group, but the truth is that this collective, gathered around traditional Burundi rhythms, brings to stage the music that goes along with various social rituals linked to their life in community, associated both to the celebration of births and farewells to the dead, and to invocations of fertility and ceremonies to raise a new king to the throne. Thus, the rhythms create a continuous dialogue with the entirety of life (in its various moments) and its musical expression is only one aspect of the performances that take place in a semi-circle and also include dance. The drums of the Master Drummers are made of wood from a tree that only exists in Burundi, and each musician plants the trees for the instruments of the one who will succeed him, feeding an unending cycle of renewal. An experience not to be missed.

They describe themselves as a group of young musicians brought together by their common love for traditional Kurdish music. Founded in exile in Istanbul in 2015, Danûk are inspired by music discovered in phonographic archives (in Berlin and Vienna) of folk and wedding songs of Kurdish culture; they bring these ancient sounds recorded in obsolete format into the present day, for those who relate to this music from a current artistic, sociological and political place. First found playing on the streets of Istanbul, they were eventually called upon to compose and perform soundtracks for film and radio, and finally joined Michael League (multi-instrumentalist and producer of the jazz band Snarky Puppy) in recording the album Morîk. Ultimately, Danûk's music is a search for their origins and for their belonging to a history greater than their own - looking back, not forgetting the foundations of a threatened culture, trying to ensure that the future is not synonymous with obliteration.

When Thanasis Zikas and Evi Seitanidou started exchanging musical ideas in 2014, they were far from imagining the sonic identity they would reach a year later: instead of shaping an aesthetics marked by a deep interest in electronics, they found themselves, after all, in a universe of acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies, in which Greek musical tradition was intertwined with blues or rock influences. Kadinelia's music is a bucolic imaginary, permeable to tsabounas (bagpipes) and lyres, beatboxing or psychedelic echoes, searching for the design of a sound landscape where (Near) East and West meet. It often sounds as close to Appalachian music and British folk as it does to Anatolian psychedelia and Greek rebetika (a multicultural melting pot that mixes local sounds with Byzantine and Ottoman influences). Kadinelia present at Imaterial their travel music, where each stop seems to concentrate several places at the same time.

Tautumeitas first engaged in traditional singing, repeating and closely following the songs that were passed down to them by their elders. But, little by little, they say, “as they got closer to the songs, the songs also got closer to them". This means that they allowed themselves to leave aside the reverence and the idea that tradition is a sacred and untouchable territory, choosing to bring their universe of instruments and influences to the themes of the Latvian traditional repertoire. And this also means that, in the Tautumeitas world, Latvian songs can keep their melodic origins, yet be arranged according to rules and features more identifiable with global pop. The outcome is a music that, despite its obvious peculiarities, instantly becomes familiar, as if the three thousand kilometers separating Portugal and Latvia were suddenly swallowed up in the short time span of each of their songs.

As José Luís Peixoto puts it, "Ganhões de Castro Verde know the size of the words they sing". And he gives the examples: "earth, sun, Alentejo". Such words are always ingrained in their voices, even if they are not always part of every lyric we hear. For their concert at Imaterial, the men who take their name from those who worked in the fields, sowing, harvesting or picking olives, join the singer Paulo Ribeiro in the show "O cante não cai do céu", adding to the ‘modas’ of the traditional songbook a set of new compositions written by the former leader of ‘Anonimato’. Paulo Ribeiro works on themes based on poems by Manuel da Fonseca, João Monge, Tiago Rodrigues or Patrícia Portela, with the perspective of renewing Cante's repertoire, bringing new insights into a music that is Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. So that Cante doesn't forget to grow outwards, rather than inwards.