Carthage Music
Carthage Music was founded in 2003 by record producer and author Joe Boyd—known for his work with artists such as Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, R.E.M., Toots & The Maytals, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and Toumani Diabaté, and for his influential label Hannibal, which he set up in the 1980s. Hannibal colleagues Guy Morris and Catherine Steinmann are the other founding partners and the more recent addition of producer Andrea Goertler completes the team. Carthage Music’s roster spans a rich and diverse range of artists and composers, among them 20th-century Bulgarian composer Philip Koutev, the acclaimed alternative country, blues and folk band Cowboy Junkies, celebrated singer-songwriter Bonnie Dobson, renowned Malian griot singer Kasse Mady Diabaté and his daughter Hawa Diabaté, and more recent signing, the UK/Belgian folk collective Remorae.
Artists
Bonnie Dobson
Canadian-born folk singer-songwriter started her career in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, and is best known as the composer of the ever-fresh 'Morning Dew'. Bonnie’s career was reignited when she was invited to perform at Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown in 2007 as one of the Lost Ladies of Folk, sparking a new era of creativity. She released an album for the Hornbeam label in 2014. Bonnie continued to write new songs and to interact with a host of London musicians and met the Hanging Stars in the early 2020s. By now in her eighties, Bonnie and the psychedelic cowboys proved a match ripe to be made. With no concrete plan, they worked up a few songs, then went back into Sean Read’s studio to see what might happen. The result was Dreams, comprising eight songs, six of which were recent compositions never before studio-recorded. The album was released to critical acclaim on Loose Music in 2025.
Chris Franck
Chris Franck is a Dutch-born English multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, record producer, and remixer, best known for his involvement with the bands Batu, Da Lata, Smoke City, and Zeep. Franck's musical influences include samba, Bossa nova, the music of Africa, folk music and funk. Chris initially gained success in 1992 in the group Batu, featuring Oli Savill, Franc O'Shea and Tristan Banks, among others. He went on to form Smoke City with Brazilian vocalist Nina Miranda (his ex-partner). A blend of acid jazz, trip hop, samba and bossa nova, Smoke City helped define the London music scene in the late 1990s. Their single ‘Underwater Love’ debuted on the UK Singles Chart after appearing as part of a Levi's ad campaign in the United Kingdom. Chris co-wrote and produced two albums with Smoke City for Jive Records: Flying Away and Heroes of Nature. Zeep emerged as a follow-up live band which Franck created with Nina Miranda.
Colin Bass
Colin Bass is an English musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. Over five decades, he has worked in a wide range of musical fields with a diverse range of international artists, including British prog-rock veterans, Camel, and world-music pioneers, 3 Mustaphas 3. He was a member of British guitarist Steve Hillage’s Band and has appeared as bassist on albums by the Malian singer, Oumou Sangare, Zimbabwean Mbira Queen, Stella Chiweshe, and Senegambian kora masters, Dembo Konte and Kausu Kouyateh. He has released three albums under his own name – An Outcast of the Islands (1998), In The Meantime (2003), At Wild End (2014) and a series of three albums in the guise of his 3 Mustaphas 3 persona, Sabah Habas Mustapha. The title track of the first, ‘Denpasar Moon’, became a hugely popular song in Indonesia in the mid-1990s and has been covered by over 50 Indonesian, Malaysian, and Japanese artists.
Cordelia’s Dad
Cordelia’s Dad is an American folk punk band instrumental in creating the genre later dubbed “No Depression”. Formed in 1987 in Northampton, Massachusetts, by Amherst students Tim Eriksen, Peter Irvine, and Tom King with later line-ups including Cath Oss and Laura Risk. Beginning with an unabashed punk rock fury and evolving into the tender, intricate acoustic songs of Spine (1998), with powerful harmony singing, haunting melodies, and insistent rhythm. The band have travelled throughout North America and Europe, melding their passionate interpretations of early American hymns, ballads, and fiddle and banjo tunes with their own contemporary pop music sensibilities. Largely dormant since 1999, Cordelia’s Dad emerged briefly from a hiatus in 2002, releasing What It Is, and in 2007 for a series of anniversary shows. Cordelia’s Dad taps into deep veins of American experience and musical tradition, forging a sound that’s just as surprising as it is familiar.
Damir Imamović
Damir Imamović is a singer, composer, author and sevdah master from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since 2005, he has performed and recorded with his Trio, his quartet Sevdah Takht and various international collaborators. Descending from a family dynasty of sevdah musicians, he represents a new generation of artists taking their country’s traditional music forward. He has released seven albums, with renowned producers such as Chris Eckman on Dvojka, and Joe Boyd and Andrea Goertler for his last two albums, Singer of Tales (2020) and The World and All That it Holds (2023), a genre-spanning creative collaboration with Bosnian American author Aleksandar Hemon. Damir regularly writes for theatre and film, produces other Bosnian artists, and is a passionate music educator. He is the author of the histories Sevdah (2016) and Saz in Sarajevo (2026).
Greg Cohen
Greg Cohen is an acclaimed American jazz bassist best known for his foundational work with John Zorn's Masada Quartet. Greg has worked with a wide variety of artists in many styles of music, from traditional jazz with Ornette Coleman, Ken Peplowski, Kenny Davern, Marty Grosz and the filmmaker/clarinettist Woody Allen, to other collaborations including Tom Waits, David Byrne, Elvis Costello, Dagmar Krause, David Sanborn, Susana Baca, Laurie Anderson, Willie Nelson, Norah Jones, Dave Douglas, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed. He has worked as an arranger, producer, musical director and composer for theatre, film, television and recording studios. He is a professor at the Jazz Institute Berlin and an honorary professor in contemporary rhythmic music at the SDMK – Danish National Academy of Music.
Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté
Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, a jelimuso (female jeli or ‘griot’) from Mali, has acquired a cult following as the charismatic singer of Trio Da Kali, an acoustic trio which was formed by the Aga Khan Music Initiative to collaborate with the Kronos Quartet. She received rapturous reviews for her work on Kronos and Trio Da Kali’s collaborative award-winning album Ladilikan. Her charismatic voice is 21st-century, but it is also steeped in the rich heritage of Mali’s griots, the hereditary musicians that date back to the founding of the Mali Empire in the 13th century. She was born into a celebrated griot family, the Diabatés of Kela, a village in southwest Mali famous for its music. Diabaté’s father, Kassé Mady Diabaté, was known for his entrancing singing, moving his listeners to tears —from which he gets his nickname, Kassé, ‘to weep’—a quality that Hawa has inherited, along with the nickname.
Kassé Mady Diabaté
Malian singer Kassé Mady Diabaté is considered one of the greatest traditional Mande voices of his generation. Kassé Mady’s timeless music is borne out of the West African tradition of the griot, a cultural figure and oral historian whose role is to record cultural identity and knowledge through oratory, lyricism and musicianship. Albums included 2003’s Kassi Kasse, featuring guest appearances by Toumani Diabaté and bass player Orlando Cachaito López, Manden Djeli Kan (2009), and Kiriké (2013). Kassé Mady’s very last project was with leading Spanish conductor and musician Jordi Savall’s monumental ensemble performance, The Routes of Slavery 1944-1888, which traced the tragic history of the transatlantic slave trade through European, African, and South American musical traditions. Kassé Mady Diabaté passed away in Bamako on May 24, aged 69.
Peter Irvine
Peter Irvine is a percussionist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist with a background spanning orchestral, theatrical, and experimental music. He is a founding member of legendary American folk punk band Cordelia's Dad. Peter performed at the Academy Awards, numerous prestigious arts venues, including the Barbican, Lincoln, and Kennedy Center. Also live on innumerable radio stations including BBC, CBC, KCRW and Mountain Stage, Peter is a longtime collaborator of Tim Eriksen, with whom he founded the folk-noise outfit Cordelia’s Dad. The two are probably best known for their musical contributions to films including the Oscar-winning Cold Mountain and cult horror phenomenon The Outwaters. In recent years, they regularly perform Pumpkintown, the duo's New England magic lantern show with painter/projectionist Susan Brearey and released the duo album Absence and her sister (Soundkeeper Recordings) in 2026, which echoes their wide palette of musical styles and influences.
Remorae
Remorae are a collective of folk, jazz and electronic musicians brought together by the Folkatron Sessions recording project. Described as “eclectic”, “genre-bending”, and “an English Lankum”, Remorae intertwines strings, close harmony vocals, and electric guitar with live electronics to create sound worlds that shift between ambient, pulsing, cinematic and intimate, sometimes shimmering and glitching, sometimes raw and strange. Exploring traditional musics through experimental processes, their EP Flourish in Green (2024) is the culmination of many years of experimenting with musical forms and modes of collaboration in unique constellations of artists and represents a pivot point in the group’s creative practice, centring improvisation and live performance.
Tim Eriksen
Singer, composer and ethnomusicologist Tim Eriksen is one of the greatest living exponents of traditional American folksong and an innovative multi-instrumentalist. His background and ongoing collaborations cover a dizzying array of genres: hardcore punk, ‘shapenote’, Bosnian folk-pop, Carnatic classical, experimental electro-acoustic and symphonic music, to name a few. He is a founding member of seminal bands including Cordelia’s Dad, Zabe i Babe and Northampton Harmony. Known for extensive contributions to films including the Oscar-winning ‘Cold Mountain’, his current projects include writing songs for Alison Krauss, performing with Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy and creating new works with Afro-Cuban pianist Omar Sosa, collaboration with the nine-piece experimental group Batteries Die, music for the indie horror film ‘The Outwaters’, and a posthumous duet with Macedonian music icon Esma Redzepova. Eriksen has long been at the forefront of an international Sacred Harp or ‘shapenote’ singing revival. His song ‘I Wish the Wars Were All Over’ was chosen by Joan Baez to be her final recorded musical statement.
Cowboy Junkies
Cowboy Junkies are a Canadian alternative country/blues/folk rock band. The group was formed in Toronto, Ontario, in 1985 by siblings Margo Timmins, Michael Timmins, Peter Timmins, and their friend Alan Anton. After recording their debut album it was the follow-up release that brought the group international recognition. The Trinity Session was recorded live in one day in a church in Toronto in 1987 and included a perfectly conceived mix of covers, including Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane’, Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, and Patsy Cline’s ‘Walking After Midnight’, and original compositions. The melancholic mix of Margo’s soft, beautiful voice teamed with Michael Timmins’ introspective lyrics and guitar playing, instantly made The Trinity Session a cult classic. Cowboy Junkies have gone on to record 16 studio albums and five live albums and continue to regularly tour North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
The Funk Ark
The Funk Ark was formed in 2007 by the Washington DC composer and keyboard player Will Rast, formerly a member of the Afrobeat group Antibalas. Across three exceptional albums, The Funk Ark nurtured a polyrhythmic funk sound, with a driving beat acting as a bed for soaring melodic improvisation and tight, powerful horn lines, a homage to vintage Afrobeat, Latin and funk stylings, recalling the best of Afrika 70, the JB’s and the Fania Allstars. Their first two albums, From The Rooftops and High Noon, were released on ESL and recorded at EST Music Studios with Thievery Corporation’s sound engineer Christopher 'Stone' Garrett. The third album, Man Is Monster, was released on the Philadelphia indie record label Ropeadope.
Guitari Baro
Guitari Baro – meaning ‘Guitar Conversations’ – is a groundbreaking instrumental trio from West Africa. The ensemble features three renowned griot musicians from Guinea and Mali: guitarists Gaoussou Kouyaté and Kerfala Diabaté, joined by balafonist Lassana Diabaté. The project features musical conversations across their shared Mande griot musical heritage, drawing on the entrancing regional styles of the repertoire, while also referencing idioms from jazz, Congolese rumba, rock, Guinean dance bands, and Cuban music, evoking the past and present in sublime, futuristic ways. Their debut album Guitari Baro, produced by Dudu Sarr and Lucy Durán, was released by Chrysalis Records in 2025.
Ivana Đurić
Ivana Đurić is a virtuoso Bosnian violinist and arranger. Born in 1984 in Sarajevo, she began her classical music education when she was 9 years old and studied the violin in Bosnia and France. From 2010 to 2014, she was a member of the National Radio-TV Orchestra and still regularly performs with them on a variety of projects. In her twenties, she started to passionately research and arrange traditional Bosnian sevdah music. She first met Damir Imamović as a studio musician. After several years of musical collaboration and friendship, she joined his band Sevdah Takht in 2015. She features on and has (co-)arranged works on Imamović’s acclaimed albums Dvojka (Glitterbeat Records, 2016), Singer of Tales (Wrasse Records, 2020), and The World and All That It Holds (Smithsonian Folkways, 2023).
Maya Youssef
Maya Youssef is an award-winning Syrian qanun player and composer from Damascus, Syria. Her story began at the age of nine while on her way to the music institute in her hometown, where she was reluctantly studying the violin. A beautiful sound was drifting through the air from a nearby taxi, and it stopped her in her tracks – it was the sound of the qanun. Now based in the UK, Maya Youssef is hailed as “queen of the qanun”, the 78-stringed Middle Eastern plucked zither. Her debut album, Syrian Dreams (Harmonia Mundi, 2017) was critically acclaimed and led to awards, performances on prestigious stages such as the BBC Proms and WOMAD, and recognition from the British government. For her follow-up album, Finding Home (2022), Maya turned to producer Leo Abrahams for a poignant reflection on finding a spiritual home away from a war-torn homeland. Maya’s intense and thoughtful compositions are rooted in the Arabic classical tradition but forge pathways into jazz, Western classical and Latin styles and explore the emotional and healing qualities of music.
Philip Koutev
Philip Koutev was a groundbreaking Bulgarian composer and arranger, whose original compositions are still considered masterpieces today. His lifelong dream was to bring Bulgaria's rich folklore tradition to the stage. Together with his wife Maria Kouteva, he founded in 1951 by Bulgaria's government, the State Ensemble for Folk Song and Dance, known as the Philip Koutev Ensemble. With his choir, he pioneered a style of arranging folk songs by fusing traditional elements, such as the open-throat vocal technique, with Western classical forms and harmonies. In 1965, Elektra Records released a live recording of Music of Bulgaria, which caused a sensation in the rest of the world that was repeated two decades later, when the Grammy-winning album Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares took audiences by storm and established the sound of Bulgarian women's choirs as one of the world's most distinctive and best-loved. You can also hear his work ‘Polegnala e Todora’ in the opening music of the Oscar-nominated film ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’.
Richard Shindell
Richard Shindell’s songs paint pictures, tell stories, juxtapose ideas and images, and inhabit characters, vividly evoking entire worlds along the way. From his first record, Sparrow's Point (1992) to his current release, The Conditional (2025), Richard has explored the possibilities offered by this most elastic and variable of cultural confections: the song. He signed a record deal with Shanachie Records in the 1990s, which released his first three albums, Sparrow’s Point (1992), Blue Divide (1994) and Reunion Hill (1997). The latter won the AFIM (NAIRD) award for "Best Contemporary Folk Album" in 1998. After moving to Argentina, he broadened his scope, collaborating and producing albums with various artists. He continues to tour nationally in the United States, with the occasional forays into Canada, the UK, and Europe. Although known primarily as a songwriter, Richard takes a more holistic view of his career. Producer, writer, singer, guitarist, interpreter: it all adds up to a life in music.
Yanka Rupkina
Yanka Rupkina (1938–2026) was one of Bulgaria’s most distinctive and celebrated voices. Affectionately known as the “Nightingale of Strandzha,” her native region, she devoted more than six decades to preserving, performing and bringing Bulgarian traditional music to audiences across the world. For more than thirty years she was the lead voice of the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Choir, which became legendary as the Mystère des Voix Bulgares and won a Grammy Award in 1990. Together with Eva Georgieva and Stoyanka Boneva she formed the renowned ensemble Trio Bulgarka, which gained prominence through their inclusion in the 1975 Hannibal Records compilation Balkana: The Music of Bulgaria. Yanka collaborated or appeared in projects involving international artists such as Kate Bush, Linda Ronstadt, Transglobal Underground and Leftfield. As a solo artist she continued to perform around the world, helping to bring the extraordinary expressive possibilities of Bulgarian folk singing to new audiences.
Da Lata
Da Lata is a London-based Afro-Latin dance collective formed by DJ Patrick Forge and composer/instrumentalist Chris Franck (Smoke City, Zeep) in the early 21st century. Their first album, Songs From The Tin, released on Chris Blackwell's label Palm Pictures in 2000, was an instant classic and dance-floor favourite. Over three further albums – Fabiola, Birds, and Edge of Reason, Da Lata have continued to evolve, with Chris Franck gathering ever-changing line-ups of outstanding multi-instrumentalists (horns, flute, percussion, guitar, keyboards) and vocalists from Brazil, Senegal, Cape Verde, the USA, Japan, the UK and more.
Fodé Lassana Diabaté
Fodé Lassana Diabaté is one of West Africa’s finest traditional balafon players. Born in Guinea into a leading family of balafon players, he relocated to Mali in the 1990s at the invitation of Ami Koita, one of Mali’s most popular divas of the time, to be part of her ensemble. He has since recorded and performed with many of Mali’s top artists, such as Toumani Diabaté, Salif Keita, Babani Koné, Tiken Jah Fakoly, and Bassekou Kouyaté and has collaborated with international artists across a number of genres, including classical (especially with the Kronos Quartet), jazz and Latin music. Lassana is a founding member of the Malian group Trio Da Kali, and leads the balafon/guitar trio Guitari Baro. His virtuosic playing can be heard on the legendary albums Kulanjan (Hannibal, 1999), those by Toumani Diabaté’s Symmetric Orchestra, and the Grammy-nominated Mali-Cuba collaboration AfroCubism (World Circuit, 2010). In 2020, he recorded his first solo balafon album, Bala, which was re-released in 2025 by Smithsonian Folkways.
Hank Dogs
The South East London country folk band Hank Dogs are Andy Allan, his ex-partner, Piano, and Lily, Andy's daughter from a previous relationship. Discovered by record producer Joe Boyd while playing London folk clubs in London in the 1990s, he declared them the first British act he'd loved in 30 years and released their debut album Bareback on his Hannibal label. A quiet, haunting sound, ethereal vocal harmonies, strong traces of blues and Celtic music and Allan's fluid acoustic fingerpicking created a cult fanbase. A follow-up album, Half Smile, followed in 2002 before they went their separate ways. However, the story was not quite over – a third album, Fiveways, was released retrospectively in 2024 on South London label Scratchy Records. This had their trademark English folk/US country-straddling sound, with occasional hints of Dolores Cranberry and Bridget St. John.
Ivo Papasov
Known by his fans around the world as ‘The King Of Wedding Band Music’, Bulgarian music legend Ivo Papasov is a master of the Balkan clarinet. In 1974, Ivo formed his Trakija band and so began a revolution in Balkan music. Starting with a purely traditional repertoire, it gradually incorporated more and more improvisation and a diversity of styles. This was the beginning of a new movement that would later be known as ‘wedding band music’. Meeting Joe Boyd in Bulgaria during the 80s led to two albums, Orpheus Ascending (1989) and Balkanology (1991), produced by Joe Boyd and released internationally by Hannibal Records. Live tours followed in the USA, Canada and Britain. In 2005, Ivo received the BBC Radio 3 World Music Audience Award. The exposure that followed led to a recording contract with World Village/Harmonia Mundi and an impressive new album, Dance Of The Falcon, released in 2008. He received the prestigious WOMEX Artist Award in 2022.
Muzsikás
The traditional Hungarian group Muzsikás, along with legendary singer Márta Sebestyén, was a leading force in the 1970s Dance House Movement that rediscovered the authentic folk music traditions of Hungary that were suppressed during the Soviet era. Their album, Máramaros – The Lost Jewish Music of Transylvania (1993), documented the pre-World War II traditional Jewish folk and klezmer repertoire of the Maramures region. It was a worldwide success and the first CD to be sold at Washington, DC’s Holocaust Museum. Collaborations with classical ensembles followed, presenting the roots of the music of Bartók and Kodály. This included The Bartók Album and a memorable Carnegie Hall concert in 2008, with the Takács Quartet. Carthage Music represents the copyrights of Muzsikás members past and present: Sándor Csoóri, Peter Eri, Daniel Hamar, László Portelecki and Mihaly Sipos.
The Purple Gang
The Purple Gang is a sixties jug band from Stockport who caught the attention of the London Underground music scene and teetered on the brink of success during the ‘Summer of Love’, sharing stages with Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens and The Incredible String Band. Their debut single ‘Granny Takes A Trip’, the title inspired by the Chelsea boutique of the same name, looked destined to become the soundtrack of 1967. It was not to be: the BBC banned the song because it had the word ‘trip’ in the title and so ended the dream of the hipster jug band before it had even really begun. But an iconic song will endure, and so it has proved for ‘Granny Takes A Trip’. Thanks to the belief and optimism of band leader and co-songwriter Chris Joe Beard, and the power of the internet, the song has achieved cult status in the ensuing decades and now sits alongside The Incredible String Band, Dr Strangely Strange and the Kinks, on many a ‘summer of love’ compilation.
Saz’iso
Saz’iso are an all-star group of virtuoso musicians and legendary singers from Southern Albania, assembled by veteran producer Joe Boyd and co-producers Andrea Goertler and Edit Pula. Together with Grammy-winning engineer Jerry Boys (Buena Vista Social Club, Ali Farka Touré, Orchestra Baobab), they produced their first album, At Least Wave Your Handkerchief At Me, released in 2017 to worldwide critical acclaim. The group includes vocalists Donika Pecallari, Adrianna Thanou, Robert Tralo and Pëllumb Meta and instrumentalists Aurel Qirjo (violin), Telando Feto (clarinet), Agron Murat (lute), Arsen Nasi (frame drum). During the past ten years, Saz’iso have been invited to concert halls and festivals all over Europe and the Balkans and have won numerous prizes, including Songlines’ 2018 Best of Europe and the German Radio Critic Association’s Award 2018. Their new album of Southern Albanian iso-polyphonic gems will be released in spring of 2027.
Will Rast
American jazz and funk pianist and keyboardist Will Rast began playing piano when he was five years old and composed his first short piano piece at the age of 10, going on to study under world-renowned pianist Fred Hirsch at the Manhattan School of Music, where he focused on jazz improvisation and theory. Will joined Antibalas in 2013 and played on their 2019 Grammy-nominated album Fu Chronicles. He caught the ear of Eric Hilton, producer and co-founder of Thievery Corporation, and began working with him on several recording projects related to their label, ESL Music, including Thievery Corporation’s seventh studio album Culture of Fear. Will now lives in Mexico, where he continues to expand his solo music career and explore Latin American collaborations.
Carthage Music Playlist:
Contact
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