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DIANA NYAD, host:

Time now to do a little traveling by way of music. Bob Duskis is our world music guide on the show. I'm sure you know Bob by now. He's the co-founder of Six Degrees Records up in San Francisco. Has his ear out all the time, every day of the year for the best things happening all over the globe in terms of music and the culture of music.

Bob, how have you been?

Mr. BOB DUSKIS: I've been well, Diana. I got my--I'm here in San Francisco with my ears hanging out.

NYAD: All right. Take us traveling. Let's hear some good tunes.

Mr. DUSKIS: Well, Diana, you know, I've been doing this a long time, I've been in the music business a long time. It takes a lot to sort of surprise me, but something came in the mail a few weeks ago, put it in the CD player, looked kind of interesting and I just sort of stopped and said, `Wow, that's different.'

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Mr. DUSKIS: That's a record called "Hip-Hop Khasene" by a duo called Solomon & Socalled. And what it is, Diana, is a fusion of Jewish klezmer music, which is Jewish sort of dance jazz music, and dance electronic and hip-hop textures. Not two worlds you would think would come together.

NYAD: No.

Mr. DUSKIS: And surprisingly enough, it's actually really, really interesting.

(Audio clip played)

Mr. DUSKIS: Now, what you just heard, Diana...

NYAD: Yeah.

Mr. DUSKIS: ...is Socalled, who's the sort of deejay and beat creator in the group. Takes a lot of his chunks of sounds from old comedy records. And on this particular CD, he brings in some old Jewish comedy records and uses little bits of it and samples them and you hear it throughout the music. Now, Solomon, the other part of the duo...

NYAD: Yeah.

Mr. DUSKIS: ...Sophie Solomon, she's the violin player that you're hearing right now.

NYAD: OK.

Mr. DUSKIS: And she's actually--she's a child prodigy, she, you know, studied Jewish and klezmer music from a very young age, as well as classical music, and she's one of the founders of the very well know, in Europe, klezmer, new klezmer music band called Oi Va Voy. So these two have--these two have come together with this sort of very, very...(unintelligible)...a lot of sense of humor, and khasene is a Jewish wedding, a traditional Eastern European Jewish wedding.

NYAD: Right, right.

Mr. DUSKIS: And what this CD does is it takes you through musically the entire wedding, from the beginning to the blessings to the breaking of the glass and the mazel tov and the celebration. And sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's really heartbreakingly beautiful, and sometimes it's just plain crazy when the sort of hip-hop beats and dance beats combine with the traditional music.

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NYAD: You know what, Bob, that was a lot of fun. All I can say is oi! A lot of fun, a lot of fun.

Mr. DUSKIS: OK.

NYAD: All right, let's travel again. Take me somewhere else.

Mr. DUSKIS: Well, completely different. We have the new one from a group that used to be called the Afro-Celt Sound System, and on this, their fourth record and a new record, they've changed their name and just call themselves the Afro-Celts now. And this group combines the Celtic traditions with music from Africa. And the band was built around some surprising connections between Celtic music and African music. It seems that there is a theory among ethnomusicologists, Diana, that Ireland was settled in ancient times by African settlers who were traveling north along the Atlantic Coast, and you know, they left bits of their culture and their language behind. And the two musics, I don't want to get too technical for our listeners here, but the two musics do share some very similar rhythmic patterns and motifs. This band combines some great British and Irish fiddlers, pipes players, guitar players, with some great African musicians who are singing African. And also, we've got imbiras and kalimbas and you know, balofone, instruments that we know from African music. So the combo is very interesting, especially when you add on to it, as you hear on this piece, some driving sort of electronic techno rhythms as well.

NYAD: Let's hear them and maybe you can point out to us the Celtic and the African.

Mr. DUSKIS: OK.

(Audio Clip played)

Mr. DUSKIS: Well, right away, you can hear the mandolin and the guitar, which is coming from the Celtic tradition.

NYAD: Uh-huh.

Mr. DUSKIS: There's chanting vocals that are coming from an African tradition, and some of the rhythm is sort of electronic and then some of the accents in the rhythm are coming from African talking drums. So it's pretty seamless and that's what makes it work. It's more than the sum of its parts, let's put it that way.

NYAD: That's a good way to put it. It's really interesting, just a real collage of sounds, lots and lots of different sounds. All right, let's hear it up full again.

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Mr. DUSKIS: So this is the sort of more driving, upbeat electronic side of the record. We have another track which is called "Ayub's Song," which is sort of an homage to the great musician from Kenya Ayub Ogada, who occasionally plays with the group. And this will give you a little bit more of an idea that actually this record is the most organic of the four Afro-Celt records. And it features a lot of beautiful acoustic instruments, both Irish and African.

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Mr. DUSKIS: The CD is called "Seed" from the Afro-Celts.

NYAD: "Seed," S-e-e-d. And the first one, that--that wild klezmer music? What was that called?

Mr. DUSKIS: The duo is called--the duo is called Solomon & Socalled and the record is called "Hip-Hop Khasene."

NYAD: I defy anybody to listen to that one and not have a big smile on their face.

Mr. DUSKIS: Absolutely.

NYAD: Bob Duskis is co-founder of Six Degrees Records in San Francisco, our SAVVY TRAVELER guide to the world of music. Thanks so much, Bob, and we'll post everything, and you will, I suppose, too, up on savvytraveler.org so people can take a listen.

Mr. DUSKIS: We will, indeed.