Welcome to Hyphenated: Music + Identity

TRANSCRIPT

Greetings! This is Hyphenated. My name is Ron Deutsch. Sorry I'm not here to take your call, but thanks for stopping by. And as an introduction, let me tell you a little bit about this project and who I am.

Hyphenated is an audio documentary series produced, written, and edited by me. I've been doing interviews with artists for over a quarter century. I've written for print and online publications ranging from MTV to to National Geographic, with a focus on world music. And for the last decade, I've been a featured contributor to National Public Radio's Afropop Worldwide program.

In recent years, in interviews I've done with what I call “hyphenated artists,” that being musicians with a hyphen between their identities, such as Haitian-Canadian, Nigerian-British, Angolan-French, there has been a recurring topic of conversation about the issues they face in trying to define themselves in their new home, how they search to understand who they are, and how others perceive them, and especially how this journey influences the music they create. And so I decided to start exploring this with these artists one -on -one, and the result of that is this series. Also, as one of might expect, their music is a reflection of who they are. Therefore, don't expect their music to fit neatly in one genre or another. There's no single checkbox for these artists or their music.

So the mission of Hyphenated is to explore how these immigrant and first -generation immigrants in the EU navigate this search for identity. It's about borders and frontiers both within themselves and their music.

I want to give these artists the space to tell their own stories.

In season one, you'll be introduced to artists, including Lucia, who was brought from war -torn Angola to an orphanage in Portugal and eventually was adopted by a family in northern France, and that is when her journey really begins. You'll meet Akram, who left Tunisia to become a classical violinist, and winds up playing oud in a jazz quintet. But even after awards and accolades, every year he must suffer the insecurity of waiting for a faceless bureaucrat to approve or decline his permit to stay. And Savanna, who leaves Paris to connect to her Armenian roots and finds herself in a war zone, meets her musical partner , and together they create a new musical genre, Armobeat.

But you will not just meet these musicians, you will also discover their music and how it is a part of their story.

Please like and subscribe to be notified of new episodes when they are posted, about every two weeks. Also the best way to support this project is to tell a friend about it, to buy recordings from these artists, add them to your streaming playlist, or better yet, go see them in concert. So I guess that's about it for now. Again, thank you for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy Hyphenated.