Singer Duncan Laurence from the Netherlands has emerged victorious at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest. The finals were held Saturday night in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The 25-year-old Laurence won the international competition with a song called “Arcade,” which he co-wrote. The song is a sweet, emotional ballad that stands in contrast to Israeli singer Netta’s wacky “Toy,” which won in 2018.

Laurence, whose real name is Duncan de Moor, participated in the Dutch version of “The Voice” in 2014. He’s also been writing for other performers, including the K-pop band TVXQ.

In all, 41 countries started out in this year’s competition. The 26 finalists’ songs included a number of power ballads alongside Duncan’s, as well as perky, anodyne pop from artists like the Czech Republic’s Lake Malawi and Denmark’s Leonora; and aspiring club bangers from the artist Tamta, the singer representing Cyprus, and Belarus’ Zena, among many others.

But because this is Eurovision, where camp appeal often outweighs other factors, there was also Serhat — a dentist turned-television impresario-turned singer, who channels Leonard Cohen at the disco and represented tiny San Marino — and Iceland’s Hatari, which describes itself as an “anti-capitalist performance art group inspired by BDSM and anti-authoritarian dystopic aesthetics.”

Hatari reportedly “tested the patience” of the European Broadcasting Union, which mounts Eurovision, in the week leading up to the finals by repeatedly speaking out against the Israeli government.

More widely, this year’s event has been partly overshadowed by politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On Tuesday, hackers interrupted the Israeli live webcast of the first semi-final to warn, falsely, that the city of Tel Aviv was under attack. Israel’s national broadcaster, Kan, blamed Hamas for the hacking. Palestinian activists unsuccessfully urged performers to boycott Eurovision 2019.

Organizers said the Eurovision finals were being watched by 200 million people across the globe. However, the show was not broadcast in the United States this year after the Logo TV network, which carried the 2016 to 2018 editions, chose not to pick up this year’s contest.

Along with this year’s competitors, other performers at Eurovision 2019 included previous winners Netta from Israel, who won in 2018, and 2014’s winner, Conchita Wurst from Austria — as well Madonna, who performed “Like a Prayer,” as well as her new, reggae-flavored song “Future” with Migos’ Quavo.

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Step into springtime by tuning into some of the fresh new music that recently arrived at The Thistle & Shamrock offices in the U.S. and Scotland. We feature exciting new recordings form Dervish, Liz Carroll and Flook.

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In 1996, Omara Portuondo was working on an album at Havana’s famous recording studio, Egrem. Upstairs, American musician Ry Cooder was laying down tracks for Buena Vista Social Club, a project with veteran Cuban musicians like Compay Segundo. Portuondo was invited to come up and sing a duet with him. They sang “Veinte Anos,” a song Portuondo learned as a child.

“Without rehearsal, this was a live recording. One take. It’s unbelievable,” says Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez. He had scouted and rediscovered the older musicians for Buena Vista Social Club. But he says Portuondo was still a star on the island, and bringing her into the project was a dream.

“I remember that once, Mr. Ry Cooder told me, ‘Omara is the Cuban Sarah Vaughan.’ And I said to him, ‘No, Sarah Vaughan was the American Omara Portuondo,'” Gonzalez says.

NPR met up with the legend herself at a downtown Los Angeles hotel the day she began her latest world tour, deemed “The Last Kiss.” Now 88 years old, Portunodo sometimes sings answers to questions about her long career.

“Por eso, yo soy Cubana, y me muero siendo Cubana,” she sings: “I’m Cuban, and I’ll die Cuban.”

Portuondo’s first gig for her latest world tour was at LA’s Regent Theater. Even though she was sitting, she had the audience clapping, dancing and singing along.

“Omara is the most important singer of our culture,” Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca, who performs with Portuondo on the tour, says. “She’s able to do any Afro-Cuban style, Latin jazz, jazz, boleros, traditional Cuban music, rumba. She’s magical, intense, pure, strong.The audience … the public … they are crying, smiling, dancing. All the time, she’s making jokes.”

“Yes, she’s flirting with the audience the whole time,” Alicia Adams, international program director for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. says. Adams brought Portuondo to the center’s Cuban Arts Festival last year, and recalls seeing the singer peak out from beneath the curtain to wave to her fans. Adams says as relations between Cuba and the U.S. have morphed over the decades, Portuondo has always been a cultural ambassador.

“She spans before the revolution and after the revolution,” Adams says. “From before, when there was much more ability to go back and forth, until later years, after the revolution, when things were not so easy in terms of that kind of travel.”

Unlike some other Cuban musicians — including her sister Haydee and her old friend, the late Celia Cruz — Portuondo chose not to defect to the U.S. She says she comes and goes from her home in Cuba as she likes, pretty much like her father, Bartolo Portuondo, did. He’d been a black professional infielder for both the Cuban League and the Negro Leagues in the U.S. Portuondo says that he was a great baseball player and that her mother, who was white, scandalized her upper-class family by marrying him.

When she was a little girl, Portuondo dreamed of being a ballet dancer. But she says in those days, you could only dance ballet if you were white. Instead, she and Haydee danced and sang at Havana’s famous Tropicana. Later, in 1945, the sisters formed a quartet with two other women, Elena Burke and Moraima Secada (the aunt of singer Jon Secada’s.) The Cuarteto D’Aida danced and sang in nightclubs and on television. The quartet even backed Nat King Cole when he performed in Havana.

Portuondo sang with the quartet for 15 years before launching a solo career in 1963. Since then, she’s sung with everyone from Pablo Milanes and Chucho Valdes to Los Van Van and reggaetoners Yomil Y el Dany. She even sang in the 2009 Spanish version of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. For years, Portuondo was associated with Cuba’s movimiento filin — the feeling movement that celebrates singers who interpret lyrics with great emotion.

Portuondo remained a star in Cuba, but it was the Buena Vista Social Club that introduced her to an even bigger audience in the U.S. and around the world. Audiences wept for her duets with Ibrahim Ferrer, who Portuondo sang with in the 1950’s. He’d been long-forgotten until the Buena Vista Social Club. The group’s first album won a Grammy award in 1998. And an Oscar-nominated documentary by Wim Wenders chronicled the group’s journey from Cuba to an historic concert at Carnegie Hall.

Portuondo never stopped recording or performing. Gonzalez says for many years, Portuondo also sang with his band, the Afro-Cuban All Stars. As for this tour being her “last kiss”? Gonzalez says that’s just marketing ploy . “She’s going to die on the stage. That’s what she wants,” he says. “She’s the Cuban diva.”

And Portuondo agrees. “Despedida? No.” This is not goodbye, Portuondo says as she breaks into song: “Lo que me queda por vivir será en sonrisas“: “What I have left to live for is smiles,” she sings, adding “Me queda tiempo todavia,“: “I still have time.”

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Celebrate the coming of summer, the fertility of the season and the greening of the earth as Fiona Ritchie invites you to gather around the fires of “Beltane,” one of four ancient, annual Celtic festivals that mark the passage from one season to the next. Artists featured include Loreena McKennitt, The Poozies, and Jim Malcolm.

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Follow the historic migration from Scotland through Ulster into Pennsylvania and on down the Great Wagon Road to a final destination in the Southern Appalachians. Artists featured in this session include Patrick Street, Cara Dillon, and Sheila Kay Adams.

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Baloji is an artist who finds strength in his roots but freedom in between genres. He was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but has lived in Belgium most of his life. The rapper is a well-known name in Belgium and France. He’s received music honors for his work, but his life has been a journey of struggle and perseverance.

At 3 years old, Baloji’s father took him to Belgium without telling his mother. After dropping out of school and leaving home at 14, Baloji discovered hip-hop. Performing under the name MC Balo, the young upstart joined the hip-hop group Starflam. As the group began to gain popularity, Baloji received a letter from his mother that changed the course of his life and career.

“I was 26 years old when I received that letter for my mom. I thought at first it was fraud,” Baloji says. But his mother knew his birth date and sent him photos of when he was a baby. The letter impacted him greatly.

Baloji’s mother had seen him on TV performing with Starflam. “Your dad told me that he brought you to Belgium … to the land of Marvin Gaye,” she wrote. The American artist used to reside in Ostend, Belgium, the same city Baloji first moved to. Gaye’s music became the inspiration for his first solo project, especially the song “I Am Going Home.” “That really stuck in my head and inspired me to do my first album, which is dedicated to my mom,” Baloji says.

Baloji’s debut album, 2008’s Hotel Impala, was a collection of all his life experiences leading up to seeing his mother again. Ten years later, the artist’s 2018 album, 137 Avenue Kaniama and his upcoming follow-up, Kaniama: The Yellow Version, relate back to the message of Hotel Impala. For example, on “La Derniere Pluie,” the centerpiece of the album, Baloji remembers meeting his mother for the first time as an adult in the DRC and realizing their cultural differences.

“This song is talking about how we met physically, how it happened, how I was feeling, how she was feeling and how we were both nervous,” Baloji explains. Baloji had invited his mother to an upscale restaurant, but the expensive menu made his mother uncomfortable. “Every meal costs at least 20 dollars, we can buy a pack of rice for that price that will last a month,” she told him. “I was expecting us to hug and be in a loving relationship, and for her — I had to take care of her and his siblings,” Baloji adds.

Baloji music tackles issues large and small. From his family history, to the experience of refugees in Europe, to our dependence on smartphones. His goal, he says, is to create art that lasts and he can be proud of.

Listen to the conversation at the audio link.

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For the past three decades, Dervish has been at the forefront of reinventing traditional Irish folk songs. The Sligo-based band is “breathing new life” into the beloved music of its homeland with The Great Irish Songbook, an album pulling from an eclectic range of genres and the voices of over a dozen featured artists.

Collaborators on the album include Steve Earle, David Gray and Rhiannon Giddens and this project encompasses everything from traditional dance music to love ballads, including a W.B. Yeats-penned serenade “Down by the Sally Gardens” and the classic “The Rocky Road to Dublin.”

The Great Irish Songbook is out now. Founding Dervish member Shane Mitchell and longtime vocalist Cathy Jordan spoke with NPR’s Scott Simon about the band’s unlikely beginnings, the soul of Irish music and the making of The Great Irish Songbook. Hear the radio version of their conversation in the audio link and read on for interview highlights.

Interview Highlights

On the origin of Dervish

Mitchell: We basically were a group of friends that were growing up together. We were asked to make a recording of local music one time and we had to come up with a title for the album pretty quickly. And we were just called The Boys of Sligo.

Jordan: I wrecked it. [Laughs] They couldn’t be The Boys of Sligo anymore!

It was about ’91 when when I joined. I was, at that time, making cakes and making pastries in County Longford and singing on the weekends. I had known the guys for quite some time and they decided that it was time to get a singer and I decided that I was fed up making cakes. I hitchhiked down to Sligo with my rucksack on my back and never came back.

On why the Irish excel at songs about heartbreak

Jordan: The heartbreak, I guess, comes in many forms. It can come in immigration, leaving loved ones behind, of course, the affairs of the heart. We have far more songs about love unrequited than songs with happy endings, which I found [out] one time when I was asked to sing as somebody’s wedding. They wanted a lovely traditional Irish ballad with a happy ending and I couldn’t find one. There’s usually somebody dead by the third verse and betrayed by the fourth or whatever. So, I’m not quite sure, there could be many reasons for it, but we have a few happy endings songs, you’ll be delighted to know on The Great Irish Songbook.

On how beloved Irish music is around the globe

Mitchell: We continue to be surprised by how loved Irish music is. I suppose when we started this project nearly two years ago, the idea was to try and find people who had a love for Irish music from different genres of music. We found a lot of closet Irish folk music fans. In fact, we have enough to make three albums, somebody said at one stage.

I am so proud of our music, that there’s so much love and people get emotionally attached to us. It’s a very positive genre of music and this was one of the reasons why we looked at this project. These are iconic songs that we all grew up with. You know, Irish pub music, people come together and it was a great sense of camaraderie when people would sing together. We just think that this was a great way to approach an album — breathe new life into these wonderful old songs.

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Angélique Kidjo now has a pair of albums that are essentially covers of other artists, but interpreted with an African sensibility so majestic as to render the originals almost as source material.

On 2018’s Remain In Light, Kidjo made the implicit African influences of Talking Heads’ original vision explicit. Kidjo didn’t channel New Wave, or even rock and roll, as a starting point; instead, she used West African polyrhythms to reinterpret the band’s take on then-modern life in America. It was one of my favorite albums of last year.

Courtesy of the artist

Somehow Kidjo had the time to record a second tribute album, this time dedicated to an individual artist.

Celia refers to Celia Cruz, perhaps the most well-known vocalist to come from Cuba during any era. The ten tracks span several decades of Cruz’s career, from before she left Cuba in 1960 to her groundbreaking recordings for the celebrated Fania Records label in New York in the 1970s, to “La Vida Es Un Carnaval,” the 1998 song that became her late career hit and anthem. Kidjo’s reinterpretations rearrange the molecules of songs that many of us know by heart. The results are glorious.

The tongue twister “Cucala” becomes a rhythmic pattern for both guitar and hand drums as Kidjo sings the Spanish-language lyric that is an ode to joy of dancing. It’s a brilliant take on a song that I honestly thought couldn’t get any better.

Cruz never shied away from the island’s African culture, especially on songs like”Yemaya” and “Elegua.” These two tracks on Celia strip away the classic, horn-driven guaracha feel of La Sonora Matancera’s 1950s-era orchestrations and become deeply emotional prayers to the two Afro-Cuban deities.

“Quimbara,” one of Cruz’s most well-known anthems, serves as Celia‘s mission statement. The original was based on guaguancó, which was a bold move at the the time. Why? Mambo and cha-cha-cha were the ruling Latin dance rhythms of the day, and here was an Afro-Cuban folkloric beat. On Celia, Angélique Kidjo changes the rhythm from a solid 4/4 to a languid, yet powerful 6/8. Afrobeat-style guitar approximates the West African koraand punctuates it all with a funky, horn driven, stop-time statement of its massive chorus.

What puts the song over the top is the call-and-response improvisation of the title. It’s done at twice the speed of the rhythm underneath (what musicians call double time) and it never clashes. Kidjo has so expertly tied the original guaguanco to her 6/8 that it serves as a point of cultural pride that Africa could claim Celia Cruz as one of their own. And that is the point of every track of this album.

Celia Cruz’s music and her entire being was a reminder of the presence of Africa in Cuba. Angélique Kidjo’s Celia musically closes that circle with reverence and more than a little love.

Courtesy of the artist

First Listen: Angelique Kidjo, ‘Celia’

01Cucala

3:19

02La Vida Es un Carnaval

4:33

03Sahara

4:37

04Balia Yemaya

2:54

05Toro Mata

4:30

06Elegua

3:06

07Quimbara

4:34

08Bemba Colora

3:44

09Oya Diosa

3:27

10Yemaya

1:37

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