Alula Records explores contemporary world music from all over the world with the desire to share their excitement and discoveries. The label's roster includes Celtic artists from Ireland and Scotland, world beat from the Middle East, world fusion from Japan, contemporary Gnawa music from Morocco, flamenco guitar from Spain, Gypsy rumba from Spain and southern France, Estonian folk music and multiple artist compilations. Also venturing into contemporary American roots music and Alula will feature American artists whose work represents the amazing musical roots and flowerings of our own cultural diversity. Alula Records pays special attention to detail, from first class CD packaging to state-of-the-art sound quality. We have already won several national and international awards for the quality of its music and cover artwork. In 1998, Alula Records was named a runnerup for World Label of the Year in the Crossroads Magazine Music Awards.

Sarah Bauhan
The Untamned Grasses
Alula Records

Sarah Bauhan began playing the tin whistle at twelve years old, and started performing for the public two years later in dudley laufman’s Canterbury Country dance orchestra. She was heavily influenced by the revival of Celtic music during the ’70s and ’80s. Through the years, Bauhan has performed at festivals, concerts, and dances around the country. She has also taught whistle and flute to both adults and children at dance camps, in schools, and in workshops. Her performance options range from a simple duo with a guitarist to a four-piece band including fiddle, guitar, bass, and piano.

Mythos
Purity
Alula Records

“Guitarist Paul Schmidt and keyboardist Bob D’Eith compose instrumentals that pack quite an emotional wallop of melodic and rhythmic structuring. Instead of tonal ambiguities, the due fashion tight and potent romantic poems that draw as much upon flamenco themes as Enigma-style wordless soprano vocals.” — New Age Retailer

Maria Kalaniemi
Bellow Poetry
Alula Records

Featured Artists Maria Kalaniemi, accordion, vocals/Olli Varis, guitar Maria Kalaniemi is Scandinavia’s most accomplished and celebrated accordionist, winning the prestigious Golden Accordion Award in 1983 and recording several critically acclaimed albums on the Hannibal, Xenophile, and Northside labels. In addition to her rich catalog of solo albums, Kalaniemi has been indispensable as a part of top ranked Finnish folk groups such as Aldargaz, Niekku, and Zeta Bop. Kalaniemi is also one of five star accordionists from around the world featured in the accordion supergroup The Accordion Tribe, alongside other famed players of her instrument such as Guy Klucevsek. Bellow Poetry is Kalaniemi’s first recording for Alula Records, and fulfills a longtime dream to record her first completely solo recording.

John Keola Lake & Na Wa'a Lalani Kahuna
Hawaiian Chant: The Lyrical Poetry of Hawaii
Alula Records

Though musically best known for its popular slack-key guitar style, the Hawaiian culture contains some far more hidden and ancient traditions. On this rare recording, modern practitioners of the age old Hawaiian chant practice take us back to a time centuries ago, when chants were the basic musical expression of everyday life for the islanders.

John Keola Lake established Honolulu's Academy of Hawaiian Arts, Music & Dance, and was declared a "national treasure" in 1987. Na Wa'a Lalani Kahuna is a group of accomplished individual chanters (including Lake) who first collaborated in 1990 while preparing for the 200-year anniversary observance of the last Hawaiian temple built in Hawaii.

Henrique Cazes & Choro 1900
Choro 1900
Alula Records

Choro music was born in Brazil in the late nineteenth century as various European dance music traditions gained rich new flavors once they were allowed contact with the heat of Brazil. Choro soon spread throughout the country to become its true popular music, with the traditional choro group consisting of a flute, a guitar, and a cavaquinho (a small guitar resembling a traditional Portuguese ukelele).

On this recording, Brazil's greatest living cavaquinho player, Henrique Cazes, has gathered a group of Brazil's most accomplished young musicians to undertake a fresh exploration of the development and history of the choro through its golden age.

Teshome Mitiku
Topia's Deluge
Alula Records

Teshome Mitiku has had a legendary 40-year career at the heart of Ethiopian music, forming the massively popular Soul Ekos Band in Addis Ababa in the 1960s. The Soul Ekos Band was the first to combine traditional Ethiopian music with the sounds of electric soul and popular music from the West. They were absolute superstars, playing regularly in front of crowds of 60,000 in Ethiopia, Sudan & Kenya. Teshome Mitiku is featured on volumes 1, 4 and 10 of the celebrated Ethiopiques series from Buda Records, featuring thrilling discoveries from the vibrant Ethiopian music scene of the 1970s. His songs have also appeared on the popular Rough Guide series of world music compilations.

Hallelujah Chicken Run Band
Take One
Alula Records

"Thomas Mapfumo is one of his country’s most influential musicians, with hard-driving rhythms, politically tinged lyrics, and gutsy vocals." — Music Hound World

"The Lion of Zimbabwe," Thomas Mapfumo, is Zimbabwe’s biggest star, one of the most legendary and best-selling African artists of all time. In 1973, Mapfumo helped form the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band and, for the first time, began to shift his music away from Western-influenced rock and explore the traditional music of his Shona people, transcribing the scale of the traditional instrument mbira (or thumb piano) to guitar with his guitarist Joshua Dube. The HCR Band was one of the first to develop the staccato style of guitar for which Zimbabwe is known today, and was also one of the first modern groups to sing in the traditional Shona language – a major act of liberation and an act of protest against the Rhodesian government. This compilation presents 18 of the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band’s biggest and most influential hits, recorded from 1974–1979 and all painstakingly remastered. A series of singles in Shona by the HCR Band recorded by Teal Records (many of which are found here) produced eight gold records in a row beginning in 1974! Take One is a wonderful mixture of songs of liberation alongside poignant love songs. Carefully prepared 24-page booklet is absolutely overflowing with a complete history of the band (edited by renowned critic Banning Eyre), a full detailed discography, and numerous extremely rare photographs and artifacts.

The Green Arrows
4-Track Recording Session
Alula Records

"In the 1970's, when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, the Green Arrows were one of the country's top bands; they were the first to release a full-length LP, in 1976. The exuberant compilation 4-Track Recording Session (Analog Africa/Alula) includes that album plus 10 songs from 1974 to 1979. Four-track tape neatly captured grooves that drew on local six-beat Shona rhythms, the bounce of South African rock, even a reggae song in English (about "Towering Inferno," of all things). The band is perpetually crisp, and its staccato precision brilliantly offsets whichever voice or instrument is allowed to wander freely amid the patterns, especially when the lead guitarist unleashes imported technology: a wah-wah pedal the South African producer brought from Johannesburg. Translations of the songs, which occasionally got the band in political trouble during Zimbabwe's war for independence, are all that's missing." - Jon Pareles, New York Times

The Green Arrows, lead by the immortal Zexie Manatsa, dominated the Zimbabwean music scene in the 1970s. This extraordinarily progressive group took the country by storm, fusing the different rhythms of the region into one unique and ebullient sound. A milestone in Zimbabwean music history! The Green Arrows, "discovered" by celebrated South African producer West Nkosi, were the first Zimbabwean band to record an LP, which was released in February 1976. So popular were the Green Arrows in the ’70s that when Manatsa got married on August 25, 1979 a crowd of about 60,000 thronged Rufaro Stadium. Some of the performers at his wedding included Oliver Mtukudzi and Thomas Mapfumo. This compilation presents 20 critical tracks that the Green Arrows recorded from 1974 –1979, all painstakingly remastered. The song "Musango Mune Hangaiwa" still holds the record for the longest stay at #1 in Zimbabwean music history. Carefully prepared 24-page booklet is absolutely overflowing with a complete history of the band (edited by renowned critic Banning Eyre), a full detailed discography, and numerous extremely rare photographs and artifacts. After a long absence from performance, the band reunited on stage on the last day of the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) on May 1, 2005.