Multiple Grammy-winner Béla Fleck travels to Uganda, Tanzania, the Gambia, and Mali searching for the roots of the banjo. Part road movie, part historical document, this fascinating film demonstrates the power of music and musicians to reach across cultural boundaries and the limitations of language to create an instant and abiding connection. Whether plaintive or pulsating, the infectious music in Throw Down Your Heart transports viewers into the...

Following up on the success of African Jim, but with higher production values, Zonk! shows the extraordinary cultural range available to township Africans, from the many ethnic strains of music from South Africa itself to contemporary American jazz and popular music, eagerly copied and Africanized. Zonk! confirms that despite the poverty and degradation of township life, the human spirit could triumph through music, producing groups and individual...

Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana-when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor-in this penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band "highlife" music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life...