A Traveler’s 10 Best Musical Discoveries

Tom Swick: Contemplating and celebrating the world of travel

03.02.09 | 10:35 AM ET

1. Sezen Aksu

The young owner of my budget hotel in Selcuk was giving me a lift to Ephesus one morning and playing the most beguiling music. “Who’s singing?” I asked. “Sezen Aksu,” he said. After two weeks in Turkey I recognized the name, and immediately fell in love with the music, which, even at its most exuberant, carried a faint, seductive sadness.

2. Khánh Ly

In Saigon in 1994 I met the great songwriter Trinh Cong Son (described by the woman who had given me his number as “the Bob Dylan of Vietnam”). A few days later in Hue, sitting at a café on the Perfume River, I heard a captivating female voice—filled with a kind of brash melancholy—drift from speakers. This was Khánh Ly, I was told, interpreting the songs of Trinh Cong Son. The next week, at a street market in Hanoi, I came across one of her CDs. Music that had accompanied me the length of the country now followed me home.

3. Bulat Okudzhava

Discovered not in Moscow but in Philadelphia (thanks to my friend Agnieszka). The lyrics of the singer-songwriter-poet are lost on me, but not the sage, unadorned, resolute voice, which now runs through my head every time I set foot in Russia.

4. Márta Sebestyén

At a summer concert in Szeged—piercing Hungarian folk songs under the stars—I instantly recognized the voice from “The English Patient.”

       

5. Ewa Demarczyk

I taught English in Poland in the early ‘80s and whenever I want to relive that time I listen to her proud, defiant, occasionally wistful songs.

6. Nana Caymmi

At a record store in Rio a friend of a friend picked out one of her CDs—songs of the sea, written by her father—and introduced me to a soft and lilting soulfulness.

7. Georges Brassens

A student in France in the age of rock, I admired the way the traditional chanson was holding its own. Young people still listened to Jean Ferrat, Georges Moustaki, Léo Ferré, and Georges Brassens, whose clever lyrics—delighting in everyday pleasures, railing against puritanical values—our teacher happily taught us.

8. Madredeus

In the northern Portuguese town of Amarante, the night before a festival, an elegiac music flowed through the streets. I eventually found the source, a small storefront doubling as the festival office, where a man held up a CD showing five men and one woman dressed in black and walking across a field beneath the words: o espírito de paz.

9. Lidija Bajuk

Her songs played not in the street but in a gallery on the Croatian island of Korcula. “Who’s singing?” I asked once again (a question you never find in phrasebooks). They were like lullabies sung by an angel.

 

10. Beny Moré

On an “educational exchange” to Cuba in 2001, I heard so often about this singer of the ‘40s and ‘50s that I felt like the rube who arrives in America and suddenly learns of Frank Sinatra.