Jad Abumrad sits down with host Ana González to talk about her new podcast, Our Common Nature, a musical journey with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. As the conversation reveals, Jad actually helped connect Ana with Yo-Yo Ma!

When the world stopped in 2020, Yo-Yo Ma started thinking about how music can reconnect people to the natural world. In this limited podcast series, Yo-Yo goes around the country to places where people have deep connections to the earth.  Host Ana González joins him to uncover stories of how culture binds us to nature, from Maine to Appalachia and Hawaii. The result is a seven-episode series that fuses music, personal narratives, and local histories from across the United States.  

Subscribe here to listen to more episodes from Our Common Nature series.

In a world that’s on fire, what do we do with art? Like, what can music actually do? 

Today, Jad Abumrad is back with his first major project since Dolly Parton’s America. 

Fela Kuti: Fear No Man is a twelve episode exploration of the life, work, and legacy of the Nigerian singer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, one of  the most important musical artist of the 20th century. 

Back in the 1960s and 70s, Fela invented a new style of music that was part jazz, part funk, part African polyrhythms and instrumentation. And it had resistance baked into its core. 

Today, Fela has been forgotten by many. Almost erased. 

Fela Kuti: Fear No Man excavates his life’s work and finds it says as much about today, this moment, as it does about the past. 

Find Fela Kuti: Fear No Man on Audible and wherever you listen to podcasts. 

As Dolly will tell you, so much of who she is - her creativity, her music, her stance on life - emanates from her faith, but what exactly is that faith? The answer is deeply surprising. In this episode, Dolly tells a story of finding God in an abandoned church filled with X-rated graffiti.  And she speaks of her plans for how she'll be remembered after she’s gone—how her voice will live on for the next 50, 100, 200 years.

In this second bonus music episode, we play two live songs we recorded, sung by bluegrass musicians Nora Brown and Amythyst Kiah. 

You can find Nora on facebook @norabrownbanjo, instagram @little.nb, and her music at jalopyrecords.org and on Spotify.
Amythyst is on facebook, instagram, and twitter at @amythystkiah, and her music can be found at amythystkiah.com.