In this talk we consider a range of emotions as expressed in women’s music-making in Afghanistan. These include romantic and familial love, sadness and separation, celebration, anger and protest, and humour. I draw particularly on my own ethnographic work with girls and women in the Persian language traditions of Herat (western Afghanistan). I also refer extensively to work by other scholars, including recent material collected separately by two young Afghan women in north-eastern...

How did French musicians and critics interpret jazz—that quintessentially American music—in the mid-twentieth century? How far did players reshape what they learned from records and visitors into more local jazz forms, and how did the music figure in those angry debates that so often suffused French cultural and political life? After Django begins with the famous interwar triumphs of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt, but, for the first time, the focus here falls on the French jazz...