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Rhiannon Giddens
Born
Rhiannon Giddens learnt fiddle and banjo from the elderly North Carolina fiddler Joe Thompson, one of the last Black string-band players of his generation, and co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops to carry that repertoire on. Her research and performances have restored the banjo's African and African American history to public view. A Pulitzer Prize for music for the opera Omar shows how far the work has travelled from those lessons.
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Ravi Shankar
Born
Ravi Shankar trained for years in the guru-shishya tradition under Allauddin Khan of the Maihar gharana before becoming the best-known Indian classical musician in the world. His work with George Harrison and at Monterey and Woodstock made the sitar famous, but his deeper legacy is teaching: he founded music schools in Mumbai and Los Angeles and passed the tradition to students including his daughter Anoushka. He died in 2012.
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Zakir Hussain (musician)
Born
Zakir Hussain was taught tabla from early childhood by his father, Alla Rakha, and became the instrument's most famous ambassador, playing with Shakti, Mickey Hart and countless Hindustani masters. He taught for decades and accompanied dancers and singers as faithfully as he collaborated across genres. When he won three Grammys in a single night in 2024, months before his death that December, it was recognition for a tradition as much as a player.
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Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Born
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan came from a family of qawwals stretching back centuries and led its party in performing the devotional Sufi music of Pakistan and northern India at shrines and weddings. His collaborations with Peter Gabriel on Real World Records brought qawwali to audiences who had never heard of it, without diluting the core repertoire. His nephew Rahat Fateh Ali Khan carries the family line forward. He died in 1997.
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Amália Rodrigues
Born
Amália Rodrigues took fado from the taverns of Lisbon's old quarters to concert halls worldwide from the 1940s onwards, and commissioned poets and composers to write for her, widening what the form could say. She is the reason fado has an international audience at all, and Portugal declared three days of national mourning when she died in 1999. Her recordings remain the standard against which every new fadista is measured.
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Mariza
Born
Mariza grew up in Lisbon's Mouraria district, where her parents ran a tavern with fado nights, and since her 2001 debut she has been the form's leading international voice. She sings the classic Amália repertoire alongside new songs written in the tradition, and her advocacy helped fado gain UNESCO intangible cultural heritage status in 2011. For newcomers she is the most approachable way into the music.
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Paco de Lucía
Born
Paco de Lucía grew up in Algeciras in a flamenco family and spent his teens accompanying singers, the traditional apprenticeship for a guitarist. He later expanded the form, adding the cajón box drum and jazz harmonies, but his partnership with the singer Camarón de la Isla is the core of modern flamenco's canonical recordings. Gitano communities in Andalusia sustain the art; he made sure the world heard it. He died in 2014.
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Bandō Tamasaburō V
Born
Bandō Tamasaburō V is the leading onnagata, the kabuki actor who specialises in female roles, of his generation, and was designated a Living National Treasure in 2012. Beyond performing the classic repertoire with famous precision, he has directed and staged kabuki and Chinese kunqu opera together and trained younger actors. His work shows a centuries-old tradition being kept alive through rigorous practice rather than nostalgia.
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Mei Lanfang
Born
Mei Lanfang was the most celebrated Peking opera performer of the twentieth century, a male actor of female roles whose 1930 American tour and 1935 Moscow visit impressed Charlie Chaplin and Bertolt Brecht. He refined the dan role's movement and costume and, after 1949, led the China Peking Opera Theatre, training the next generation. Much of what audiences recognise as classic Peking opera style passes through his school.
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Joseph Shabalala
Born
Joseph Shabalala founded Ladysmith Black Mambazo in the early 1960s to sing isicathamiya, the a cappella style developed by Zulu migrant workers in South Africa's mining hostels. Paul Simon's Graceland made the group world-famous in 1986, but Shabalala also founded an academy to teach the style to young South Africans, and his sons now lead the group. He died in 2020.
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Toumani Diabaté
Born
Toumani Diabaté was born into a Malian griot family whose members had played the kora, a 21-string harp, for some seventy generations. His solo album Kaira (1988) showed the instrument's range to the world, and his duet records with Ali Farka Touré won Grammys. He remained rooted in the griot role of keeping history in music and taught his son Sidiki, who continues the line. He died in July 2024.
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Paddy Moloney
Born
Paddy Moloney founded The Chieftains in 1962 and played uilleann pipes and tin whistle with them for nearly sixty years, bringing Irish traditional tunes to stadiums and film soundtracks. The band's collaborations with rock and country stars could look like crossover, but the core of every record was traditional repertoire played by masters. He also ran the Claddagh label's early recordings of traditional musicians. He died in 2021.
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Shirley Collins
Born
Shirley Collins travelled the American South with the folklorist Alan Lomax in 1959, collecting songs from rural singers, and became one of the defining voices of the English folk revival with an unadorned style true to the source singers she learnt from in Sussex. After losing her voice for decades she returned with Lodestar in 2016 and has kept recording into her nineties. She has served as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
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Kathryn Tickell
Born
Kathryn Tickell learnt the Northumbrian smallpipes as a child from older players in the county, released her first album as a teenager and became the instrument's best-known performer. She set up a Young Musicians Fund to support young traditional players in the north-east and has taught and led workshops for decades. The smallpipes' survival as a living instrument owes a lot to her teaching and touring.
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Julie Fowlis
Born
Julie Fowlis grew up on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, a Gaelic-speaking community, and has made Scottish Gaelic song accessible to listeners who do not speak a word of it. She has presented Gaelic music programmes on BBC radio and was the first Gaelic Ambassador for Scotland's languages. Many people first heard Gaelic singing through her songs on the soundtrack of Pixar's Brave.
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Yo-Yo Ma
Yo-Yo Ma founded the Silk Road Project in 1998, now Silkroad, bringing together musicians who play traditional instruments from across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, such as the pipa, kamancheh and shakuhachi. The ensemble commissions new work but always grounded in those players' own traditions, and runs education programmes in schools. Ma's fame is the draw; the ensemble's tradition-bearers are the substance.
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Wynton Marsalis
Born
Wynton Marsalis co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1987 and has run it as an institution devoted to jazz's history as well as its present, with a resident orchestra playing Ellington and Armstrong alongside new work. Its Essentially Ellington programme has sent free transcriptions to thousands of school bands. Critics have argued he is too conservative about what counts as jazz, but nobody has done more to keep its classic repertoire in performance.
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Marty Stuart
Born
Marty Stuart started touring with bluegrass pioneer Lester Flatt at 13 and spent decades amassing one of the largest private collections of country music artefacts, from stage costumes to manuscripts. He is turning it into the Congress of Country Music in his home town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, whose first phase, the restored Ellis Theater, opened in 2022. His role is part performer, part archivist, and the archive is the more unusual contribution.
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Savion Glover
Savion Glover learnt tap from the generation of Gregory Hines, Jimmy Slyde and Honi Coles, and created Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk (1996), a Broadway history of Black America told through tap. He has run his own studio and company to teach the form, insisting on the hoofer tradition of rhythm over showy arms. For a dance that once nearly vanished from stages, he is its most important living link.
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Linda Ronstadt
Born
Linda Ronstadt, at the height of her rock fame, recorded Canciones de Mi Padre (1987), an album of the Mexican rancheras and mariachi songs her Sonoran-born father's family sang, with Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. It is often cited as the best-selling non-English-language album in American history, and it gave mariachi a mainstream profile in the United States. Since Parkinson's ended her singing, she has continued to champion the music in her home town of Tucson.
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Ry Cooder
Born
Ry Cooder went to Havana in 1996 and produced Buena Vista Social Club, recording veteran Cuban son musicians such as Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González, many of whom had stopped performing. The album and Wim Wenders's film gave them late international careers. Cooder has been careful to credit the musicians and the organiser Juan de Marcos González, which matters: the tradition was theirs.
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