About

A 21st century label celebrating music from the global south. Singers, storytellers and culture-makers. Folklore in conversation with Modernity. We celebrate hybridity and in-between spaces. Messages and mysteries carried by the human voice. We invite belonging and incite joy. Welcome home.

A Note from our Founder

The word folkalist came to me during a layover in Addis Ababa, on a whirlwind voyage from Cape Verde to Dakar, Bamako to Tanzania. As I was singing with Ethic-jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke and local musicians who effortlessly crossed folk genres and identities, something in me clicked: I realized that I feel most at home at the crossroads where diverse cultures meet, and that my calling as an artist is to do my part to advance the music found in these places of encounter.

Traditions are not static. History shows us that they have always been in flux, shaped by constant contact with other societies and ideas. This dynamism is all the more true in our current age of hyperconnectivity. Folkalist strives to elevate music that thrives in the fertile space between genres, music that transcends boundaries and binaries, music that speaks to the reality of today’s global citizens who do not possess one whole culture, but fragments of many.

With Folkalist, my dream is not just to highlight marginalized music and music-makers, especially women, but to build a digital platform through which artists and audiences everywhere–from Ethiopia to Argentina, Cabo Verde to India–can find one another, discover novel connections, and in so doing, create a new type of global music community.

Welcome to Folkalist. Welcome home.

- Kavita Shah

Our Team

Kavita Shah is an award-winning vocalist, composer, producer, researcher, polyglot, and educator who makes work in deep engagement with the jazz tradition while addressing and advancing its global sensibilities. She has been praised for her "riveting" music (New York Times), her ability to "render cultural borders redundant" (Songlines), and her "amazing dexterity with musical languages... what she's doing is something completely new" (NPR). Her projects blending modern jazz, new music, and folk traditions from Brazil, West Africa, and India include "Visions" (2014), "Folk Songs of Naboréa" (2017), "Interplay" (2018, nominated from France's Victoires de la Musique for Jazz Album of the Year) and "Cape Verdean Blues" (2023). She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Harvard College, an M.M. in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, and speaks nine languages.

Jayme Stone is a musician, composer, instigator, producer and educator. On any given day, you might find him in his studio reworking a little-known hymn learned from a field recording, producing a session with musicians from Bamako or New York, creating experimental soundscapes, or tucking his kids in on time so he can get back to writing the next verse of a new song. Stone, a “consummate team player” (Downbeat), has developed a process of trawling for understudied sounds in the more arcane corners of the world to see how they’ll land in his musical universe. His many collaborators have included Margaret Glaspy, Moira Smiley, Tim O’Brien, Julian Lage, Dom Flemons, Bassekou Kouyate, and more.

Susana Turbay Botero is a cultural manager and curator from Medellin, Colombia. Susana’s work is people-oriented and focuses on building bridges between the public(s), artists, and institutions through exhibitions, public programming, and storytelling. After receiving her Master’s in Public Humanities from Brown University, Susana relocated to Berlin, where she currently resides. She considers art to be a mechanism for uplifting voices from the global south and shining a spotlight on the rich talent and culture of Latin America and the Arab diaspora in the region.