The posthumous release that became an Australian number one

A lone voice
Rolling Stone magazine once described Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu (above), who died last year aged 46, as “Australia’s most important voice”. His final album, released nine months after his death, set out to meld indigenous and classical music, and gave birth to a new sound. “Djarimirri” (Child of the Rainbow) marries modern orchestral arrangements with the traditional rhythms of the didgeridoo. Gurrumul’s otherworldly chants soar above it all, telling stories of the crow, the octopus and other totems of his Yolngu tribe, to give a feeling at once sparsely contemporary and ancient. “Djarimirri” glided straight to number one, becoming the first album recorded in an indigenous dialect ever to top Australia’s charts.

The mistakes stayed in
As a young pianist at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Tomas Kaco was scolded for playing Chopin “with mistakes”. Kaco couldn’t help himself. He enjoyed splicing in snatches of the gypsy music he heard growing up. Home – a small town in the Czech Republic’s north-east – was always filled with music. His Roma father played him his beloved gypsy songs, again and again, on cassette tape. When Kaco started tinkering on the piano, aged five, he kept those melodies and rhythms in mind. They stayed with him even as he went to school in Prague, to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and to Carnegie Hall for a performance earlier this year. He played Chopin. The mistakes stayed in.