Kabylia

Coordinates: 36° 40′ N | 4° 55′ E
Number of provinces included: 8

As a descriptive category, world music succeeds in being a particularly vague label for such a wide range of sound. The musical styles and traditions rooted in specific places usually have more meaningful names. Kabylia for example, a small region along Algeria’s Mediterranean Coast between the cities of Algiers and Skikda, is home to an eclectic type of folk music called yal. The fiercely independent Berber people living in Kabylia developed yal by blending rhythms and instrumentation to produce something similar to rai, a more familiar type of Algerian music. A mountainous, rather isolated part of Africa’s second largest country, Kabylia is divided into two sections by the Sahel-Soumman valley.

– Ben Keene, editor of Oxford Atlas of the World.