Yours truly got to know Sudanese-American Sarah Mohamed Abunama-Elgadi aka Alsarah in 2013 thanks to 'Aljawal', a one-off collaborative project with French producer Débruit. Meanwhile, Alsarah seems to have found a regular backing band in The Nubatones, already yielding a first album, 'Silt' in 2014, now followed by 'Manara'. Alsarah, who has a degree in ethnomusicology, describes her music - a mix of Nubian "songs of return" (during the early-1970s, many Egyptian Nubians were forcibly resettled to make room for Lake Nasser after the construction of the dams at Aswan), traditional Sudanese music and jazz influences - as East African retro-pop. With album title 'Manara', Arabic for "lighthouse", Alsarah refers to the current refugee crisis: "Sometimes we leave home willingly, sometimes we are forced out, sometimes we plan to go back, and sometimes we don't know if we will ever see our loved ones again. But one thing we always know is that we don't want to forget, or be forgotten. As the sea takes us, 'Manara' is the lighthouse anchoring our journey, and the keeper of our secrets. Not a destination, but rather a marker along the way."; and she definitely speaks from experience, because when she was only 8 years old, her parents, weary of the regime in Sudan, relocated to Taez in Yemen, but when in 1994 a civil war erupted there, Alsarah's family once again had to go in search of a safe place to live, this time ending up in the United States.