Respect Festival Open Air 2026

Respect Festival Open Air 2026 will take place on June 13 and 14 on the island of Štvanice in Prague.

Organizer's text: This year's program of the most important global music festival in Prague has a wide range — from authentic roots from African villages to contemporary fusions, created on the basis of artistic vision, not producer routine.

Purely instrumental, the Egyptian-Belgian trio The Handover draws on folk melodies from the Nile basin, which they place in an almost psychedelic framework. Ogoya Nengo is one of the last surviving female singers of "dodo" songs, which functioned as a communication channel reaching the public in rural Kenya. On the contrary, contemporary African music is represented by the Guitari Baro trio, combining acoustic and electric guitars with the melodic percussion instrument balafon. Noble pop from the Indian subcontinent is a concept still unknown in our country. Pakistani singer Muslim Shaggan will demonstrate the intimate and introverted position of the genre.

Madagascar has long been known as a musical treasure among connoisseurs, as the local instruments and rhythms are significantly different from the music of continental Africa. This is also due to the fact that the original inhabitants arrived on the island from Malaysia. Half a century ago, when electric guitars arrived in Madagascar, the trance dance style tsapika was born, which will be presented in Prague for the first time by the group Bobo & Behaja.

The Cape Verde Islands, whose music connects Africa with Portugal and Brazil, are a similar treasure. Mario Lucio with his Pan African Band rediscovers the roots from which contemporary Cape Verdean music arose.

The surprise of the program includes The Zawose Queens from Tanzania, a duo formed by the daughter and granddaughter of the African music visionary Hukwe Zawose, whose albums were released by Peter Gabriel 40 years ago. The second highlight will be the Dutch singer Meral Polat, whose ancestors are from Kurdish communities in Turkey. He is coming to Prague for the third time. He can perfectly connect the emotional charge of Kurdish songs with the accompaniment of Western instruments.

A surprising mix of styles is created by the trio of Lebanese-French player Wassim Halal, who performed with Indonesian gamelan in Prague a year ago. This time he focused on the styles of the Balkans and will come with a Roma synthesizer player from North Macedonia and a Bulgarian drummer. A group of Moroccan Berbers from the Atlas Mountains, Araw N Fazaz, will bring further variety, combining female vocals, traditional instruments and European violins.

13. until June 15, there will be therapeutic sound sessions by two Nepali lecturers called Himalayan Singing Bowls in Prague's Punct.