World Musical articles - Page 4

Slava Grigoryan (guitar)

Leonard Grigroyan (guitar)

Karin Schaupp (guitar)

Mark Isaacs (piano)

James Greening (trombone)

Miroslav Bukovsky (trumpet)

Adam Armstrong (double Bass)

John Napier (cello)

Michael Kieran Harvey (piano)

Kila (Irish band)

Tiranawen (Mali band)

Neil Finn (guitar/vocals)

Ben Walsh (percussion)

Mark Atkins (didgeridoo)

Tyrone Noonan (vocal)

Brett Hirst (bass)

Benjamin Martin (Piano)

Emma Jane Murrphy (cello)

Heval

Zoe Hauptmann (double bass)

Ustad Zakir Hussain (tabla)

Hamid Baroudi (Algerian singer)

Al Slavik (bass)

Abdou Dagher (violin)

Guy Strazzullo (guitar)

Jeremy Alsop (bass)

Mary Doumany (harp)

Daniel Weltlinger (violin)

Glen Henrich (vibraphone)

Christian Watson (saxophone)

James Tawadros (percussion)

Dimitri Vouras (clarinet)

Tony Wheeler (Clarinet)

Bobby Singh (tabla)

Julie Anthony (vocals)

Barry Crocker (vocals)

Fabian Hevia (percussion)

Peter Kennard (Percussion)

Farid 'Freddy' Rizk (guitar)

Maxim Bibeau (double bass)

Vassilli Formizky (double bass)

Mohammed Youseff (oud)

Naziha Azzouz (vocals)

Charlie McMahon (didjeridu)

The Australian Chamber Orchestra

Ustad Sultan Khan (sarangi)

Katie Noonan (vocal)

Alister Spence (piano)

Alfred Gamil (violin)

Emad Nosir (violin)

Nabil Rizkalla (oud)

Walid Bibi (nay)

Khaled Al-Amir (vocals)

Ghazi Nassouh (vocals)

Hany Bedir (percussion)

Saad Marco (violin)

Ashraf Aygaybi (nay)

Sherif Kamel (qanun)

Yacoub Mansi Habib (trumpet)

Gamal Zreika (darrabuka)

Tarek Sawires (percussion)

Sandy Evans (saxophone)

Steve Elphick (double bass)

Jess Ciampa (percussion)

Sumanji (tabla)

Wanderlust

Lior (vocals)

Dave Norris (turntables)

Kid Confucious

with Malian Band Tiniraween

with jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand)

Huntington Festival with Richard Tognetti, Slava Grigoryan & Neil Finn (Crowded House)

with piano virtuoso Michael Kieran Harvey

with international percussionist David Jones

Quartet featuring Alister Spence, John Napier & brother James Tawadros

with Slava & Leonard Grigoryan at Womad

with baritone Teddy Tahu at Huntington

with Wanderlust at Villa Celimontana Jazz Festival in Rome

after a performance with Zakir Hussain & Sultan Khan at Womad

with Adel Salameh, Naziha Azzouz & James Tawadros at the Sydney Opera House

with accordion virtuoso James Crabb in Italy

with Japanese Koto master Kazue Sawai

a young Joseph Tawadros (1)

a young Joseph Tawadros (2)

a young Joseph Tawadros (3)

World Music Features

Bombs rain down on Fallujah and suicide bombers slaughter would-be police recruits. A radical Moslem cleric attacks the interim government and his armed militia stalks the streets. As the Iraqi bloodbath continues the world can only look on in a kind of stunned disbelief. Isn't this war supposed to be over?

Some people might think it remarkable that it takes a terrible war to put a country like Iraq on the musical map. But perhaps this is only natural. In an effort to extract something positive from all the death and destruction visited on coalition forces and on innocent Iraqis it is hardly surprising that we turn to music and culture to provide us with something more reassuring. Music can at least remind us that there is more to Iraq and its people than burning vehicles and chaos.

It was against the backdrop of continuing bloody fighting in Iraq that Fawzy Al-Aiedy, an Iraqi musician, found himself sitting behind the stage at the WOMAD festival in Reading, England, last July.

Fawzy Al-Aiedy was born in Basra in southern Iraq in the 1950s. The regime of Saddam Hussein was so fearful that, like many Iraqis, he has had no choice but to live in exile and to denounce from a distance the tyranny and abuse of human rights in his native Iraq. A modest and gently spoken man, Al-Aiedy spoke in French about his life and music, his rapid words falling over each other.

Despite living in France for 30 years Al-Aiedy is fiercely proud of being an Iraqi and passionate about Basra, the city where he was born and grew up:

"In ancient times Iraq was the cradle of civilization," he says. "Mankind's first cities were situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The land has had a rich culture for thousands of years. Basra is a beautiful city, with architecture in every style and from every period that you can imagine. As a major seaport which opens out onto the Arabian Gulf it is a city dedicated to the maritime life."

His initial musical training was not quite what you would expect for a boy from a modest family:

"I am a player of the oud, an instrument that is traditional in Iraq, an instrument which is over 3,000 years old. But, as a student at music school in Iraq, the first instrument that I learned to play was the oboe and I became a musician in the European tradition. The music of Bach, Mozart and Handel was a great revelation to me. From there I went on to study Middle Eastern music and learned to play the oud. What I am doing now is a mixture of modern and traditional music. I want my music to establish a common ground with other peoples around the world. It is most important that the music is accessible. And that it is able to communicate with many peoples."

In France, Al-Aiedy initially played for two years with a Western classical orchestra. But he did not feel that a career in classical music was for him. It did not allow him to explore the traditions of Middle Eastern music, indulge his love of Arabic poetry, or fulfill his desire to create new music. Between 1976 and 1996 he released a string of recordings combining traditional Arabic and Western sounds, including jazz. His album entitled Terre, released in 1983, was a precursor of what soon became known as world music, bringing together musicians and musical styles from many different countries.

As Iraq hit the headlines in 2003for all the wrong reasons, Al-Aiedy, one of the leading Iraqi musicians outside his country, suddenly found himself in great demand.

"The war has provoked a great interest in Iraqi music," he says. "I have played recently in Germany and Scandinavia as well as France and hope soon to go to the U.S. This is my moment and I have very much appreciated the opportunity to play in front of so many people."

From 1996, Al-Aiedy's music took a new direction, leaving behind the jazz influences and returning to a more natural fusion of traditional Iraqi and global sounds. Like much of the music intended for a global audience, Al-Aiedy's music is essentially a fusion of traditional Iraqi instruments and rhythms with high production values and a more Western musical sensibility. At WOMAD his lineup includes the derbouka (Arabic drum), Eastern violin, keyboard, electric bass guitar and drum. His songs are about journeys, poetry, dreams, his native town of Basra, and about living in exile.

Feelings about the Iraq war are still running very high. When, later that evening, Al-Aiedy played to a packed tent on the Siam Stage at WOMAD, he merely had to say where he was from to get a round of applause from the festival audience, anxious to show some empathy with the suffering of Iraq. Al-Aiedy performed many of the songs from his latest album, Paris-Baghdad Grooves, which is a stunning fusion of Oriental and Western influences. The title has echoes of the famous Paris-Baghdad railway, completed at the start of the 20th century, which opened up the Middle East to colonization and the creation of nation states. The album perfectly reflects Al-Aiedy's personal musical and cultural journey serving up traditional Iraqi sounds but in a polished and sophisticated Parisian style.

Paris-Baghdad Grooves lives up to its name, comprised of a series of catchy and sensual songs that had the festival audience dancing. In songs like "Arabia" and "Dana Dina" he has created a striking fusion sound that is truly global and which communicates and appeals across political and cultural boundaries. The music is led by his very fine voice, which is Middle Eastern in style but does not neglect to provide the audience with the moments of satisfying release associated with great popular tunes. Al-Aiedy is doing for the traditional music of Iraq what Maryam Mursal does for the music of her native Somalia, creating a finely wrought international sound.

Inevitably, Al-Aiedy is asked about the invasion of Iraq and the present events in his country. "Saddam Hussein's rule was terrible," he says, "and Iraqis are glad that he is gone. While he remained in power the situation for the Iraqi people was completely blocked. The problem is that the U.S. and U.K. invaded Iraq all alone. It would have been much better to get wider international support. Democracy is very important to Iraq but the country is not yet used to it. It is necessary to help the Iraqi people to understand."

Tolerance and openness lie at the heart of Al-Aiedy's approach. This was well demonstrated on the final day of the festival when his impromptu performance with Israeli musician Yair Dalal at the gala quickly turned into an inspirational and exciting piece of spontaneous music-making, electrifying the audience and providing one of the highlights of this year's festival. Music continues to sow seeds of hope even amidst the smoke of war.

World Music Features

Prologue

GLOBAL RHYTHM has assembled four female artists of South Asian heritage for one story. They don't have that much in common musically, they're at different points in their careers, and they don't even really know each other. Why do it, you ask? The obvious answer is their similar ethnicity, but they're here to tell you that ethnicity cannot be homogenized and that South Asian artists continue to change and grow.

The Setting

New York's Mercury Lounge was comfortably full one evening last summer, a mixed crowd milling about. There were girls hanging out, doing girls night out. Hipsters were there to see what was going on. Even though the crowd is skewed South Asian, it was hard to miss the four obnoxious twenty-something Indian stockbrokers in the back, slapping each other on the back and swilling scotch to celebrate their latest victory on the Street.

The band at the Mercury that night was led by Falu. She's a singer who actually grew up in Bombay, but these days she's finding a way to integrate her classically trained voice with rock guitar, funk bass and straightforward 4/4 drumming. Her voice leaps octaves and carries melodies, not unlike the way in which classical Indian singers practice their art, but with a black dreadlocked drummer, white bassist and Korean keyboardist this is hardly a live version of some Bollywood filmi.

Across town on another night in New York, at S.O.B.s, Bhangra Against Bush was offering bhangra dance lessons before DJ Rekha and her guest DJ Eddie Stats started spinning the wheels of steel. The dance floor was filled with Indian, white, black, Asian and Latino people trying to get a handle on the rhythms provided by the clattering drums of bhangra. Off to the side, regulars were catching up, watching the action and getting drinks.

Even though the Republican National Convention was in town and most locals had fled the city, the club was filling up at the un-club-like hour of 10 p.m. The dancers got sweaty as bhangra gave way to snippets of hip-hop, reggae, scratching and other odds and ends. The action only slowed slightly when Rekha turned the boards over to Stats for a set of dancehall that showed some surprisingly strong similarities between these seemingly distant genres.

Whereas it's common for Indian homeowners to open up their homes for music performance, South Asian culture moved its way out of the living rooms and basements in the mid-'90s to become a club phenomenon. More recently, there've even been impressive box office receipts from the hit movie Bend It Like Beckham and the Bollywood Nights musical. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber has gotten in on the action with the musical Bombay Dreams, which uses the music of Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman [see GLOBAL RHYTHM cover story, October 2004]. This is to say nothing of hip-hoppers Missy Elliott and Timbaland's use of bhangra beats and Indian music samples. It now appears as if Talvin Singh's much vaunted Asian Underground has surfaced.

Cover Girls

Assembled for the photo shoot for the magazine cover, the four women have all come to this point from different places. Falguni Shah (Falu) was born in Bombay and now lives in New York. Rekha Malhotra was born in London and grew up in New York. Sheetal Bhagat was born Chicago and now is in Los Angeles. And Kiran Ahluwalia was born in Bihar in Northern India and grew up in Toronto. At the time of publication, she'll have just moved to New York.

The shoot takes place inside on a sunny day, but the yoga studio used is light and airy enough that you don't feel like you are missing out on the nice summer afternoon. Part cocktail party, part girls' sleepover, part dress-up, the vibe is surprisingly fun and loose. The women share jewelry and curling irons. Rekha is text messaging as she waits for the photographer to get the light just right. Everyone is chatty and patient.

Of the four women, Rekha is the quickest, with a sardonic humor, cynical comeback and bittersweet story that are hardwired into the personalities of many New Yorkers. Kiran is the most genial, chatting with everyone and friendly, with a sort of Canadian openness that makes her immediately likable. The big eyes and sculpted features of Sheetal are intimidating at first, but then she opens her mouth and you get the sense that she's a no-nonsense woman who tells you exactly what's on her mind. The youngest of the bunch is Falu. She's less sure of herself, but she smiles a lot and has a soft earnestness about her that will likely harden the longer she lives in New York.

Portrait of an Artist

Later at a nearby caf, where everyone has reconvened for food, Sheetal gets to the heart of the matter without much preamble.

"I think we're so different. Each of our cultural background means we are doing different things. Rekha does hip-hop. I think it's fabulous, the more great [Indian-derived] work that can be built up the better."

"I think there is a danger of oversimplifying our common backgrounds," Rekha adds. "As a DJ I get that a lot. People ask me, 'Is there something religious in that song?' And I'm like, 'No, they are talking about drinking and pursuing a girl.' For me, there is a danger of over-classifying things by culture."

Creative expression doesn't come without a certain amount of self-appraisal and awareness. It helps us make sense of who a person is. Any Indian person (or most any person from a country of size and population) will tell you that there are countless different cultures and traditions within their country. These women speak for themselves first and foremost, drawing upon their own experiences.

"India has a massive culture," Kiran says. "South Asia doesn't mean anything. It's really inspiring to hear what's happening and to see what new sounds are being born right now. I get very excited."

The first thing traditionalists are going to point out is that these women are not doing traditional Indian music, the music that they may have even been trained to perform.

"There is constantly a sort of tug-of-war between the two," Falu points out. "The real challenge is to push toward innovation while staying true to 5000-year-old traditional
roots. It's very easy to take music from both worlds and slap it together. I think it's much more difficult to find a balance that can be respected by members of both traditions."

Falu isn't the only one: All four filter Indian culture through the personal experiences they have as Americans of Indian descent.

"We're not really losing [our ethnicity], but growing it," says Kiran. "We want to grow more of it. It's pretty hard to lose it if you've learned it. The thing is, you don't want to repeat exactly what your teachers did, or what other artists have already done. It's about contributing to my form of music. It's trying to take it forward, not forward but in a different way."

Obviously, tradition versus innovation is always a hot-button issue in world music. Some artists are saddled with keeping a forgotten or fading tradition alive, and that's a lot for them to uphold, especially if they are finding their own way. With a music tradition reaching back several millennia and a population topping one billion, India and its culture aren't in danger of fading away. In fact, it's a modern culture that is very much on the move in many directions.

"I don't believe in tradition," Rekha declares. "Especially with the music I do in North America, within the bhangra community, there is this whole notion of tradition and what is traditional and there are people who try to check you to see if you are real or not. And I feel like we are kind of inventing the tradition."

Kiran: "Many people think my music is traditional, but it's really how you define traditional. Does traditional mean music that was performed and played 60 years ago? Thirty years ago? Two hundred years ago? What is traditional music? In my mind I'm doing contemporary Indian music. I have taken in influences that have come into my head from India, but also things I've got in Canada as well. Because there is no electronic music in my music, people are tempted to say that it's traditional. It's not contemporary Western, but contemporary Indian."

Falu: "I'm trained in pure Indian classical music, stuff that goes back 1,000 years. My songs are about today's times. I don't really feel like mine falls in a genre, it's more about me creating one."

Sheetal: "Mine is based on traditional motives and melodies, but the basis of each of the songs is a really grungy drum loop. I added bass and strings—these songs have everything you would have in modern pop or electronica. There is electronica stuff, some very traditional stuff like throat and lute. There's kind of an Eastern thing. I think we're carving out our own genre."

Suffragette City

Wrestling with their art is not the only thing the four must come up against. These 21st Century women still wrestle with gender issues as well. All are involved in the business as well as the art in their careers. Coming up against biases, their opinions and achievements are not always taken seriously.

"I've had people tell me not to worry about things and just sing my pretty little head off, which is really patronizing," Sheetal recalls. "I don't like being told not to worry about something. I can't say for sure, but I wonder if a man in my position would be told the same thing."

"I thought I could prove my DJ skills," Rekha says. "But the reality is that the ethos of hip-hop is so male-driven. It's about masculinity as much as supremacy of skills, which I find very offensive."

"I don't like a lot of impromptu drumming during my set, call me weird," Rekha adds. "In my contract I say that there is no live music to accompany my set. A lot of times, especially in bhangra, they like to have dholis come on. And I rarely find a dholi who respects what I'm doing, where they play with, not against, not over, what I do. I have MCs that ask me if they can chant with me. I tell them that I want to hear what they do first and they get pissed."

The payoffs, of course, are grand. Rekha is one of New York's preeminent DJs. And she's thankful to be able to make a living doing what she loves. Kiran has arrived, winning a Juno, touring Canada and Europe, and playing gigs in the U.S. Falu and Sheetal are going to be there soon; they've got the goods as well.

Each has made music that draws upon her Indian roots, but to varying degrees each has moved in a new direction. Whether it's Kiran using Canadian poets for ghazal lyrics or Sheetal basing a new song on a drum loop, these are women who are finding their way in the world, which is all any of us can hope for. Watching them do their thing is to see the modern experience of defining oneself as an artist and an individual. Their presence is proof of their resolve and success.

Together these women are part of a community that is announcing, in its own way, this arrival of South Asian culture in America. Whether it's in a club in New York or L.A., or some little bar in Saskatchewan, they are here to spread the word about their Indian culture and their experiences here in America. Theirs isn't a kinship of style or sound, it's one of the Indian-American experience, which, happily, they are willing to share with us and each other.

"This [conversation] is cool because I kind of feel isolated," Rekha says. "I'm gonna bring up 9/11: Everyone asks me if I'm feeling a lot of tension because I'm brown. I go, 'Look, I work at home all day alone. Then I go to a club with 500 people. There is nothing in between. The environment in the club space is loud. You don't talk to people or interact with people. It's not about being isolated, it's more about having people to bounce things off of and use as a springboard.'"