Author Archives: Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi

Indiegogo camapign: “PROFILED” – a feature-length documentary about police brutality and racial profiling

PROFILEDText by Kathleen Foster (director, produces independent documentaries that combine elements of individual stories, current events and history with a focus on grass roots struggles for change.)

Why I am making PROFILED?

In June 2012 a police officer killed Shantel Davis, a young African-American woman, through the open window of her car. It happened in Flatbush, a Brooklyn neighborhood near where I live. Distraught residents described hearing the fatal shots and watching officers drag Davis’ bleeding body onto the street, where they left her to die.

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Music Listings – 3/16 through 3/22/2015

1. SONADORA with Brooke Hamre Gillespie

Date: Monday, March 16, 2015
Time: 7pm – 10pm
Venue: Sacred Arts Research Foundation (107 Green St #G55, Brooklyn, New York 11222)
Ticket: $33
Genre: music of sound healing instruments/New Age?

Brooke Hamre Gillespie is actively involved with the Golden Drum, a cultural community center in Brooklyn, a member of the Initiatic College, and a student of Maestro Manuel Rufino learning the traditional Native American healing ways and sacred wisdom traditions. She is a visionary sound healer, song writer and song carrier of sacred songs from all over the world including Native American songs from South, Central, and North America, Tibetan and Sanskrit mantra, African songs and more. Brooke is a gifted energy and sound healer, Pleiadian Lightworker and Reiki Master. She believes in sound and music as universal methods of healing.

Woody Guthrie: 75 Years into “This Land is Your Land” and the Fight’s Still On

Text by John Pietaro – videos selected by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on Bastille Day, 1912 and some say that revolution was his birthright. Few before him, or since, can lay claim to the mastery of protest music as honestly as Woody. Though he battled the ravages of Huntington’s disease in his later years and lived only into middle age, his time remains eternal. And his life story is the stuff legends are built on.

75 years ago today, February 23, 1940, Woody completed work on an acerbic song of fight-back he then sang as “God Blessed America For Me”. Later, upon further reflection, Woody shifted its emphasis to include an embrace of the nation’s beauty and promise as much as it damned its inequity. “This Land is Your Land” has, through the decades, come to be seen as the ultimate folk revival song, indeed, our second national anthem. A closer examination of it, though, reveals the revolutionary core.

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Recommended Concert: Ghazal Ensemble (Iran/India) blending classical traditions

Ghazal Ensemble

Photo by Jack Vartoogian / Front Row Photos

Date: Sunday, March 22, 2015
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: Michael Schimmel Center at Pace University (3 Spruce Street, New York, NY 10038, 212-346-1715)
Tickets: $39
Genre: Persian-Indian trad. music

The Grammy-nominated Ghazal Ensemble, the brainchild of Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor and Indian sitar master Shujaat Husain Khan, and featuring acclaimed Indian percussionist Sandeep Das, return to New York City for a special 20th anniversary concert on Sunday March 22nd at 7:30pm at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts.

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Music Listings – 3/9 through 3/15/2015

1. God’s Untruly Friends

Date: Monday, March 9, 2015
Time: 7pm
Venue: Theater for the New City / Cino Theater (155 1st Avenue, b/w 10th & 11th street, New York City 10003, 212-254-1109)
Ticket: $15
Genre: psychedelic-ambient jazz/electric sitar music/improv

God’s Unruly Friends picks up where Dawoud’s previous ensemble Renegade Sufi left off. Featuring Latif Kurfirst (percussion), Chenana Manno (singing bowls, bass, dance, vocals), and led by Dawoud (exotic string instruments, such as the sitar and dilruba, laptop, vocals), and special guest t.b.a.. They offer music improvised from elements from many musical genres, and translates non musical concepts into musical ideas.

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