Category Archives: Reviews

Concert review: Anoushka Shankar forging the link – separated by a thousand years – between Spanish and Indian music…

Date: April 6 – 8, 2012
Venue: City Winery (NY)
Concert review by Dawoud Kringle

The idea of blending two different cultural influences in art or music is not new. In fact, the idea has been going on for centuries. It is only now that it is so noticeable, due to the process being accelerated by communication and other technology.
A recent intriguing step in this path is the CD and tour by Anoushka Shankar; daughter of illustrious sitarist and musical ambassador Ravi Shankar. No stranger to multicultural experiments, Shankar has brought about an intriguing blend of Indian raga and Spanish flamenco. According to historical evidence, flamenco’s distant roots are in 9th century India. Punjabi “untouchables” fled persecution and wandered the Middle East and Asia; eventually settling in Europe. There has been, however, little speculation of the common roots of the theory of this music.

 

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Concert review: Mohammad-Reza Lotfi – the virtuoso tar and setar player came after almost ten years of absence from New York City!!!

Date: April 15, 2012
Venue: Symphony Space (NY)
Concert review by Aida Shahghasemi   
Mohammad-Reza Lotfi, the virtuoso tar and setar player came to the Symphony Space stage on W. 96th street after almost ten years of absence from New York City. As he regularly does, Lotfi walked on with his white cotton shirt and pants and gracefully carried himself to the point of readiness, legs crossed, tar in hand,  looking up at another world for the initial inspiration. On his side, he had his loyal tombak player, Mohammad Ghavihelm.

Courtesy of World Music Institut
Courtesy of World Music Institut

Lotfi began his career over forty years ago. He was born in 1947, in Gorgan, a northern province of Iran. Encouraged by a musical family, he delved deep into playing tar and soon he was the student of some of Iran’s biggest traditional music masters such as Aliakbar Shahnazi, Habibollah Salehi, Hossein Dehlavi, Abdollah Davami, Sa’id Hormozi, and Nourali Boroumand. His studies carried him to Western classical music conservatories, where conducting, composing, and orchestral membership became additional areas of study and fascination. Lotfi rose out of a fertile cultural and musical era in Iran. The seventies holds memories of influential individuals such as Dr. Dariush Safvat and initiations such as the Center for Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music, from which some of the most prominent Persian Classical musicians of today prospered. These include Mohammad-Reza Lotfi, Hossein Alizadeh, Parisa, Hossein Omoumi, Naser Farhangfar, Dariush Tala’i, Majid Kiani, and Mahmoud Farahmand.

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Concert review: Simon Shaheen – The Call, Songs of Arab Pride, Dignity and Liberation!

Date: April 10, 2012
Location: CUNY Graduate Center/ Live@365 World Music Series, presented by Elebash, curated by Isabel Soffer
Reviewed by Brian Prunka
Simon Shaheen is well-known among Arabic music enthusiasts as one of the most gifted living performers on the oud, the fretless near-eastern antecedent to the lute and as a superb violinist.  For several decades he has worked tirelessly to increase awareness and understanding among Western musicians and audiences of the rich Arabic musical tradition, and encouraged Arab musicians to embrace their musical heritage. I became aware of Simon in the late 1990s when I first began learning the oud, and learned of the annual Arabic Music Retreat that he directs each summer.  Simon and his colleagues, such as Ali Jihad Racy and Bassam Saba, introduced to me and countless others the remarkable depth and richness of the Arabic Tradition.  While my opinions on this performance may not be wholly objective, I hope that my intimate familiarity with the playing styles of the musicians will compensate to some degree for that deficiency.

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Concert review: Nass Gwana performing the sounds of Moroccan Gnawa music in New York

Date: March 27th, 2012
Venue: Zebulon (Brooklyn, NY)
Concert review by Jim Hoey

Zebulon, on Saturday night, was jumping with the sounds of Moroccan Gnawa music, a mix of Arabic, Sufi, and Sub-Saharan Berber mysticism. The band, Nass Gwana, performed three sets for the night, featuring the 3-stringed sintar (desert bass/guitar), which was shared by two of their players, and lots of droning kalabash (castanets), and vocals by almost all of their members.

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CD recommendation: Kmang Kmang “Drifting” – Chicago’s post-rock collective debut!

Artist: Kmang Kmang
Title: Drifting
Label: self release
Genre:  classical guitar music with a good dose of jazz and instrumental fusion

“The most important thing is that it’s viscerally powerful,” states Barmey Ung, the classically trained guitarist and composer behind Chicago’s avant acoustic rock collective, Kmang Kmang.“I don’t like to intellectualize things too much, and don’t like to attach meanings where there doesn’t have to be meanings. I just want the music to be aesthetically powerful.”

Let the man himself speak about his CD release!

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