For those of you who don't already know about Azam Ali let me introduce you to her. She is of Persian background, raised for a time in India, and has lived in the U.S. for a while now. She creates an ethnic kind of music that's not really easy to typify. For several of her albums she worked with Greg Ellis, an American percussionist who utilizes instruments from all over the drumming world. More recently she formed a group named Niyaz with a distinctly Middle Eastern flair. I like a lot of what she does and love some of it. If you surf You Tube you can hear the variety in her work, but what I really appreciate is the creative daring of someone creating something quite new.The video embedded below shows Azam Ali in concert with her group, Niyaz. This song is music she composed around an old Persian poem called "The Hunt" that appeals to the animal lover in me. The hunter has fallen in love. As newly smitten lovers often do, he can't stop thinking about his new sweetheart. In every animal he is about to shoot he sees her and so of course is unable to harm the animal. Each verse gets longer as the list of animals he is unable to kill gets longer and longer. :-)
3 comments:
May I add that the words in the song that Azam Ali sings comes from the poems of Jalaleddin Rumi. The song sums up his philosophy that all is one and one is all, that every being is a different manifestation of the spiritual whole that compose and bind all things. I am you as you are me, as we are all things and all things are we. As a high school student majoring in literature, I had to memorize his poems.
For some reason, I didn't expect her to sing in Farsi. I like it a lot; she sounds very Persian to me. What's "new" about her sound? (I'm not being sarcastic...I'm really wondering).
-Shirin
Shirin,
The song I chose to post isn't very different (I just like it) at all, but some of her other stuff is. She utilizes a lot of sounds and instruments from various cultures from the coast of northern Africa, the Middle East and India. She often doesn't sing in a true language, but a type of pseudolingua (made up sounds... I think I also just made up that word!) She also uses some techno sounds and what I've read one person describe as "global groove." One of her songs is similar to those Bulgarian choir types; if you've never heard that kind of music you can hear hers at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzQmkSjLvvE&feature=related One would have to listen to several of her albums to get a good overview of her eclectic creations.
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