From BBC:
Archive for the 'Music' Category
Shubhangi Swarup in Open:
My career as an extra began when my friend, who was directing a music video on a shoestring budget, desperately sought fillers-in for her nightclub sequence. For free. With good intentions, I washed and conditioned my hair, wore a slinky dress at 9 am and showed up. Only to be insulted by the make-up dudes, who thought my hair needed re-doing and caked my face like the Joker from Batman.
If watching life pass by is a hobby of yours, then I would recommend the patient, thought-provoking job of an ‘extra’. On the music video set that day, while I tried to catch up with my favourite author Naguib Mahfouz, some models snorted a line of coke or two (for inspiration, I’m assuming). As your role increases, the pressure to be inspired does too.
When it was time for my two minutes of fame—a shot where I try to seduce the singer away from his lady love—I screwed it up royally. I had to sing the following lyrics in a seductive way: ‘O mere raja, paas to aaja, dono milke naachenge.’ (Oh my king, come closer, let’s dance together.) My laughter got worse each time I’d repeat the lyrics, and I just couldn’t get myself to look into his eyes and sing those words with a straight face. In the end I was in splits, with tears in my eyes. More:
also read Adventures of Shubhangi
Percussionist Sivamani delivers one of TED’s liveliest and most inventive performances yet. He uses traditional Western and Eastern instruments to create a rhythmic tour de force, along with a tub of water, corrugated metal, spoons, luggage, our stage props and even a little audience participation.
Modern Sufi leaders have become part of Pakistan’s corrupt ruling elite, favoured by the West not for their ‘moderation’ but for their compliance. Qalandar Bux Memon at Naked Punch:
I was sitting at the shrine of Shah Kamal in Lahore, with the dhol beats and whirling dervishes dancing to connect to the ‘centre of the universe in themselves’, when a friend turned and pointed to an old German fellow sitting a few meters from us. “He just delivered a lecture on Sufism. He is an expert on the subject, and talked about how it’s a religion of peace and love.”
I replied curtly: “Have you ever been in love? Have you had your heart broken? What peace is there in that state? What peace was there when Mansur had his head chopped off on the orders of the Baghdadi Emperor? What peace was there when Shah Inayat was fighting against the Mughal emperor for his life and that of his commune? What peace is there in Sassui’s peeling feet as she searches for her beloved through the desert of Sindh?”
My friend agreed and said: “But they pay me – I have to go along with them.” More:
Part two of Qalandar Bux Memon’s series on Sufism, focusing on the history of Sufism and the positive role it could play, will be published at The Samosa.
Oscar-winner A.R. Rahman’s song “NaNa” (click above to listen) from the Hollywood film “Couples Retreat” has been shortlisted for nomination in original song category for the 82nd Academy Awards. It will be competing with 62 other songs.
Rahman’s son Ameen also makes his singing debut in this track.
Couples Retreat is a comedy film directed by Peter Billingsley and written by Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn and Dana Fox.
From the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots:
Indian-American jazz musician Vijay Iyer and his Vijay Iyer Trio’s “Historicity” album was the most honored jazz album of the year. Click here to read the full article in Village Voice, and here to go to his website.
Below, Vijay Iyer Trio: about “Historicity”
And below, Vijay Iyer Trio recording Galang.
Shilpa Ray grew up in a Hindu household in New Jersey where she learned to play the harmonium. A year ago she left her band Beat The Devil to set up her own band, Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers. One review said she embodies “the vocal likeness of Janis Joplin.” Another called her “a punk Ella Fitzgerald.” Click on the video above to listen to her raw voice and watch her play the harmonium.
Here’s an interview in Brooklyn Vegan (via 3quarksdaily):
It was approximately a year ago that Shilpa Ray left her band Beat The Devil to focus on her own project with her own band that she calls Shipa Ray and The Happy Hookers. That would make 2009 not only their year, but their first year.
My own excitement for the band came right around January/February when I first heard their 8-song unreleased CD-R. More:
Also read the story in the Indian Express
Sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar in conversation with with Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk programme. From the Indian Express:
Sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar.
Shekhar Gupta: Because these were also the days of Beatlemania, spirituality, hippie cults.
Pt Ravi Shankar: Exactly. And then what happened was that I became a pop star all of a sudden. All young people, bearded, long hair, wearing beads and not normal. They would behave like Naga sanyasis if they were permitted. And I was not happy at all. I would tell George, “What have you done?” And I started speaking out. And then Montreal Pop Festival was the first place where I had this platform. They wanted me to play between The Who and another pop group. I said no, I am not going to play. Because I saw them kicking the instruments, burning the guitars and doing obscene things.
Shekhar Gupta: And that would offend you.
Pt Ravi Shankar: It was all drugs and nobody normal there — the audience or the people on stage. I said I was cancelling my programme. So they changed my number to an afternoon show, where there was no one before me or after me and that was fantastic. All the famous rock stars were there, including that guitar player Jimmy Hendrix. Anyway, that did change and that show was so successful. And then barely a year or so later, I was invited for the first Woodstock and I played there. Actually, I started the programme. Joan Baez sang and after that it started drizzling. So I said I won’t play because my sitar will get wet. So they quickly tried to cover it with something and I performed. But that was the experience that changed my whole view, because there were half a million people. It was raining, there was mud all over. And who was listening to music? They were all stoned. Completely stoned. And they were enjoying it. Mujhe yaad aaya, hamare mulk mein bhains dekhte hai in muddy water… it reminded me of that and I said “This is it. I am not going to play.” More:
Click here to read the first part of the interview.
In The Telegraph, Calcutta, Anuradha Roy has this delightful story on Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photo journalist. She was born in 1913:
In July this year, it was reported that India’s first professional woman photographer, Homai Vyarawalla, 96 years old, had decided to swap her 55-year-old Fiat for a Nano. She paid up, and was promised that the very first Nano out of the factory would be hers. However, the car company overshot its delivery date, upon which Mrs Vyarawalla cancelled her order. (To add insult to injury, she announced that a second-hand Maruti would do just fine instead.) In August, on Parsi New Year’s Day, Tata officials came personally to deliver her car and beg forgiveness.
After all that, by September she was considering selling the new car. She explained that she was tired of the media attention. Also, she didn’t like the car’s colour any more. She wanted to sell because she did not like driving a red car. More:
Born and raised in London, and of Indian/Punjabi heritage, Kamaljit Singh Jhooti, better known by his stage name Jay Sean, started rapping at 12. He is best known for his hits “Stolen”, “Eyes On You”, “Ride It” and “Tonight” in UK. He has released two albums, Me Against Myself (2004) and My Own Way (2008). Click here for MTV.
Some days back we posted a rendition of Husn-i-Haqiqi by Arieb Azhar, a superb and vibrant piece of music. Here’s another chosen by All Things Pakistan: Sufi singers Saeen Zahoor and Noori.
And read Sain Zahoor Ahmed on Sufi music and his mission at The Nation (via Pak Tea House).
It started broadcasting in 1923, began a Hindi service in 1950s, and earned millions of rupees as advertising revenue (in those days All India Radio had banned film music). Old-timers would remember it as the station that played the popular Binaca Geetmala. Even today, Radio Ceylon’s Hindi service that goes on air at the crack of dawn for just three hours every day has a million listeners. From the Indian Express:
AS Jyoti Parmar plays a devotional song for her listeners in a small room of Radio Ceylon (now Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation) in the early hours, she continues her father Digvijay Parmar’s legacy, who spent 30 years at Asia’s oldest radio station in Colombo. Jyoti hails from Uttarakhand. She was a child when her father got a job with Radio Ceylon in 1967. The station featured top radio announcers of that time like Gopal Sharma, Vijay Kishore Dubey and Ameen Sayani. She first stood in front of the mike 20 years ago, taking people’s requests. The listeners were from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
As she continues playing old melodies from this heritage building, she realises that the world back home has changed. The famous segments, Binaca Geetmala and Lipton ke Sitaare, are now part of history and have been replaced by Bhoole Bisre, Purani filmon ka sangeet, Ek hi film ke geet. More:
Husn-e-Haqiqi means true beauty
[via 3quarksdaily]
Declan Walsh from Lahore in the Guardian:
Wannabe rock stars have it tough in Pakistan. Last month a new band, Poor Rich Boy (and the toothless winos), took to the stage of a cramped Islamabad cafe for their breakthrough gig. On the first night, one person turned up.
“It was the night of the world cricket finals. Bad timing,” said the group’s guitarist, Zain Ahsan, ruefully. The second gig was better – 30 people came along – but brought its own dark worries.
“I asked the owner, ‘What if a bomb goes off?’” said Ahsan. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be with you.’”
Even in a summer of Taliban violence young Pakistanis are rocking on. An underground music scene is quietly thriving in the country’s major cities, nourished by the internet and the passion of mostly amateur bands.
In Lahore a pair of unemployed rockers have tapped into that enthusiasm with a new school for rock’n'roll.
“We weren’t getting a lot of gigs, and we needed to survive,” said co-founder Hamza Jafri. “So we thought we’d try this.” More:
The Sindh Assembly observed a minute’s silence to mourn the death of Michael Jackson. The News, Pakistan, has the report.
Below, the video of a thief who would be MJ comes via All Things Pakistan:
And from Pak Tea House: Michael Jackson’s death led many of Pakistan’s local television channels Friday morning, knocking the near constant coverage of the military campaign against Taliban militants off the top of the news lineup, if only for a few hours. At Illusions CD shop in downtown Islamabad, employee Irfan says, even today, years after the height of Jackson’s career, people still come to buy his music.
Irena Akbar in the Indian Express:
Michael Jackson was the Barack Obama of pop music. Or perhaps it should be put the other way round, since Michael came long before Obama did on the public scene. On Thursday, as the king of pop passed away, here’s what makes Obama and Michael so similar in more ways than just the fact that they are the world’s most recognisable Black faces.
Like Obama, Michael, an African-American youngster, had White audiences under his spell. His 1982 album Thriller, with 50 million copies sold worldwide, is history’s best-selling album ever. His concerts had Whites attempting to “moon-walk” like him. MTV, which was criticised for playing videos by only white performers, started regularly airing the title video of Thriller.
Soon enough, Michael had cast his magical spell all over the world, just like Obama’s victory was celebrated from New York to New Delhi. As an Indian child growing up in conservative Saudi Arabia in the 1980s -- I still remember Michael’s legendary numbers like Billy Jean and Beat It beaming out of racing sedans on the streets of Jeddah. Blasphemous it may sound, such was my craze for Jackson -as was that of any other kid in the 1980s -- I would play the number in our car when we would drive back to Jeddah after our pilgrimage in Mecca. Not to forget, we would play a videogame whose theme was based on his song, Smooth Criminal. And oh yes, who can forget the Bad poster that adorned many a wall of my friends there. More:
Below, another tribute:
And in Outlook, AR Rahman on Michael Jackson:
I met him personally after the Oscars in Los Angeles and we vibed very well. He said that he loved India and the Indian people. He said he heard good things about me and he was praising the chord progression of Jai Ho’s chorus.
He was bursting with energy and told me that every dance move he did, came from his soul and did a five second stunning example. It was like a lightning strike 
He was concerned about developmental issues such as Global Warming and about wars and its damages to the human community.
He asked me to compose a unity anthem on the likes of “We are the World ” for him. I nodded in awe …! More:
Click on the video (above) for her version of Wild World, and below, No More Bhopals at a concert in Chennai, India. “…in a way, the burqa helps creates shock value,” she says.
Gopu Mohan in the Indian Express:
How do you say, “I’m a conservative Muslim, but I’m also cool?” Perhaps you should rap it. The medium, after all, is the message. This is certainly what one young woman, Sofia Ashraf, believes. When on stage with her band Peter Kaapi, she raps, clad in a burqa, about what it is to be a traditional Muslim who is also modern and trendy.
“I can’t sing to save my life. In college, when we wanted to try something for a cultural programme, I tried rapping and it went well,” says the 22-year-old freelance graphic designer and copywriter, who is also the lyricist and rapper of the Chennai-based ethnic rock band Peter Kaapi. Incidentally, Peter, in city slang, is a person who speaks in English as if it is a matter of prestige, while the word kaapi is synonymous with the state.
“When I started trying rap during my college years, I was not trying to register a political message or social protest. It was more about teenage ideas like creating an identity. Even the crowd was not right for our songs about Islam. Along the way, somewhere, I started talking about myself.” More:
Hindustan Times has an extract from “Lata mangeshkar…in her own voice.Conversations with Nasreen Munni Kabir,” published by Niyogi Books:
One day in 1942 or 1943, a young girl came before my eyes. Today the world calls her Lata Mangeshkar. She was wearing a white sari. And I asked her to sing and she sang me a song. A few days later, she recorded ‘Haaye chhore ki jaat badi bewafa’ with the famous playback singer of the era, G M Durrani. It was a duet I had composed for Chandni Raat and she sang it with great feeling. She then sang my songs in Dulari and Andaaz. The first song we recorded for Andaaz was Darna mohabbat kar which was recorded by Kaushik Sahib.
I remember the poor girl would come by train to the studio, drenched, holding her umbrella in her hands. I used to offer her tea. She was always very affectionate. If I felt unwell, she would come to my house to see me. Her decency and her affectionate nature are praiseworthy. She has such intelligence and perception and immediately understands how a song must be sung. Her singing range is across a full octave from C3 to C5 and she can reach as low as G in the alto range. More:
Renowned Pakistani ghazal singer Iqbal Bano died in Lahore on Tuesday evening. Murtaza Razvi in the Indian Express:
The year was 1985, Pakistan’s darkest period under the General Zia dictatorship. The regime only reluctantly allowed the celebration of the dissident poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s birthday the year after he died, virtually banished from public life. An unspoken ban remained on his poetry on state TV and radio. The organisers had chosen the Lahore Arts Council’s Alhamra auditorium (a sarkari venue) on The Mall, neighbouring the Governor House, and Iqbal Bano was to sing Faiz.
Not only was Faiz banned by the quasi-Islamic regime, but also the wearing of saree at public venues. The mild-mannered Bano came draped in a silk saree, a perfect picture of her Dehli gharana style, but that day she roared like a lioness as Lahore swung along. The crowd was so huge the organisers had to throw the auditorium doors open, asking the youngsters to sit on the floor and vacate the seats for the elderly, who also came in droves. Then, loudspeakers had to be put up outside the hall, along The Mall, because the crowd outside just would not leave without hearing Bano sing Faiz. More:
Adil Najam at All Things Pakistan:
The last of the iconic woman singers of Pakistan and internationally acknowledged legendary artiste Iqbal Bano, who was widely known for immortalising Faiz Ahmed Faiz famous poems, died at the Ittefaq Hospital Tuesday. Iqbal Bano, 74, has left behind an unforgettable trail of thousands of immortal melodies since the day she started her singing career at a debut concert at the Lahore Arts Council back in 1957. More:
As The Dhol Foundation prepare to bring their weapons of mass percussion to Womad in Abu Dhabi next weekend, the sensational drumming collective’s frontman Johnny Kalsi talks to Stephen Dalton about their 20-year journey from one-man band to world music maestros. From The National:
Johnny Kalsi
The hybrid sound of The Dhol Foundation also reflects Kalsi’s own scrambled roots as a musical citizen of the world. Although he grew up in London listening to the same British rock and pop as his peers, his family history also includes Indian and African influences. Which helps explain the multicultural ethos behind his band’s music.
“Because I play with so many different bands, and I’ve worked with so many artists all over the world, if I like a flavour I just basically ask that artist to guest on my album,” he explains. “My albums don’t really have a genre because the flavour is from everywhere. I like Arabic music, African and Indian music -- both Bollywood and bhangra. I like the whole lot.”
Kalsi was born in Leeds, in northern England, but his family relocated to the western suburbs of London when he was still a baby. “I’m a Hounslow boy, same as Phil Collins,” he laughs. One of just five Asians in his school, and only two who wore turbans, he was singled out for racist abuse by some of his classmates. But this only drew him closer to his Sikh faith, he says, which is inextricably linked with music and Dhol drumming.
Kalsi’s father was a post office manager, while his late mother worked in a biscuit factory. Both were born in the Indian half of the Punjab, close to the Pakistani border, the cradle of bhangra music. More:
Visit: Womad Abu Dhabi and The Dhol Foundation
In Mint-Lounge, a review of Bhairavi: The Global Impact of Indian Music by Peter Lavezzoli (HarperCollins):
Among the winners at the Grammy Awards in February 1968, in the three important categories of jazz, pop and classical, were three performances that were in some way fertilized by Hindustani music: Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite, the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin’s West Meets East. It was perhaps an annus mirabilis for Indian classical music, capping such an active decade of its encounter with the Western consciousness that, two years earlier, British pop singer Steve Marriott had exasperatedly remarked: “We’ll be able to get plastic sitars in our cornflakes soon.”
In Bhaivrai: The Global Impact of Indian Music, Peter Lavezzoli aims to chart that encounter, in the years before and since 1968.
More:
Sitars and stripes forever
In TimeOut Mumbai, Peter Lavezzoli, author of Bhairavi, tells Naresh Fernandes how Hindustani music changed the West.
On Sunday, August 1, 1971, New York’s Madison Square Garden filled up with thousands of fans eager to see some of the era’s biggest pop stars performing at a charity event billed as the Concert for Bangladesh. But before George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan could come on, sitar player Ravi Shankar, sarodist Ali Akbar Khan and tabla maestro Allarakha were to present a folk melody from the conflict- and cyclone-ravaged country that was the focus of the effort. After Harrison introduced them, the Indian musicians started off by playing a flurry of notes, drawing polite applause from the audience. “Thank you,” said Ravi Shankar. “If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will appreciate the playing more.”
That moment of cultural befuddlement still elicits sniggers from Indians watching the film of the event, but it marked a watershed. More:
Here’s what TIME says about Zeb and Haniya’s debut album, Chup: “The Indians may have cornered the bhangra market, but when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll, it’s the Pakistanis who have found their rebel yell.”
Their website says “The Zeb and Haniya band is a project started by two musicians, Zebunnisa Bangash and Haniya Aslam, based in Lahore, Pakistan. Though the music and sound of Zeb and Haniya is hard to confine to one genre, it has been described at various times as Alternative, Art Folk, Ethnic Blues, and World Music.”
Click here to read their Wiki profile.
A.R. Rahman might have infused Bollywood beats with a global rhythm, but alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa uses jazz to expolore his Indian classical music roots. In New Yorker, Gary Giddins tunes in
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Jazz musicians have two fundamental goals: creating music that keeps listeners wondering what’s next, and finding a novel context within which to explore old truths. (There are no new truths.) Whenever a musician achieves this synthesis, usually after years of apprenticeship and exploration, a rumble echoes through the jazz world. Such a rumble was heard last fall, when the thirty-seven-year-old alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa released an astonishing album, “Kinsmen,” on a small New York-based label (Pi), quickly followed by another no less astonishing, “Apti,” on a small Minnesota-based label (Innova). The breakthrough had been a long time coming, and, curiously enough, it justifies ethnic assumptions that Mahanthappa had for much of his career been working to escape.
Hear the sounds of this astonishing musician on YouTube here
A.R. Rahman, the prolific Indian film composer behind the “Slumdog Millionaire” score, has been nominated for three Academy Awards. From The New York Times:
A. R. Rahman knows how big a deal it would be if he wins an Oscar on Sunday.
One of the most prolific and successful film composers in India, he has three nominations, all for “Slumdog Millionaire”: best original score and best original song, for both “Jai Ho” and “O … Saya,” a collaboration with the Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A. (The film, by Danny Boyle, has 10 nominations, and last month Mr. Rahman won a Golden Globe for best score.)
“It would be a great honor,” Mr. Rahman said with characteristic diffidence in a phone interview this week from Los Angeles, where he was preparing to perform at the ceremony. “It would help me to do bigger things.”
M.I.A’s music strikes dissonant undertones to some Sri Lankans, writes Thomas Fuller in the New York Times
To many Americans, Maya Arulpragasam, known as M.I.A., is the very pregnant rapper who gyrated across the stage at Sunday’s Grammy Awards.
Yet in Sri Lanka, where she spent her childhood years, M.I.A. remains virtually unknown. And some who do know her work say she is an apologist for the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels fighting in the country’s long-running civil war.
M.I.A. — who has been nominated for an Oscar for the song she co-wrote for the hit film “Slumdog Millionaire” — has branded herself through music videos and interviews as the voice of the country’s Tamil minority. In the video for her song “Bird Flu,” for instance, children dance in front of what looks like the rebels’ logo: a roaring tiger.
“Being the only Tamil in the Western media, I have a really great opportunity to sort of bring forward what’s going on in Sri Lanka,” she said in an interview on the PBS program “Tavis Smiley” last month. “There’s a genocide going on.”
And click here to watch a YouTube video of MIA’s Bird Flu.
Hip-hop star M.I.A. on her Oscar and Grammy nominations. Ethan Smith in The Wall Street Journal:
Hip-hop artist M.I.A. recently rocketed from the experimental underground to the pinnacle of the entertainment world. “O Saya,” her collaboration with Indian composer A.R. Rahman from the “Slumdog Millionaire” soundtrack, is one of three nominees for the best-song Oscar. And her track “Paper Planes” is in contention at this year’s Grammy Awards for record of the year — the Recording Academy’s top honor.
Born Mathangi Arulpragasam in Britain, the future singer returned with her family to her parents’ native Sri Lanka when she was 6 months old. The family, who are members of Sri Lanka’s ethnic-Tamil minority, moved to Jaffna, in the island nation’s north. Not long afterward, the country erupted into civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government, and violence consumed Jaffna.
As a child, Ms. Arulpragasam rarely saw her father, Arul Pragasam, who was involved in the Tamil-separatist movement — though she says he was part of a more political faction than the violent and better-known Tigers.
Cutting chai, crazy traffic, BEST buses and a woman taxi driver in Mumbai are all part of the video for Dido’s new song, Let’s do the things we normally do from her album Safe Trip Home. The video is directed by Siddharth Sikand, the man behind the Get Gorgeous promos on Channel [V]. Sikand’s brief was simple: he had to interpret home. So, he picked on a woman cab driver (Shahana Goswami) and all life’s drama that she watches unfolding in the back seat of her cab.
