Kiran Ahluwalia to present Indian Songs: Roots & Revolution in New York

 

Award-winning singer-songwriter and composer Kiran Ahluwalia will present Indian Songs: Roots & Revolution on Saturday, February 21, 2015 at 20:00 (8:00 pm) at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York. She will be joined by guitarist Rez Abbasi.

Kiran Ahluwalia brings a modern sensibility to her songs of Sufi mysticism and yearning romantic love, creating music that looks to the future while maintaining an essential line to the past. A proponent of the great vocal traditions of India and Pakistan, she explores new territories to create a fusion of Indian and Pakistani beats, Western jazz, and Saharan desert blues. Two of her CDs, including the 2012 Aam Zameen: Common Ground with Tuareg group Tinawaren, won a Juno (Canadian equivalent to the Grammy) for Best World Music of the Year.

This program is a CD release concert for her sixth album Sanata: Stillness, in which she wrote both the lyrics and music. Her songs deal with the unattainable -both the beloved and the divine, discarding shame and celebrating female sexuality, and untying the knots that bind us to stale embraces.

One song offers new arrangements on a qawwali song by the legendary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

The program is part of The Composers Now Festival in New York in February that celebrates living composers, the diversity of their voices and the significance of their musical contributions to our society.

Kiran Ahluwalia was born in India, raised in Canada and currently lives in New York City. She immersed herself as a child in Indian classical music and ghazal, a song form based on Urdu poetry.

When the family moved to Canada she continued her musical training. After graduating from University of Toronto in the early 1990s, she returned to India where she spent a decade of intense deep study with her classical guru Padma Talwalkar and her ghazal guru Vithal Rao. At the same time, she traveled throughout the Punjab, immersing herself in the style and approach of Punjabi folk songs.

In 2001, back at home in Toronto, she recorded her first commercial CD, Kashish‐Attraction. This was followed by the Juno award for World Music Album of the Year for Beyond Boundaries in 2004. Her self‐titled compilation was released worldwide in 2005.

Before composing for her fourth album, Kiran met her future musical partner and husband Rez Abbasi, a New York City-based Pakistani-American jazz guitarist whose arrangements and ideas had a crucial effect on Kiran modernizing her songs. Together they traveled to Portugal to collaborate with fado musicians for Kiran’s fourth recording Wanderlust – winner of the 2007 Songlines/WOMAD Best Newcomer Award in the UK.

Later, through a chance encounter with the legendary Malian group Tinariwen, Kiran became fascinated by the guitar-driven approach of Tuareg music of the Sahara desert. After intensely studying Tuareg and other West African music, she was convinced she needed to add the addictive, hypnotic and cyclic rhythms to her own compositional ideas. Her collaboration with Tinawaren on Kiran’s fifth CD, Aam Zameen: Common Ground, resulted in Kiran receiving her second Juno award for World Music Album of the Year.

Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue at 3rd Ave., Downtown Brooklyn
$30; $25 students, seniors
Tickets: roulette.org, 917-267-0363