Alsarah & the Nubatones

Part of the Alsarah & the Nubatones Visiting Artist Residency

Singer and ethnomusicologist Alsarah was born and raised in Khartoum, the capital city of the Sudan, until her family fled their homeland for Yemen, escaping an increasingly stifling and unstable regime. But violence and a short civil war eventually visited the family there too, so in 1994 she moved the New York to build a new life. As with so many expats she turned to the music she grew up with to fill a void left by her exile, and Alsarah began to seriously study the Nubian culture—the region along the Nile River between Sudan and Egypt. When Egypt began to build the Aswan High Dam in the 60's, the people of the area were displaced without compensation, endangering and dispersing an incredibly rich culture. Over the years certain artists such as Hamza El Din and Ali Hassan Kuban crucially kept those traditions alive, but Alsarah has set about presenting Nubian music in a more contemporary vein while retaining key sonic elements, such as the prominent use of loping rhythms on the frame drum and the indelible twang of the oud. Over dinner one night she and percussionist Rami El Aaser began talking about old music from Nubia, pulling out records and reading articles—activity that led them to invite oudist Haig Manoukian and bassist Mawuena Kodjovi to form the Nubatones. As the band developed Alsarah traveled and performed widely; in 2013 she performed at the first Somalian music festival in two decades. The group dropped its impressive debut album Slit (Wonderwheel) in 2014, a collection that serves up a dazzling variety of East African music melded with contemporary elements like hip-hop beats and snaking synthesizer riffs: Alsarah calls it “East African retro-pop,” with source material stretching from Ethiopia to Zanzibar. In a recent review in the New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote, “Her songs looked toward the sparseness of Arabic music, accompanying her voice — gentle at first, then revealing a steely core — with oud, percussion, electric bass and a backup singer. Like the other performers, her lyrics held messages of social conscience; one song, she explained, criticized governments that did not protect human dignity.”

http://www.alsarah.com/

J.A.S.S. Quartet

This new Los Angeles combo is helmed primarily by musicians affiliated with Indian classical music: tabla player Salar Nader, violinist Shiva Ramamurthy, and vocalist Aditya Prakash. And while there's no missing how those traditional sounds form the backbone of its music, the presence of Vietnamese-American pianist Julian Le gives the end result a much different complexion than one might expect. As much as listeners tend to make certain assumptions about what musicians from a certain part of the world are interested in, the truth is usually more complicated as J.A.S.S. Quartet proves—musicians naturally absorb all sorts of traditions and styles, and it's only natural that those ideas flow into their own work. The shimmering, melodically lush lines of jazz-trained Le give the music a rewarding beauty and added harmonic sophistication, cascading over the percolating grooves of Nader and the snaking, microtonal sallies of Ramamurthy with a liquid grace. The focal point, however, is Prakash, an acclaimed singer in Indian classical music who has frequently situated that discipline in new contexts, whether collaborating with the likes of Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale, or leading his own expanded combo the AP Ensemble to investigate his interest in hip-hop, jazz, and brass music in addition to Indian traditions. In the J.A.S.S. Quartet, Prakash melds the phrasing of Indian music within a more limber improvisational context, pushing against the grain of his co-horts with much greater freedom and immediacy than he can in formal contexts. At times the group pushes deeper into art-song territory, forging a stunning balance between Hindustani fundamentals and introspective pop melodies.