Indo-Canadian singer-composer Kiran Ahluwalia's sixth album Sanata: Stillness is an intoxicating swirl of Indian rhythms, African desert blues, modern jazz colors and a farflung lot of other things, while her previous releases explored the ghazal and folk styles of her native India, Portuguese fado, Celtic fiddle and Afghani rhubab as well. In just the last few months she has put a South Asian spin on "Three Blind Mice" for NPR's acclaimed Radiolab program, and recorded a track with Alex Skolnick, guitarist for the popular heavy metal band Testament. Ahluwalia finds in these disparate cultural languages common ground for a thrillingly new music of discovery and joy that is perhaps best termed None of the Above.
Born in Patna, India, Ahluwalia grew up in Canada and trained in Indian classical music and the Indian-Pakistani poetic song tradition ghazal. Her work borrows from these and other tradition-laced forms but moves so far beyond the traditions that they're recognizable only as great-sounding songs. Her musical odyssey into uncharted terrain accelerated when she met and married Pakistani-American guitarist-arranger Rez Abbasi (voted No. 1 "Rising Star" in DownBeat's 2014 critics poll). Their union of musical cultures, she says, could only have been possible among the diaspora of those living outside of India and Pakistan.
"Since the partition of India and Pakistan, relations between the two countries have often been at the edge of war. If we had not migrated to the West it would have been impossible for us to meet and do this music," she says. "This music wouldn't have existed had we had not been outside those borders."
Sanata: Stillness pops with the best thing any music of any kind can offer: The sound of discovery. As if carrying strands of cultural-roots DNA, Ahluwalia's musical melanges tip their hats to the past while sticking determinedly to a freshly hybridized music of sheer sonic surprise, efforts that have earned her JUNO Awards (World Music Album of the Year) for 2004's Beyond Boundaries and 2012's Aam Zameen: Common Ground.
"I never wanted to be a classical Indian music performer," she says. "I learned Indian classical music to be able to be a better ghazal singer and Punjabi folk singer." Ghazal is a highly literate poetry made up of mostly couplets, and has very particular rhyming schemes. While her first couple of albums hewed closely to the musical and lyrical forms of ghazal, Ahluwalia now pens most of her own lyrics in a contemporary song style. It's an idea largely inspired by her passion for the guitar-heavy grooves of the Tuaregs, nomadic tribes from the Sahara desert.
"One of the key elements of Tuareg music is taking the fewest notes in a melody and building a groove and a trance with it," she says. "Most of Tuareg poetry is about civil war and the hardship of living in the desert, but also the beauty and the love of the desert. I wasn't able to find the words in ghazal poetry that would allow me to compose a melody that would incorporate more Western arrangements along with Tuareg phrases and rhythms, so I incorporated Tuareg rhythms and wrote my own words."
Freed from the formal restrictions of the age-old ghazals, Ahluwalia now sings of the personal and political in ways that adhering to traditional forms would not have allowed her to do. "For me it's a release of whatever is inside, a release of joy in some songs, or just where the music is propelling me." In "Qaza" she melds a Western singer-songwriter type of rhythm and enchantingly sings of the need for letting go and exploring "the dark alleys of the mind," an overarching theme on Sanata: Stillness.
"There is a corner of the mind that has a sign up that says 'Do Not Enter,' and these songs are about trying to get the guts to enter that corner and to deal with whatever's in there. So it's the struggle with the 'civil war' within." Her soaring voice on the lively "Tamana" celebrates unchained female sexuality; the haunting "Hayat" conveys the resonant disconnect of being an Indo-Canadian living in New York City; built upon Indian/Pakistani rhythms, the galloping qawwali cover tune "Jhoom " was inspired by the joys of wine.
Making divergent musical roots unify is a challenge that Ahluwalia enjoys; creating a frisson between daringly juxtaposed sounds is even more to her liking, for her music is about rubbing them together and watching the sparks fly upward. As heard on a cooly bluesy cover of the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan /
Peter Gabriel song "Lament" and elsewhere on the album, she and Abbasi introduce innovative harmony to musics that don't normally emphasize it.
Pushing the perimeters of familiar musical genres requires a courageousness that Ahluwalia proved again when she performed at the 2013
Festival in the Desert in Mali, during a truly dangerous time -- kidnappings had already occurred and normally intrepid world music fans were staying away in droves. (They actually needed air cover during the festival.)
Everywhere she has traveled recently, from Africa to India and the USA, people recognize Ahluwalia from the video for her earlier Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan cover, "Mustt Mustt," which just goes to show how she has crossed cultural and political boundaries by staying bravely true to her self.
SOUNDCLOUD:
http://soundcloud.com/info-260/sets/sanata-stillness.
