It’s not easy finding a good clip of Cheb i Sabbah… But this is one, of him and a belly dancer named Frederique in a Berkeley record store. Making it even more interesting, one of the songs that he plays - starting right when Frederique’s name comes up in the credits - is a song by Natacha Atlas (that’s “Dymalhum,” from her [...]
Several years ago, while I was working at a terrible daytime publishing job, I cheered myself up by listening to a show on WBAI FM that was DJed by Delphine Blue. That was in 1998 to 2000, but I think I might have listened to her earlier than that. Delphine was the DJ who introduced [...]
I picked up a copy of the Basement Bhangra CD by DJ Rekha and wanted to say a few words about it. But for some interesting and no-doubt more informed reviews, I suggest checking out The Orlando Weekly and Sepia Mutiny. The gist that I get from these reviews - especially the one from Orlando [...]
Dehli2Dublin give us a nice new spin on the old Irish-meets-Indian music theme… I like this particular clip (”Apple Jam”) quite a bit:
There’s also a crazy video of them doing a Canada festival with a combination of kathak dancers and jig dancers, which I discovered at Project BollyHood.
The guy in the group whom Project BollyHood mentions, Dave Sharma, has [...]
Below, I’m posting a copy of the first comment that I wrote last night in that thread at Brooklyn Vegan on the M.I.A. show. I think I’m going to let this suffice as my write-up here (more or less). The conversation at BV has kind of gone down hill since then. There was some back-and-forth about whether the wait was [...]
Well, I went tonight to see M.I.A. at Terminal 5. It was a great show. Terminal 5…less great as a venue, and the opening acts, not really so great. She should have gone on much sooner, but when she finally hit the stage, it was truly explosive.
I started to do a write-up but am too exhausted [...]
Some people are visiting this site in a search for mujras because they’re looking for softcore porn. That’s understandable, because the mujra sort of has a double meaning. Wikipedia used to have* a pretty good description of its origins… It was a dignified dance once, but due to political and social upheaval, it did for a while become [...]
This (as a lot of you probably know) is M.I.A.’s “Bird Flu”:
And this is a clip of the Tamil film song that it sampled from:
(That’s from the movie Jayam (also often spelled Jeyam). I’ve seen that song listed as “Thirvizha Na Vantha,” but also as “Thiruvizhannu Vandhaa” and many other variations thereof.)
Wandering around the Net the other day, I found a good Canadian-based site called Beats Without Borders. It features a good clip of a Cheb i Sabbah show, over in the “multimedia” section. It also has some very good music mixes - one, by DJ Adrian, starts playing as soon as you get to the main page, and two [...]
