Sita Sings the Blues

This is a trailer for an animated film by the same title.  The music is very nice, though I can’t make much of the lyrics.  (Are they singing “Sita-ji” over and over again?  Obvously, there’s a good reason why that thought kind of amused me.  Sometimes, though, it sounds like “Sita-genie.”  Or maybe it’s something else in Hindi.) 

From what I can gather, the band that made the music to this clip is My Pet Dragon.  According to My Pet Dragon:

“Sita Sings the Blues” played to rave reviews at the Tribeca Film Festival!  The animated feature film by Nina Paley includes original compositions and score music by Todd Michaelsen of My Pet Dragon and also features the voice and dance of Reena Shah as Sita!

We are working to get a soundtrack record for “Sita Sings the Blues” available for digital download, stay tuned.

That’s all quite interesting.  But I found out something far more interesting – at least to me – when I looked at the site of Reena Shah:

Reena graduated from the Padmini Institute of Fine Arts, where she studied Bharata Natyam, an Indian Classical Dance Form, under The Late Guru Padmini Ramachandran, a famous Indian Actress & Dancer.

It’s funny, because that information is just buried in the middle of the “about” section, as though it wouldn’t interest people much.  (I fell off my couch when I saw that, but never mind.)

—————-

P.S.  Padmini was born on June 12, 1932.  Unless something happens to drag me away from my computer, you can expect a birthday post. 

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Madhuri Dixit Stage Show

A very nice thing to find for Madhuri Dixit’s birthday…  I like this stage show a lot.  I might even like these songs more in the stage show than in the original film scenes.

Tamma Tamma:

Key Sera:

Loop Guru – Paradigm Shuffle

Jai Maa Kaali

I stayed up well into the morning watching a 1995 movie called Karan and Arjun (available with subtitles at Daily Motion).  The scene below is fantastic, and the music to me sounds like pretty good Indian-folk-techno-rock fusion – hard-driving, especially near the end.  (I love the guy’s vocals at the end of this clip – so goth.)  The music and dance scenes were the best parts of the movie, and the story was kind of touching (as those Indian reincarnation-for-justice/revenge movies often are).  It gets a bit too silly near the end with the drawn out martial arts cowboy action scenes, but I foresaw that potential problem right from the beginning, and it’s not a big deal.  But meanwhile, those scenes in the temple…wow!  Hail mother Kali!     

Karsh Kale – Electric Tabla

An Interesting Interview with Cheb i Sabbah in Jewish Journal

I was doing a search on Cheb i Sabbah, mainly to find if there are any new and noteworthy reviews of his new album Devotion (I didn’t really find any) and also to see if he’ll be playing my town anytime soon (yes, at Drom on March 15 -yea!), when I stumbled upon this interview in Jewish Journal.  And this is a particularly interesting interview, because, with their perspective, they brought out some comments and information from Cheb that you probably won’t find in most other publications (or, I should say, most of the other not-so-many publications that interview him).  Here are a couple of good excerpts:

JJ: Most of your music has a heavy Indian influence.  Why?
CS: I was exposed to Indian music in the 1960s, while living in Paris.  The French were really into ethnomusicology, so I always heard music from around the world.  I’d grown up with North African Andalusian music, which is based on times of day, seasons, longing, separation, sadness, joy, all of that.  Classical Indian music is the same thing, so it wasn’t a big leap.

JJ: How did you grow up with Andalusian music?
CS: It was developed in Spain by the Jews, Berbers and Arabs, and after the Spanish Inquisition, it traveled throughout the Arab world.  In Algeria, the whole tradition of Andalusian music was largely maintained by the Jews, and it just so happened that my mother’s cousin was married to one of the master musicians.  So I grew up right in the middle of that.

JJ: How long has your family lived in Algeria?
CS: We trace back 2,600 years – to the Babylonian conquest of ancient Israel.  Following that exile, Jewish refugees migrated throughout the region, many settling in North Africa.  At the time, the Berbers of North Africa were pagan, but many were influenced by the Jewish idea of monotheism and converted.  Since that time, there were numerous invasions throughout North Africa – including that of the Bedouin Muslims.  The Berbers fought the Bedouins but lost, so many converted to Islam.  My family is among those who stayed Jewish.

. . . 

JJ: Do you feel at home in San Francisco?
CS: No.  That is one symptom of displacement.  Once you’ve been displaced long enough, nowhere is home – not even where you were born.  If you look at it from an Indian point of view, in a way it’s good, because you can’t be attached to anything – even your country, your roots and your culture.  I feel it’s good to practice nonattachment, because in the end, when you go, you can’t take anything; so why be attached?

Sharaab – Zindagi

A nice techno song done by Sharaab around samples (video as well as audio  here) from the song “Aap Jaisa Koi,” from the 1980 Bollywood movie, Qurbani.  (You can find out more about the original here.)