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. 

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?

New Cheb i Sabbah: New Clip, New Album, Good Review

There is a very interesting review of Cheb i Sabbah’s new album, Devotion, at Ethnotechno.  A couple of excerpts here:

Devotion, like the record of this name, is concerned with participating in the Self. What should also be expressed, as has been with all of Sabbah’s work, is the necessity of evolution in these art forms.  Hence while these eight songs are based on traditional, indigenous songs and ideas, he has made the presentation of the music completely unique . . . .

In fact, what is true of “Jai Bhavani” is what separates all of Sabbah’s work in Indian music:  Turn up the bass and drums, keep the melodic aspects (flutes, strings) woven within the texture of rhythm, and cap it off with some of the most beautiful vocals around.  Hence the hypnotic rhythm created both by the drums and Rana Singh’s voice on “Koi Bole Ram Ram.”  What Sabbah has done in his forty-four year career in turntablism is understand how to bridge numerous things, generations and cultures topping that list.  Taking Singh’s lyrics about the essence underlying divine names, he moves it from a ritual gathering to a dance floor (another form of ritual gathering, really).  Music that was important for one culture’s mythology becomes relevant to the world . . . .

Throughout his nine-year career on Six Degrees, Sabbah has redefined the way we experience the folk music of India, Pakistan, Morocco and Algeria.  He has brought it up to date for a technologically-inclined, digitally-consumed Western audience without sacrificing an iota of integrity.  That is, he has made the very notion of devotion sonically relevant to people who would have otherwise never happened to experience the rich traditions of these cultures.  As the title aptly suggests, every one of these sixty-two minutes is filled with devotion.  Regardless of the form you may or may not subscribe to, the essence is right here.

Along with the review, Ethnotechno were good enough to post Cheb’s new YouTube clip –  a nice snippet of interview and good (albeit brief) concert footage:

P.S.  According to Six Degrees, the release date is January 29.  They provide a free download for one song, Qalanderi.

Bandish Projekt (live in Sweden)

Loop Guru – Sussan

I was very glad to stumble across this one…  Although it sounds like a slightly different mix, this song was on Loop Guru’s first album, Duniya (The Intrinsic Passion Of Mysterious Joy), which I’ve had in my CD collection since it first came out, in 1994.  (Though it didn’t come out in the U.S. that year – I bought it as an import.  And by the way, as a point of trivia, this was also one of the first CDs that I ever bought, if not the first.  Yes, I was quite a vinyl holdout…) 

The title, of course, refers to the featured singer, Sussan Deyhim, whom I’ve also reviewed separately a few times.  A fine collaboration!

A Few Sites That I’ve Downloaded Music From Lately

    [Photo:  Lady Ra]

These are sites where I’ve downloaded music lately – mostly mixes, but also some individual songs, etc.   Plus, I have a few comments…  

1. Beats Without Borders –  I’ve talked about this one a few times – a good Canadian site, run by a small group of DJs who’ve done a number of other interesting things too (like hold benefits and festivals, participate in performing electronic music groups, etc.).  There are some good MP3s for listening and downloading over in the “Multimedia” section, as well as in the individual DJs’ sections (which you won’t discover unless you click their pictures on the left side of the site). 

I just downloaded Tarun and Lady Ra’s Diwali mix (live!), which is a clubby mix of bhangra with dancehall, etc. (familiar combinations at this point, but still good to hear).  I also downloaded something that I like even more, Lady Ra’s own MasalaSonica mix.  This is more of a “chillout” mix at times, but otherwise it’s quite danceable.  It’s got some Indian and Arabic electronica (yep, Cheb i Sabbah is in there), some trancey, psychedelic music, some jungle, and even political commentary.  Altogether, I think this is very good.

2. World Beat DJ, Lady Ra – The Lady Ra mix that I just mentioned is located at the Beats Without Borders site, but I didn’t get to it from there; I got to it from here.  This site says it’s “in progress,” which I hope is the case, because it would be nice to see more things on here.  In other words, there isn’t a whole lot here right now, but it looks promising. 

3. Indian Electronica – This is a site that focuses extensively on just what it says – a broad genre of music that I’ve been listening to quite a lot over the past 10 or even 15 years.  I’ve found lots of old favorites in these mixes, and some new music, and some interesting remixes of old favorite stuff.  Although  I have some quibbles with Indian Electronica…  All of the mixes that we can dowload come from an Internet radio show of sorts, replete with an announcer who I think announces a bit too much, and all of them have an opening theme that I find very annoying.  But I’m not as bothered by all of that as I was by the confusing listing/organizing/scheduling of their festival in New York City a few months ago, and my inability to buy a CD at an event where I was supposed to be able to buy it.  (Long story – probably not worth typing here.)  Plus, much of this festival was scheduled at an impossible time (for day workers or midnight shift workers), a Thursday very late at night.  (And I thought at first that it went on through Friday, but Friday was just some boring cocktail party in a museum.)  Anyway, I was so annoyed by this sequence of events that I took their site off my blogroll for a while.  But, of course, that’s a dumb reason to take off a site that really is a great resource.  So I strongly recommend it, especially the podcasts.  My favorite shows of late were #9 and #13.  (Just go to the podcast site and you’ll find them – though be forewarned, these pages take a very long time to upload, because the site itself is kind of slow and sometimes gets a little screwy technically, at least on my computer.  Why am I not surprised?). 

4. Eastern Eye – A nice and simple site – just someone who’s digitized and downloaded a bunch of old Bollywood albums from his record collection.  A lot of this stuff comes from the late ’70s and early ’80s and sometimes it veers a bit much into kitsch.  But there’s great music here too, with some really fine playback singers such as Mohammed Rafi,  Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar;  and lots of compositions by R.D. Bruman, among others.  (There’s an interesting song here composed by Bappi Lahiri – reminds me a bit of a more famous song he wrote called “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja.”)