Kiran Ahluwalia
(Avokado Artist)
Kiran Ahluwalia is an upper class Punjabi who grew up mostly in Toronto, fascinated at an early age with the ghazal, a form of poetry (and singing) fascinated with love and loss, but couched in sophisticated, literary written language. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, by contrast, grew up in the deserts of Northern Mali, watched his father killed by rebels at the age of 4, drifted in and out of refugee camps, fought for Quaddafi's Libyan army as a young man and broke finally out of the most abject poverty into international stardom with the desert blues band Tinariwen. You could hardly imagine two life stories more different, and yet, the two meet here in sinuous hand-drummed rhythms and droning, hypnotic textures. Aam Zameen: Common Ground finds an unlikely meeting place between Malian proto-blues and Indian classical traditions.
The two art forms connect most successfully in a cover of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Mustt Mustt," itself a cross-cultural collaboration between the famed Qawwali singer and Canadian producer Michael Brook, which was later remixed by Massive Attack. The song is performed three times over the course of the album, first and most dramatically, in a slow, bass-thumping, hand-clapping, caravan-rhythmed interpretation that blends the call and response chants of Africa with the shadowy tonal variations of Ahluwalia's ghazal singing. It's a stunning transposition, one that works equally well whether you approach it from a "How is this different from Tinariwen?" or a "What exactly is not South Asian about this?" standpoint. The song sits in an imaginary no-man's land at the non-existent borders between North India and the Sahara, but it works very well all the same. It comes again six songs later in a slightly more sparse and somber guise, Ahluwalia's voice sliding and fluttering over a darker backing of electric bass, keyboard and some sort of sustained keyboard sound, and yet again, in a longer, again African-tinged version at the close of the album.
In between, Ahluwalia continues to play the syncretist. Her song "Safra," layers traditional, keening vocals with indie rock guitars, and fits very traditional ghazal poetry (written by friend and sometime collaborator Khalil Sohail) over breezy, new age optimism. "Rabba Ru" brings together multiple stringed instruments, like guitars but maybe not exactly guitars, together in a song that is part desert drone, part subcontinental lament and part (a very small part) Cajun and country blues. Ahluwalia makes it work because she and her fellow musicians - not just members of Tinariwen but also Terakaft - seek genuine points of contact. Their connection comes not just in similar drum sounds, or a proclivity for bent vocal notes, but in seeking the real emotional center of these sounds, the sense of suffering, persistence and overcoming that pervades many kinds of traditional music.
There's a lot more polish and sheen on this album than you'll hear on the typical Tinariwen or Terakaft solo effort, and a few sounds veer past smoothness into the realm of slick. Yet for the most part, Ahluwalia cleans up traditional sounds only enough to allow them to shine, crosses culture only to show their basic commonalities.
DOWNLOAD: "Mustt Mustt" (any of them) JENNIFER KELLY
See also at BLURT: Tinariwen album review (Tassili) and feature (An Extraordinary Life).
