[FA Worldmusic] Great Performance Last Night at Makor, NYC: Zanzibar's Culture Musical Club

[Evangeline Kim]

I hope all North American and other summer festival presenters will do their
best to have Zanzibar's gorgeous taarab orchestra - Culture Musical Club -
return to the US in 2008. The 15 member group performed last night to wild
enthusiasm at Makor here in New York, and the packed audience seemed like a
mini-WOMEX with so many world music radio hosts, journalists and Afropop's
fans in the room (I even saw KEXP's and Microsoft's Jon Kertzer from Seattle
in the room who featured them on his radio program, Best Ambiance), so eager
to sample rarely heard East Africa's taarab music, live and direct out of
Stonetown.

The group is the second oldest taarab orchestra in Zanzibar, and was founded
in 1958.  Their wedding repertoire is truly a music of ecstasy so wonderfully
represented by Culture Musical Club, ranging from a swooning "bashraf" intro
akin to classical Egyptian orchestras with qanun, oud, strings, dumbek,
tambourine and other instrumentation, to the maracas-charged, hip-swivelling
"kidumbak" dance.  The 3 main vocalists, Mombasa's rising taarab star, Amina,
and Zanzibari Rukia Ramadhani and Makame Faki, each with beautiful, elegant
stylings, captivate, charm and entice.  After so many years of fascination
with other regions of Africa here in the US, I believe this group will help
break East Africa's music to North America in a major and long-overdue way, as
they've been touring Europe for the past 10 years and this was their first US
tour.

I have to thank Tom Pryor for letting me know the group was touring here and I
hear that it's to Mike Orlove's credit for getting them here for his Chicago
World Music Festival.  And thanks too to Brice Rosenbloom who's booking at
Makor now.

Werner Graebner, the group's manager, will be at WOMEX, so I recommend that
you track him down in Seville and do your best to book this group as a
priority.

Best,
Evangeline