{"id":148574,"date":"2010-11-22T20:55:08","date_gmt":"2010-11-22T20:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socancom100stg.wpenginepowered.com\/east-meets-west-fusions\/"},"modified":"2010-11-22T20:55:08","modified_gmt":"2010-11-22T20:55:08","slug":"east-meets-west-fusions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/east-meets-west-fusions\/","title":{"rendered":"East-meets-West fusions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les traductions pour les articles avant l\u2019automne 2013 ne sont pas disponibles pour le moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of hottest touring bands in Canada at the moment eschews the standard instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums in favour of sitar, dhol and tabla \u2014 mixed with a little Irish fiddle. Delhi 2 Dublin, a five-piece outfit from Vancouver, is riding a wave of South Asian music that has permeated Western culture. This year, the group\u2019s concert appearances have included dates at the Vancouver Olympics, the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX, Festival d\u2019\u00e9t\u00e9 de Qu\u00e9bec in Quebec City and the World Routes festival at Toronto\u2019s Harbourfront Centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe play to mostly white audiences \u2014 it\u2019s not brown people who are coming to see us,\u201d says Delhi 2 Dublin\u2019s tabla player Tarun Nayar<\/strong>. \u201cAnd they don\u2019t get scared away by the fact that there\u2019s a bunch of Indian instruments on stage and that our singer sings a lot of his lyrics in Punjabi. They don\u2019t even care. It\u2019s awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Delhi 2 Dublin, whose other members include vocalist Sanjay Seran<\/strong>, sitarist Andrew Kim<\/strong>, dhol player Jaspaul Ravi Binning<\/strong> and violinist Kytami<\/strong>, is just one of a number of Canadian South Asian acts enjoying crossover success. The group\u2019s current album, Planet Electric<\/em>, which was produced by Nayar and mixed by noted U.K. producer Diamond \u201cDJ Swami\u201d Duggal (Apache Indian\/Maxi Priest\/Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), is winning college-radio airplay and rave reviews in the indie music press for its energetic mash-up of bhangra, Celtic, dub reggae and electronica.<\/p>\n

East-meets-West fusions are nothing new to Canadian music. In the 1990s, Punjabi by Nature, a Toronto-based band led by Tony Singh, <\/strong>built a large following with its mix of bhangra with reggae, dance and industrial music. The group performed at jazz and folk festivals across Canada and even opened for hip-hop heroes the Beastie Boys. Meanwhile, Mississauga, Ont., sitarist Irshad Khan<\/strong> released a series of fusion albums and Vancouver\u2019s Indian Lion<\/strong>, who blended bhangra and reggae, issued his Under Cover<\/em> album on the BMG label.<\/p>\n

More recently, Indian-born, Toronto-raised singer Kiran Ahluwalia earned acclaim for her entrancing arrangements of ancient Persian and Punjabi ghazals, or poems. Ahluwalia, now based in New York, won the 2004 Juno World Music Album of the Year prize for her Beyond Boundaries<\/em> album. After winning the Songlines\/WOMAD Newcomer of the Year Award in England in 2008, Ahluwalia and her five-piece ensemble performed at the London Jazz Festival.<\/p>\n

Now that Hollywood has discovered Bollywood, A.R. Rahman\u2019s Slumdog Millionaire<\/em> soundtrack has won Oscars and Grammys and even the Pussycat Dolls have taken to wearing saris, the time seems ripe for Canada\u2019s latest wave of Desi-flavoured artists. Singer Suba Sankaran<\/strong>, who performs with Toronto\u2019s Indo-jazz outfit Autorickshaw, agrees. \u201cAudiences have open minds and open ears and they\u2019re ready to take bigger risks,\u201d says Sankaran, daughter of renowned South Indian percussionist Trichy Sankaran<\/strong>. \u201cThe fusion in things like fashion, film, books and cuisine, plus the information highway, has really helped to lift the veil of exoticism off the music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raghav<\/strong> knows all about fusion. The Calgary-born singer, who has based himself in England since attending Sir Paul McCartney\u2019s Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, has become one of the world\u2019s leading urban Desi stars by mixing English and Hindi vocals over music that blends R&B, hip-hop and Bollywood-sampled beats. Raghav\u2019s 2004 album Storyteller <\/em>featured Kardinal Offishall<\/strong> and sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide. His new album, Identity<\/em>, includes the Bollywood-style ballad \u201cHumrahee,\u201d sung entirely in Hindi, as well as a thumping dance track with U.S. rapper Redman.<\/p>\n

Raghav\u2019s manager, New York-based Jay Gatzby, who also represents Montreal\u2019s the Bilz & Kashif, as well as a number of U.S. and U.K. musicians and actors of South Asian descent, believes artists like Raghav can transcend their own communities. \u201cLook what happened to Latin artists like Shakira or Ricky Martin,\u201d he says. \u201cWith their talents, they\u2019ve been able to translate their success into the English market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sitarist Rishi Dhir<\/strong>, who leads the Montreal group Elephant Stone, says he doesn\u2019t understand music marketing. But he knows that his five-piece band sticks out from most other groups. \u201cThere aren\u2019t many bands that have sitar, especially in Canada, and people are intrigued by that.\u201d A classically trained sitar player, Dhir was a member of Montreal psych-pop outfit The High Dials until he grew disillusioned with the rock lifestyle. \u201cI love Bollywood music, Indian classical music and psychedelic rock, so that\u2019s what I wanted to mix,\u201d says Dhir. With tongue in cheek, he calls Elephant Stone\u2019s sound \u201chindie rock.\u201d<\/p>\n

With more than one million people of South Asian descent, Canada has become a major breeding ground for Desi talent, including Vancouver\u2019s En Karma, currently the country\u2019s top bhangra band, and Toronto\u2019s Gurpreet \u201cthe Tabla Guy\u201d Chana, who has recorded and performed with Canadian artists like Jorane<\/strong>, Ron Allen <\/strong>and Nelly Furtado<\/strong>. \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of Canada and our diversity \u2014 there are hybrids everywhere,\u201d says Sankaran, who also sings a cappella \u201980s hits with Retrocity. \u201cWe\u2019re on the precipice of something really exciting here.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Asian music in Canada<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-non-categorise"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}