#Rafiq Bhatia

[nofatclips]

Unbind by Son Lux from the album Tomorrows - Instrumental

[sivavakkiyar]

[yt: Sam Cooke]

[yt: Rafiq Bhatia]

[jonathantaylorthomas]

Where words fail, music speaks. Filling the emotional spaces with music that stays with us long after the credits have rolled, here are the newest members of the Academy’s Music Branch:

Taylor Swift, Abel 'The Weeknd' Makkonen Tesfaye, Jean Michel Bernard, Rafiq Bhatia, Ian Chang, Ryan Lott, Alain Boublil, David Buckley, Dominick George Certo, Chandrabose, Anne-Kathrin Elisabeth Dern, Anna Drubich, M.M. Keeravaani, Penka Kouneva, Zeltia Montes, Starr Parodi, Dara Taylor

Taylor is officially an Academy member.

[nonesuchrecords]

Kronos Quartet has announced its eighth-annual Kronos Festival, to take place at SFJAZZ Center, June 22–24, 2023. This year's festival celebrates works created for Kronos Fifty for the Future, a commissioning, performance, education, and legacy project. Featuring pieces by Rhiannon Giddens, Philip Glass, Zakir Hussain, Angélique Kidjo, Terry Riley, Wu Man, and more, the festival is hosted by Kronos in multiple performances over three days; the group is joined by Aizuri Quartet, Attacca Quartet, and Friction Quartet plus special guests Rafiq Bhatia (guitar), Soo Yeon Lyuh (haegeum), sound artist and instrument-maker Victoria Shen, and student ensembles from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Details/tickets here.

[eloscartimes]

Escucha la banda sonora de ‘Everything Everywhere all At Once’, de Son Lux

Escucha la banda sonora de #EverythingEverywhereallAtOnce, de Son Lux, nominada al Óscar 2023 a Mejor Score.

El tributo al cine de artes marciales es una constante en la banda sonora compuesta por el trío Son Lux, conformado por Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia e Ian Chang. La fusión de música clásica de cuerdas y tambores con elementos más modernos, rápidos y experimentales como percusiones y guitarras logra exaltar el linaje asiático de Evelyn y el misterio de los multiversos, sin olvidar exaltar la…

[adsmusiconstellations]

Rafiq Bhatia - In A Sentimental Mood (Standards Vol. 1, 2020)

http://www.rafiqbhatia.com / https://www.anti.com

Order at https://rafiqbhatia.ffm.to/standardsvol1

[filth-thezine]

Rafiq Bhatia - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (feat. Cécile McLorin Salvant) (Ewan MacColl cover)

[half-a-tiger]

RAFIQ BHATIA - “In A Sentimental Mood”, from the EP 'Standards Vol. 1,' available now via Anti-.

Directed by: Michael Cina and John Klukas

Artwork by: Michael Cina

Cinematography by: John Klukas

Editing by: Alex Howard

VFX by: Michael Cina and Alex Howard

[nofatclips]

A Different Kind of Love and Upend by Son Lux from the album Tomorrows III - Directors: Evan Chapman & Kevin Eikenberg

[sivavakkiyar]

[yt]

[ryanmuir]

New York Guitar Festival kicks off its 20th anniversary tribute to blues legend Memphis Minnie considered a crucial link connecting acoustic Delta blues with the electrified Chicago sound and was one of the first blues artists to go electric in 1942. Featuring Alsarah and the Nubatones, Nicole Atkins, Rafiq Bhatia, David Bromberg, Kevin Breit, Banning Eyre, Fantastic Negrito, Binky Griptite, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Kaia Kater, Brandon Ross, Amythyst Miah, Vernon Reid, Rachael & Vilray, Abdoulaye Alhassane Toure, Jontavious Willis, and Brandee Younger.

Photos © Ryan Muir

[sonlux]

Completing the Brighter Wounds collection, our EP Yesterday's Wake is available now for download and streaming worldwide ▷ sonlux.lnk.to/YesterdaysWake // Video by Marek Partys

[sinceileftyoublog]

Big Ears Festival 2019: 3/21-3/24

BY JORDAN MAINZER

While it’s easy every year to spot patterns among the Big Ears Festival lineup, the fest is one equally unconcerned with trends/scenes or purism and instead fascinated with rediscovering and redefining canon. Across the worlds of experimental/ambient music, jazz, and folk, the curators aim to spotlight both those with impressive CVs and ones taking advantage of their newly acquired musical platform. As I wrote last year, you can become as much of a festival curator, too, something that wouldn’t be possible if all of the performing artists didn’t have an equal seat at the table. 

But it’s not just that the festival is diverse in terms of genre, gender, and race. It’s that the sets--diverse within themselves--are born of organic collaboration. You could camp out to see various performances celebrating 50 years of ECM Records, about as established in the world of music as you can get; minutes away, you could catch someone like Lonnie Holley (who has been releasing music only for this decade) perform a one-time collaborative set with half of Fugazi. Perhaps a Big Ears Festival isn’t what it is for you without witnessing the artistic marvels of seemingly perennial participants like folk heroes Rhiannon Giddens, Abigail Washburn, Bela Fleck, and Rachel Grimes, or Knoxville music organization Nief-Norf. If that’s the case for you, they’re thankfully hard to avoid, unless for some reason you’re averse to simultaneously seeing them play with legends like Richard Thompson, Bill Frisell, and Harold Budd or contemporary genre defying masters like Mary Lattimore.

Rhiannon Giddens and friends busk in Market Square

As for this year, most sets had some elements of drone, if not deep listening, some more explicit than others. Alvin Lucier performed twice throughout the fest, joined both times by Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi and once by Joan La Barbara. Budd was featured three times--I caught his set with Nief-Norf and Lattimore, which started with minutes of ambient gong playing and eventually seeped its way into the crevices of the cathedral. Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, who just released an album together called The Transitory Poems, dueled on piano in the dark Tennessee Theatre, fast-paced, anxious, and monotone with some occasional typical flowery playing from Iyer. Rafiq Bhatia’s performance of his Broken English album combined his drone guitar picking with rolling drums and bass/synth and visuals, its peaks and valleys exuding the most exciting elements of post rock. This Is Not This Heat perhaps provided the most exhausting, exhilarating performance of the entire weekend. Multiple drummers, three-part chanted, breathy harmonies, woodwind shoved right into the microphone--it was the type of set that transformed you physically as much as mentally, probably the most at the festival since Swans in 2015.

Rafiq Bhatia performs Broken English

Charles Hayward of This Is Not This Heat

Experimental elements delved into even the ECM sets. Frisell and upright bassist Thomas Morgan toed the line between minimal and sterile, succeeding most when their songs felt like short sonic experiments. (The two have a great album out on ECM next month, Epistrophy, recorded at the Village Vanguard in NYC.) One of the surprise standouts of the entire weekend was the Mathias Eick Quintet. The Norwegian trumpeter created tones that were soft, somber, evocative, and weepy, a refuge from the rest of the band’s noise, and his rarely used singing voice was truly haunting, especially when harmonizing with violin. (It didn’t hurt that Eick was beaming on stage, grateful to be there and follow up Frisell, one of his idols.)

Mathias Eick Quintet

Mercury Rev

Normally, this experimental spirit pervades the entire lineup, so I was a bit surprised to see that two of the festivals headliners were full-on rock bands, even if ones pushing the boundaries of pop with their grand ambitions. You can’t deny that Mercury Rev and Spiritualized are gloriously uncool and maybe even a little corny, but their strict adherence to their artistic visions made their sets highlights of the weekend. To call Mercury Rev singer Jonathan Donahue “theatrical” is the understatement of the century; his Wayne Coyne-meets-Daniel Rossen coo is bested only by his miming of conducting an orchestra. The band provides instrumental fodder--half Wonka-esque chamber pop, half psychedelic glory--for Donahue’s sense of wonderment. Of course, the set was heavy on Deserter’s Songs, their opus that permanently shifted their aesthetic for the dreamier, and probably a good thing considering their more Big Ears-y album was their underwhelming latest, a Bobbie Gentry covers record. 

Jason Pierce of Spiritualized

As for Spiritualized, they’re touring off of a great new record, And Nothing Hurt, and they presented it in full during the latter half of the set. Jason Pierce sat perched on a chair for the entire set, donning sunglasses and reading off of a lyrics sheet. The hope that pervades the new record was actually bested by the song choices for the set’s older songs: “Hold On”, the glorious “Come Together”, early 90′s gem “Shine A Light”, the yearning “Stay With Me”, “Soul on Fire”, and the happiest version of Ladies and Gentlemen weeper “Broken Heart” you’ve ever heard, saddled with doo wop harmonies from the backup singers. Sure, the band delved into some noisy interludes and a strobe freakout during “On the Sunshine”, but for the most part, this was the new Spiritualized, pleasant slumbers and all.

Sons of Kemet

But to call Big Ears a festival for the mind and for the sheer listener is reductive; mobile music reigned supreme just as much as still vibrations. Perhaps this was perplexing to a crowd that tends to be older and very, very patient. A jazz fan I spoke to was perplexed by the currently thriving South London jazz scene, two of its brightest, Shabaka Hutchings-containing stars, Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, providing two of the most stimulating sets of the festival. The former’s combination of saxophone, tuba, and drums times two yielded a set that slows down only when the audience--not even the band--physically needed to do so, their latest album Your Queen Is A Reptile one of the most vital jazz records in recent memory. Yes, it’s also that neither Kemet nor Comet are jazz purists (more like rock-adjacent and jazz-inspired) that might have otherwise overwhelmed the ECM crowd, but by the end of both sets, even casual onlookers were hooked. The latter’s combination of King Shabaka’s saxophone, sort of hype man Dan Leavers (Danalogue) on Roland keyboards, and Max Hallett (Betamax) on drums was more primal despite their sound more electronic and space-themed, incorporating aspects of ambient techno into their funk jazz. Their latest record Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery has established them and especially Hutchings as major players in the global scene, if they weren’t already.

Junius Paul (left) plays bass for Makaya McCraven’s (right) set

The Chicago area brought a couple scene-specific acts to the festival, though one was certainly more niche: Jlin’s pseudo-footwork was an admirable retrospective of her now untouchable three-album discography (though I’d love to see Big Ears book a collection of footwork producers). And Makaya McCraven, whose Universal Beings was a relatively global album (despite what he says) offered a blissful, nimble set of slow-burning grooves from that record and Highly Rare, with a band that included bassist Junius Paul and guitarist Jeff Parker of Tortoise.

Overall, what made Big Ears Festival special this year is what makes it special every year: that any one person can come away with an experience 180 degrees from another person. But that’s increasingly happening because the festival refuses to be pigeonholed into one realm of experimental music, sometimes acknowledging that you don’t have to be experimental at all.