Houston's Sonny Mehta gets $75,000 grant to blend Sufi Qawwali music and American gospel
, Houston’s Sonny Mehta will spend the next year and change exploring the spiritual connection between traditional South Asian music and gospel sounds from these shores.
“Music is a universal language; we hear that all the time,” he says. “But I feel like when you bring two different, disparate, distinct genres and populations together with a true purpose of building something new, and you do it genuinely, I think that shared space always generates love and goodness.”
Nowadays Qawwali ensembles have begun opening to female members, and Mehta has begun adding female and LGBTQ+ poets into Riyaaz Qawwali’s repertoire — a far cry from where things stood a few generations ago. Qawwali only began reaching Western ears in the mid-‘70s thanks to the Sabri Brothers, the first musicians to play this form in Carnegie Hall.
Musically, Qawwali is characterized by catchy rhythms, prominent vocals, and the use of tabla drums and a drone-like instrument such as a harmonium. Compositions can last several minutes, the cumulative effect growing quite trance-like and ultimately transcendent. As described by Mehta, a native Houstonian who grew up loving Aretha Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” album, Qawwali’s similarities with gospel go well beyond its devotional lyrics.
None are on the books for Houston yet, but Mehta will bring Riyaaz Qawwali back home in November for a show featuring popular local choir the Jones Family Singers, with whom they played at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston last March — and will do so again next month at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C.
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