Captivating Cuban Jazz Launches Global Fridays Fall Season Sept. 16
Press Release: Arab American National Museum
Music, theater, multimedia performances enhanced by artist workshops
Southeast Michigan’s only world music and performance series – Global Fridays at the Arab American National Museum (AANM) – offers cultural experiences this fall that creatively transport audiences to Cuba, Egypt, India and beyond.
The 2016 Fall Season opens Friday, Sept. 16, with a jazz workshop at 5 p.m. followed with an 8 p.m. performance by Dafnis Prieto Si O Si Quartet, a revolutionary drummer and composer who has had a powerful impact on the global Latin and jazz scene. A classically trained musician at the National School of Music in Havana, Cuba, who takes pride in the multifaceted percussive traditions of his homeland, Prieto transposes elements from his Afro-Cuban musical heritage onto a jazz drum kit while integrating congas, timbales and the layered rhythmic patterns of rumba and son. Also a gifted educator, Prieto has worked with bands led by Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman and Eddie Palmieri, among others.
The Global Fridays festivities continue 6:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, with an open mic, reception and gallery stroll of the What We Carried: Fragments from the Cradle of Civilization exhibition followed by Noura, a staged reading by award-winning Iraqi American playwright/performer Heather Raffo at 8 p.m. In this re-imagining of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Raffo examines the story told from inside the marriage of an Iraqi refugee family living in New York. This fast-paced script highlights an acutely relevant awakening of identity that tackles the notions of shame, violence, assimilation, exile and love. It’s a detailed insight into the interior crisis that lies behind the collapse of the modern Middle East and America’s inseparable relationship to it.
In addition, a few days prior to her performance Raffo and Detroit’s Matrix Theatre Company are offering a FREE theatrical storytelling workshop entitled Places of Pilgrimage: Identity & Belonging in America, open to adult participants 18 years and older from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 4.
The musical voyage carries on at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28, with a Diwali Celebration of classical northern and southern Indian music featuring renowned flautists Raman Kalyan and Deepak Ram. The Spirit of Breath, a jugalbandi or duet of two solo musicians, offers listeners a distinct experience, akin to witnessing two artists paint the same image (raga), but with contrasting shades of color and nuance. Ram, one of the senior disciples of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, has spent more than 20 years learning the nuances and imbibing the intricacies from the great legend. Raman, a leading flautist of the Carnatic style, learned from Sangeetha Kalanidhi Dr. N. Ramani.
The 2016 Fall season closes at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 9, with a musical oratory featuring Egyptian drummer, disc jockey and storyteller Karim Nagi, who guides audiences on an alternative tour of the Arab World and Arab Diaspora through an educational, groove-worthy trip. Using percussion, verse, storytelling, video projections and an urban remix soundscape, Nagi describes revolution, recreation, immigration, profiling, identity, music, dance and more. Pieces like Yalla Yalla poetically chronicle the Arab Spring, while the anthem Baladi TukTuk describes the challenges of immigration.
Since the Arab American National Museum (AANM) opened on May 5, 2005, its Global Fridays multicultural performance series – a sister series to the AANM’s annual summer Concert of Colors world music festival in Midtown Detroit – has offered high-quality musical and spoken-word presentations for fans of traditional and world music and those with adventurous cultural tastes.
Enhancing the Global Fridays experience are post-show artist “meet and greets” and CD signings.
Global Fridays 2016 Fall Season
Arab American National Museum
13624 Michigan Ave.
Dearborn, MI 48126
Tickets – $15 general public and $10 AANM Members – are available in advance. Tickets are also available at the door.
All Global Fridays performances begin at 8 p.m. at the Arab American National Museum, 13624 Michigan Ave. in Dearborn. Free, lighted parking is available in the municipal lot north of the Museum.
For more event information and ticket purchase visit:
http://arabamericanmuseum.org/gf-fall-2016