Five Rivers to Five Boroughs—Soho Road to the USA

I attended the launch of an exhibit titled, Five Rivers to Five Boroughs—Soho Road to the USA, and a panel discussion about bhangra music at 92y in Tribeca, New York, tonight. It charts the rise of the drum-driven music and dance from the Punjab, now heard on streets and dance floors throughout the US, UK & beyond.

The panel discussion touched upon not just bhangra's popularity as a music form but how it linked to issues within the South Asian diaspora.

Some American-born South Asians in the audience bemoaned the lack of a platform for bhangra music in the USA, saying it had more of a solid base in the UK and there was more performance of it there, too. Shin from live music group, DCS, said the live music scene was waning because of the popularity of DJ culture. Ethnographer, Nina Chanpreet Singh, also on the panel, said bhangra had become a way through which young South Asian men asserted their identity, after 9/11 had made them more vulnerable targets of hate crime.

These are just snippets of some of the interesting discussions.

The exhibit itself features photography, album sleeves, promotional art and rare examples of print media that helped spread the bhangra sound across the world. It's contributors, such as journalist and DJ Boy Chana, Alaap stalwart Kalyan and DJ favorites San-j Sanj, & DJ Rekha, have allowed unique access to their personal collections of never-before-seen photographs and archives. The exhibition has toured to over 70 venues already in the UK and Europe. Click here for details.

Muslim Women's Film Festival

Tomorrow in Los Angeles, hundreds of films from around the world by women living in Muslim majority and western countries, will be shown. These women's voices will be added to a global discourse that usually lacks them. The Muslim Women's Film Festival will be a part of a wider initiative to get these women’s stories heard by a New York-based charity called Women's Voices Now.

The 98 short films in the festival (available online), focus on stories about and mostly by women and girls living in Muslim majority societies and those living as minorities around the globe.

The mixture of fiction and documentary films looks at the lives of Iran’s first female bus driver, two women married to the same man, and an all-female Tae Kwon Do group in Afghanistan.

The aim of the festival is to allow Muslim women to tell their stories by themselves through citizen journalism and the Internet, so their voices and perspectives register on the western public consciousness.

Catinca Tabacaru, a lawyer and head of Women's Voices Now, says: “The content of the films is surprising to western audiences who are not used to seeing Muslim women portrayed as heroes and changemakers."

The festival is not a one-off but a year-long campaign with focused events planned in other countries (a UK visit is in the works, too), beginning with the festival. The organization plans to travel to Muslim majority countries and show these films. Tabacaru says that the festival and campaign is not about fixing these societies but “creating a platform” for women’s stories.

Radio Bruce

Today I co-hosted Dave Marsh's morning show on E-Street Radio, a Bruce Springsteen radio station (yes, such a thing exists), talking about my essay that will be pubished in a book about the rock musician in May.

My contribution was based on a presentation I gave at a Bruce Springsteen Symposium in 2005.

My relationship with Springsteen's music has changed since that time but the essay gives a snapshot of how my fandom developed.

Some have viewed my fandom with mocking scepticism. Why turn to a rock star who is so far removed from your day-to-day life for inspiration and guidance, some would say to me? Isn't that what we all do as teenagers and then grow out of it?

I can understand this point of view but Springsteen's music is not just for teenage phases - or only for men for that matter, the gender that makes up most of his audience. I believe it is for anyone stuck in a spiritual rut.

Springsteen once said it wasn't his job to carry the dreams of his fans, only to inspire them to carry their own. I am sure he feels the pressure from fans and his own image to act a certain way. Who knows what its really like for it to be routine to have hundreds of thousands of people screaming out your name, on a regular basis since you were 25 up to your sixties?

It's a completely different world to the ones fans usually inhabit despite his regular Joe Schmoe image. But Springsteen never asked us to trust him in the same way he asked us to trust his music. I feel some fans find it hard to extricate the two - not that it's an easy thing to do.

My relationship with his music has changed because I have. I don't listen to his music manically anymore and I don't feel the need to queue for three days to get a front row position at one of his gigs. But his music is a tool that I have used to find my place in the world.

In a way, that's what all art should do. Rather than try and enchant us with the cult of personality that surrounds its maker. Even if this is so enmeshed with art in modern times.

My New York debut

Many come to New York with a pipe dream. It's fabulous to have dreams if we don't get carried away with the fantasy and focus on our own strengths and passions to make them come true.

A few months ago I realised one of my own on the upper west side of Manhattan: I played guitar and sang in public for the first time in my life. When I first started to sing a few years ago it was a mystery to me what my voice would sound like, especially because my speaking voice is soft-spoken. 

At the end of my performance of a Bruce Springsteen and a U2 song, complete strangers clapped and came up to tell me how they had enjoyed my "soothing" and "rich" singing and playing. I then repeated the feat at a house party last night where again - people I did not know - were hanging on each word I sang.

I am looking forward to developing my singing and playing further and discovering other parts of me that I only dreamed existed but which have become real in New York.

Light of Day 2011

Yesterday night I attended the Light of Day benefit concert in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Great show for a great cause (to help raise money for sufferers of Parkinson's disease). Unbilled and unsurprisingly, Bruce Springsteen played a 90-minute set. Kelly-Jane Cotter from the Asbury Park Press described Springsteen as the 'gift with the purchase' for those with tickets. And you know what to expect when Springsteen plays NJ.

The clichés: the gig was mostly attended by affluent, middle-aged men, many in gold jewellery, who would not be out of place in an episode of the Sopranos and ladies looking like New Jersey housewives. Not a typical Springsteen crowd outside of NJ. Another cliché: Springsteen stole the show. Well, he's going to isn't he? That's not to say the other performers are not stellar artistes. But Springsteen's mantle as spokesman of joy, broken dreams, hopes and romantic nostalgia has pierced the consciousness of more than one generation of fan. This means he's going to affect more listeners than those whose work hasn't been given that platform and investment. Third cliché: grown men blubbering "I love you Bruce!" and screaming in desperate joy as he begins fraught-father-son-relationship song, Adam Raised A Cain. Fourth cliché: ultra-tetchy bouncers and security trying to control over-zealous Springsteen fans' attempts to shoot to the front of the stage.

I am sure there are many others. Springsteen joined Jesse Malin, Willie Nile and others on duets before belting out his own The Promised Land, Atlantic City, Your Own Worst Enemy and more to satiate a salivating audience - and an irrepressible Springsteen! An unexpected punk highlight was photographer, Danny Clinch's harmonica on simple and fun, Pink Cadillac.

Alejandro Escovedo played a soulful, acoustic set that ran the gamut in emotion, style and rhythm. Jesse Malin and the St Marks Social's fresh chemistry buoyed the audience with songs from Malin's latest album, Love it to Life. Willie Nile horsed around yet sang with heart and conviction, including the rousing, One Guitar.

Springsteen played one of the longest sets he's ever done for a Light of Day show. Could this be any indication of a tour in 2011? Let's hope.

Rebel Queen

I wrote a piece in the New Year Eve's edition of the Guardian about the last queen of the Punjab, Jindan Kaur.

The piece highlights the life of an inspiring, gutsy and far-from-perfect heroine in Punjabi culture. But it is also is a microcosm of a wider issue that needs to be highlighted: that there is a culture of female dissent in the east. This may seem obvious. But how often are women in "the Orient" to use Edward Said's term, made to appear too eager to be dominated and often victims rather than pro-active women in charge of their destinies. Too often and this view is perpetuated in the media too.

Knowing about a historical figure like Jindan Kaur may not change the image of women or even people's minds overnight, but it shows that there are figures to look back to. Complex women who had much to contend with and showed grit and persistence in the face of odds. Highlighting such women helps us begin the process of asking: where are they? How can we continue to highlight them and raise awareness of them?

There is a argument I did not get to make about how western feminists can sometimes look down on women’s struggles in eastern countries without realizing that a history of dissent does exist and we don’t always know about the figures that instigated it. Or the figures are not always spoken about in a way that makes them recognizable as part of a social movement.

But there are figures like Jindan Kaur. Then there are others like the writer Amrita Pritam who wrote about the horrific fallout for women in the Punjab during Partition - stories not discussed enough. Also the Rokeya Hossain story mentioned in the feature - Sultana's Dream - came ten years before what is considered one of the first western feminist utopian stories, Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This indicates a visionary attitude for society by women living in it at the time; not just passive women living as victims of oppression.

What history/stories are we missing while we are engaging in debates? When I went to the British Library to do research on Jindan Kaur, a search of her name yielded few results in the computerised archives. The librarian told me women were "very badly represented" in the catalogue. There needs to be radical rethinking of how we view history and one place we can start is by digging out these 'hidden heroines' and spreading awareness of them.

First Brit ever wins longest-running talent show in world

Last night the first ever Briton won what is probably the oldest official talent contest in the world and the model for shows like American Idol and the X-Factor. Ayanna Witter Johnson was the joint winner along with Nathan Foley of New York's Apollo Amateur Night competition - the first time there has been a tie in its 70-year history.

Johnson, a singer, composer and cellist who is from north London, performed a self-penned number called "Ain't I A Woman". She says she decided to audition for the competition when she heard about it while studying nearby at the Manhattan School of Music on the upper west side of New York.

Her name is now on a list filled with mind-boggling talent who won past Amateur Night contests, including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, James Brown and Lauryn Hill.

Billy Mitchell, the Apollo's tour director, says the Amateur Night Competition attracts a different kind of participant than shows like American Idol. "Most people on our show...their families are struggling," he says. But he rates the general talent of people who take part in the contest much higher than participants in shows like American Idol. "The talent seems to be much better - absolutely, without a doubt."

Ralph Cooper, an actor and producer, started the original Harlem Amateur Hour in April 1933 and the show is known for combining the talent show format with a distinctive, vaudeville-like atmosphere, and has depended on audience participation since the very beginning. According to the Apollo's website the "popularity contest has proven an effective measure of star potential, becoming a launch pad for some of the nation's greatest entertainers".