Amerli: Refugees for Refugees

Muziekpublique is a non-profit organisation based in Brussels that seeks to bring together musicians from different cultures now resident in Belgium. It stages around 100 world music concerts a year at the Molière theatre, a 400-seater venue in Matonge, the African neighbourhood of Brussels, where this disc was recorded. Featuring instrumentalists and singers from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tibet, several pieces here group together the musicians from a particular country for virtuosic displays of their musical traditions. But the most thrilling moments tend to come when they support each other. The Tibetan singer Dolma Renqingi, who sounds rather like Yungchen Lhamo, is accompanied by a Pakistani sarod player on the trad Himalayan chant ‘Chomolungma’. On ‘Nowruz’, concerning a festival that was forbidden under the Taliban, Tibetan and Afghani voices combine. The title-track, which refers to a town north of Baghdad occupied by IS for many months, finds the Iraqi oud player Hussein Rassim duetting magically with the Syrian cellist Bassel Abou Fakher. Most uplifting of all – if perhaps not the strongest musical moment on the CD – is the Buddhist prayer ‘All Sentient Beings’ on which the Tibetan flute player and singer Norbu Tsering is joined by fellow musicians intoning spoken word passages in Arabic, Urdu and Dari.