PRICE:
$14.50
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Ghazalaw
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
MARVEL 002CD MARVEL 002CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
10/30/2015

Ghazalaw, the eponymous debut album from the Wales/India collaboration, is the second album to be released on Cerys Matthews's Marvels of the Universe label. Ghazalaw is a sublime musical meeting between acclaimed Indian ghazal singer and musician Tauseef Akhtar, from Mumbai, and Gwyneth Glyn, from Criccieth, North Wales, one of Wales's leading singer-songwriters. The music is a marriage of two great traditions of love poetry and traditional music: the ghazal singing of the Indian sub-continent and the folk song of Wales. Though the traditions may seem distant at first glance, dig deeper and you'll find that Welsh folk and Indian ghazal evolved from common ancient poetic forms, specifically Sanskrit. Tauseef Akhtar served a ten-year apprenticeship with the greatest ghazal singer of modern times, the "Ghazal King" Jagjit Singh. Gwyneth Glyn is steeped in the linguistic and poetic richness of her homeland, inspired by the landscape of Wales and centuries of tradition. Yet she stands at the forefront of a new Welsh generation keen to seek out and celebrate the many affinities that tie two distant parts of the world together. Akhtar and Glyn are joined from India by Ashish Jha (tabla), Manas Kumar (violin), and Sanjoy Das (guitar), and from Wales by Georgia Ruth (harp, vocals), who earned two BBC Radio 2 Folk Award nominations in 2014 following the release of her 2013 debut album Week of Pines.