Noon | Claudia Cassidy Theater
Salil Bhatt & Doug Cox’s Slide to Freedom
Ordo Sakhna I sometimes think even midwesterners used to the Great Plains would feel a terrifying agoraphobia if suddenly transplanted to the Central Asian steppes. But their wide-openness seems to inspire a sort of intimacy in the traditional music of the nomadic tribes who call them home. Their songs certainly evoke the miles yet to travel and the rocking and galloping of the horses who’ll help them do it, but they’re also flirtatious, witty, and full of a very down-to-earth feel for the joys and sorrows of the community. Seven-man, three-woman ensemble Ordo Sakhna hail from Kyrgyzstan, right on the edge of the great Asian steppe, and with their spectacular traditional costumes and arsenal of instruments—keening ocarina, sproinging mouth harp, pounding drums, chiming fiddles and lutes—they bring some of the vastness of the sky and the closeness of the yurt with them wherever they go. —MK
Razia Said Madagascar native Razia Said began a life of travel at age 11 when she left the grandparents who’d raised her and moved to the west central African nation of Gabon to live with her mother. She studied in Paris and eventually settled in New York, which has been her home base for two decades, all the while bouncing between Bali, Ibiza, and Milan, working as a stylist and actor. The 50-year-old singer came to music late in life and spent three years making the recent album Zebu Nation (Cumbancha), a pleasant, mostly acoustic collection that combines slow-to-midtempo folk-pop and R&B with traces of Malagasy styles like tsapiky and salegy—mostly audible in the warmly percolating accordion of Rabesiaka Jean Medicis and the great Regis Gizavo. Said has an inviting voice and her melodies ripple with sensuality, but the music’s vibe is a little too Starbucks-friendly for my taste. —PM
6:30 PM | Randolph Cafe
Goran Ivanovic & Andreas Kapsalis Guitar Duo
7 PM | Preston Bradley Hall
Shanbehzadeh This remarkable Iranian ensemble plays a form of traditional music that’s little known in its homeland, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Its members are from Bushehr, a Persian Gulf port city in the country’s southwest whose trade-route location exposed it to a rich assortment of cultures during its 19th-century heyday—with Arab, Jewish, African, Indian, and Armenian populations settling there for periods of time—and their music preserves a sound forged by such intermingling. Saeid Shanbehzadeh, who plays ney and Persian goatskin bagpipes, and his son Naghib, who plays hand percussion, are the heart of this trio, creating an intensely hypnotic sound that owes as much or more to African trance music as it does to anything Persian. On songs like “Hajiuni-Choupi-Chaki,” from the ensemble’s terrific 2009 album Iran: Music of the Persian Gulf (Buda), the group delivers a relentless rhythmic throb, which the elder Shanbehzadeh dances to onstage—a practice the authorities at home told him to abandon, helping provoke his 2002 move to France. There’s no mistaking his pipes with anything you might hear in Scotland: he plays a ferocious, fast-moving flurry of notes with no underlying drone. —PM
7:30 PM | Claudia Cassidy Theater
Bilja Krstic
8:15 PM | Randolph Cafe
Pedro Moraes
8:30 PM | Preston Bradley Hall
Salil Bhatt & Doug Cox’s Slide to Freedom
9 PM | Claudia Cassidy Theater
Razia Said See above.
9:45 PM | Preston Bradley Hall
Ordo Sakhna See above.
10 PM | Randolph Cafe
Morikeba Kouyate Ensemble
10:15 PM | Claudia Cassidy Theater
Oreka TX See Wednesday, September 29.