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Artist List:
Amampondo
Amjad Ali Khan
Asad Qizilbash
Bembeya Jazz
Chico Cesar
Clave Y Guaguanco
Eliza Carthy Big Band
Ensemble Kaboul
Jimmy Cliff
Julien Jacob
LoJo
Manecas Costa
Manu Dibango and
Ray Lema
Nitin Sawhney
Ojos de Brujo
Oumou Sangare
Pape and Cheikh
Samba Sunda
Sevara Nazarkhan
Sierra Maestra
Super Rail Band
Temple of Sound
Teofilo Chantre
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Profile:
Ensemble Kaboul
 
It's hard to imagine how the government of a country could take it upon itself to ban all forms of music with the dour exception of religious chanting. But that was precisely what the Taliban did during their mercifully brief reign in Afghanistan. Even before the Taliban took power in the mid 1990s, the political and social zeitgeist in the land was hardly comfortable for musicians, which is why many of them fled abroad.
Famed singer Hossein Arman and his son Khaled Arman, a virtuoso of the rubab or Afghani fiddle, founded the Ensemble Kaboul whilst living in exile in Geneva in the mid 1990s. Their cousin Osman, a flautist of dazzling repute, completed the core of the group. Their aim was to celebrate the sumptuous multi-cultural mosaic of modern Afghani music; Tadjik songs from Mazar-i-Sharif, intricate instrumentals from Herat near the Iranian border, exstatic party songs from Jalalabad with their virtuoso percussion breaks and popular tunes from Kabul itself.
The basic dynamic of the group rests on the unique interplay of the rubab (fiddle), santur, tabla and zirbaghali, a distant Afghani cousin of the Arabic derbouka and Iranian zarb.
This enticing line-up touched the hearts of the glitterati at this year's Radio 3 World Music Awards, where the group were presented with an award by Channel 4 anchorman Jon Snow. There was a general if unvoiced thanksgiving that this wondrous part of Afghanistan's heritage had survived all that war and religious bigotry could throw at it.
Biography by Andy Morgan, July 2003
Elsewhere on BBCi:
R3 Awards for World Music profile
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