Folk Bands and Artists
Amira Kheir
2019 Songlines Award nominee for BEST ARTIST, consecrated as “The Diva of the Sudanese Desert“ (BBC World News) Sudanese-Italian singer Amira Kheir, has been enchanting audiences around the world with her unique sound of Sudanese Desert Blues. Based in the UK, her music draws from traditional Sudanese music, entrenched in frenzied East African polyrhythms and pentatonic scales, and ancient mystical Nubian and Niloitic melodies, while traveling through soul, jazz, rock and electric desert blues. She is a unique artist who is incorporating sounds that are very different from each other and creating music that has a coherent identity of its own, expressing itself through improvisation, experimentation and magnetic communication between its stellar band members.
To date, she has released three albums to great critical acclaim ´View From Somewhere (2011), ´Alsahraa´ (2014), and most recently her highly critically acclaimed third album ´Mystic Dance´ (2018), all released by her independent label Contro Cultura Music and legendary African Music label Sterns Music. Her latest release ´Mystic Dance´ garnered superb reviews including 4 stars on the Evening Standard and 5 stars on Songlines, described as “A tour de force that builds on the rich promise of her 2014 release Alsahraa“, and garnering Kheir comparisons with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald as well as a nomination for the Songlines Awards 2019 in the category of Best Artist.
Based in London and singing in Arabic, English and Italian, Amira Kheir has performed at some of the world´s biggest festivals and stages, including Womad Charlton Park (UK), Festival Au Desert (Mali), repeated editions of the London Jazz Festival including London Jazz Festival 2018, London African Music Festival, and the London International Festival for Exploratory Music (LIFEM), as well as touring the Netherlands as part of the ´World Sessions´ Tour by World Connections. She was commissioned to to write and perform improvised live scores for Ernst Lubitsch´s seminal 1920s silent film ´Sumurun´ by the Bird´s Eye View Film Festival twice, and has been featured on world reknowned magazines including Songlines and fRoots, as well as being a regular at Radio France Internationale, BBC World News, BBC World Service, BBC 3´s “World on 3 with Lopa Kothari“, BBC Arabic and BBC Persia. As a young singer, musician, composer and producer, she has been nominated as one of “6 Amazing Jazz Artists from the Middle East and North Africa not to be missed” by Mideast Tunes, and selected as one of “13 African Artists that will mark the next Decade” by Rede Angola.
Amira Kheir is an artist of global proportions. With a track record of creating provoking and engaging music that grabs the attention of any listener due to its urgency and also subtle sophistication, she is an artist able to write transversal, culture-crossing music which speaks to listeners across borders and perfectly accompanies her spell-binding vocal abilities, making waves not just in the jazz and African music circuits, but also internationally. A singer of the highest calibre, she is instantly recognisable by her distinctive contra-alto which ranges from crystal clear to husky silvery qualities and incorporates ondulating pentatonic styles from the rich Sudanese tradition to soulful vibrato all in one breath.
Amira is a new type of Diva. The BBC´s consecration of her as “The Diva of the Sudanese Desert“, carries with it a connotation of a new 21st century young African female artist- embodying the modern and the traditional effortlessly, whilst building bridges through music with the rest of the world. She is a true ambassador not only for the new generation of Africans, but for people across the world, whose identity is non-linear. Her new album ´Mystic Dance´ is a reflection of exactly this: the marriage of the ancient and traditional with the modern and contemporary. It is a celebration of ancient mystical East African roots catapulted into an electric futuristic outer-space desert soundscape. This is an artist to watch!
