Shabaz is a world-dance musical trio based in the Bay Area of

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. Its name refers to

Lal Shahbaz Qalandar Sayyid Shah Hussain Jafari al-Marwandi , (1177 - 19 February 1274) popularly known as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (), was a Sufi saint and poet who is revered in South Asia. In Taqaiyah, his maternal grandfather changed his name to Usman al-Marwandi o ...

, a

Sufi Sufism ( or ) is a mysticism, mystic body of religious practice found within Islam which is characterized by a focus on Islamic Tazkiyah, purification, spirituality, ritualism, and Asceticism#Islam, asceticism. Practitioners of Sufism are r ...

saint who is a major inspiration behind the musical genre of

qawwali Qawwali is a form of Sufi Islamic devotional singing originating in the Indian subcontinent. Originally performed at Sufi shrines throughout the Indian subcontinent, it is famous throughout Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and has ...

. Its members are brother-and-sister Pakistani vocalists

Sukhawat Ali Khan Sukhawat Ali Khan (born 1960), son of Indian-Pakistani vocalist Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and nephew of Nazakat Ali Khan, is a classical singer of Sham Chaurasia gharana tradition, as well as a performer of North Indian and Pakistani classical music ...

and Riffat Salamat, as well as Bay Area multi-instrumentalist/producer Richard Michos. It was established in 1994 as the Ali Khan Band; its members decided to change its name to Shabaz in 2001 to avoid confusion with other "Ali Khan"s. Both Khan and Salamat are descended from Chand and Suraj Khan, who sang to

Akbar the Great Akbar (Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar, – ), popularly known as Akbar the Great, was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Akbar succeeded his father, Humayun, under a regent, Bairam Khan, who helped the young emperor exp ...

when he was emperor of the

Mughal Empire The Mughal Empire was an Early modern period, early modern empire in South Asia. At its peak, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus River Basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to ...

. As the Ali Khan Band, the band released two albums on the San Francisco-based City of Tribes label. They signed with Mondo Melodia in 2001, and released their self-titled album as Shabaz on September 11, 2001.

Critical reception

Derk Richardson described ''Shabaz'' as an atypically successful attempt at combining world and dance music, writing that the band had "succeeded where countless others have faltered." He further stated that there were two reasons the album was successful at achieving this crossover, namely: "The Khans sacrifice none of the emotional power of their singing in Shabaz's aggressively pop-crossover format, and Michos carefully complements their ecstatic stylings with his deftly programmed arrangements of traditional Asian and Middle Eastern acoustic instruments and modern Western electric guitars and synthesizers."

Robert Christgau Robert Thomas Christgau ( ; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became a ...

gave the album a 3-star honorable mention, describing the band as "sister and brother qawwali singers with more spirit than shame and an American collaborator helping them take their bhangra and chela technopop". Silke Tudor wrote that on the album, "synthesizers and keyboards accent the ecstatic vocalizations of Sukhawat and Riffat, which is the opposite orientation of most exports from the Asian Underground."

Discography

*''Shabaz'' (Mondo Melodia, 2001)

References

{{Authority control Musical groups from San Francisco Musical groups established in 1994 Qawwali 1994 establishments in California