Cool Stuff: Arab World and India
- Hannah Cheatham
- Jan 24, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 24, 2020
Cool stuff blog threeeeee!!!! Woot woot!
1. Norah Jones
When we talked about Ravi Shankar in class, I was so tickled to learn that I already knew one of his daughter: Norah Jones!!!
I first heard her sing in Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, probably when I was 6 or 7, where Norah sang a cover of "Love Me Tender". As a young girl, I was so entranced by her performance and to this day, it's still my favorite version of this song. Yes I said it! Sorry Elvis Presley fans! I just love her style and aesthetic of her voice: her warm timbre is so soulful and rich it's like extra dark chocolate!
She was born Geethail Norah Jones Shankar in Manhattan, NY on March 30, 1979. Her father, Ravi Shankar, was a famous Indian sitar player and her mother, Sue Jones, was a concert producer. She grew up with her mother in Grapevine, Texas, eventually ending up at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing Arts in Dallas, where she honed her skill and love for singing that started in her church, where she sang solos regularly. She participated in high school choir and band, where she played alto saxophone. She takes inspiration from Bill Evans and Billie Holiday, among others, and credits her mom with sparking her affinity for the "oldies". She majored in Jazz Piano and sang with the Jazz Singers at University of North Texas, where she met a future collaborator Jesse Harris. She started a band with Harris less than a year after leaving for New York City, where she started out as a lounge singer.
Throughout her 20 year career, she's come out with 7 albums, 20 additional collaborative albums, and accumulated 44 award nominations and 25 awards for her work, 5 of those awards being at the Billboard Music Awards and 9 being Grammy. Though her relationship with her father was tenuous, she reconnected with him in his later years, visiting him and her family in New Delhi and writing material that would later appear in her album The Fall. She has also collaborated with her half-sister, Anoushka Shankar on several tracks and albums, which is this beautiful, enchanting blend of both styles. This honestly sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole on YouTube... and adding these songs to my Spotify playlists!!!
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2. Bollywood
I am not particularly versed in Bollywood. Other than in this class, my only Bollywood experience was the 2005 movie Bride and Prejudice, which is such a fun movie! I'm not even sure it's technically true Bollywood, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless and it piqued my interest in the art form, so I'm going to write this whole section on Bollywood (if that wasn't obvious enough by the title).
The Bombay film industry, or Bollywood, began in 1913 when the first Indian silent film, growing to produce over 200 films a year by the 1930's with the first Indian sound film coming out in 1931. Talkie films quickly took over the industry, as the demand for musicals grew. The Great Depression, World War 2, and Indian Independence movement battered the industry through the 30's and 40's. Most films produced in this era remained light and escapist in nature, but some tackled the more political issues of Indian independence and social issues. This didn't hold back the industry completely, as the first color film came out in 1937. Although color films didn't become a staple in the Bollywood film industry until the late 1950s.
The "Golden Age" of Bollywood is considered as the later 1940's to the 1960's, with some of the most critically acclaimed films produced during this time, including Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool, Awaara, Shree 420, and Aan. These films focused mostly on social themes, primarily class life in India.
In the 1970's, Bollywood had reached a stagnant period where all the films revolved around musical romances. The writing duo of Salim-Javed revitalized the industry, introducing more violent films about underworld crime in Bombay. The term "Bollywood" was also coined during this decade.
The 90's to the present is known as New Bollywood, as the industry abandoned the violence based films that were declining in musical quality, for a more youthful and family friendly approach, with strong melodies and strong emotional connections. Lots of new actors and actresses entered the industry, also contributing to the revitalizing youthfulness of this new era. This is the era of Bollywood we're in now and it shows no sign of stopping.
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3. Syncretic Film Scores with Arab Music Influence
When looking at the musical pieces of the Arab world, one piece that we looked at really struck me, as I could hear it in a new light and could easily see it as a film score. As mentioned before in the first Cool Stuff Blog, I love listening to film scores and when I find syncreticism, it makes me really happy. So I was wondering if I would be able to find any film scores that adapted Arab styles to portray the movie and it's characters.
Most of my Google searches resulted in music from Aladdin, and others that just talked about the music in Arab film industry. However, I did find a student research paper on this subject from DePauw University called "Adventure, Intrigue, and Terror: Arabs and the Middle East in Hollywood Film Music", but is is 108 pages long... 108. I did read through the contents, the introduction, and the f, and it seems to be exploring the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in films and film scores and not Arab musical elements in these film scores, which was what I was after. And most of the articles that I found explored this as well. I'll include these below in my sources, and while they're interesting, they weren't exactly what I was looking for.
So this small, quick search came up fruitless, I intend to really listen for this in the future and find these elements in film scores. I also hope that the scores like Black Panther will inspire other film composers to search the world for inspiration and create more syncretic scores in the future.
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Oh, I'm glad you discovered the collaborations between Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar--they're really lovely, aren't they?
I totally did not know that, that was Norah Jones who sung in the Princess Diaries. That is really cool to know.
The Norah Jones cover of Love Me Tender is SO beautiful! It is so cool that the daughter of one of the most famous Indian musicians now has a career making music with roots in Black America. What a wonderful syncretism!
Norah Jones was in The Princess Diaries? Go figure! I've had very little experience with Bollywood myself. I've only seen clips of a few animated films of... questionable quality. The music sounds really interesting, though!
Bride and Prejudice is a fun movie. I love Pride and Prejudice so it was nice to see another take on it. (Last year it was a school assignment, but it was certainly an enjoyable one.) I did not realize Norah Jones sang in Princess Diaries II either.