East meets West. Bakhoor's ensemble of performers hail from Canada, USA, France, India, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and include three of Canada's finest guitarists well known in the folk, blues, jazz, and world music traditions.
Influences
Sarah McLachlan, Indigo Girls, Sinead O'Connor, Melissa Ferrick, Tracy Chapman, Melissa Etheridge, Suzanne Vega, Nancy Griffith, Loreena McKennitt, Jann Arden, Alannis Morrisette, Cassandra Wilson, Jane Siberry, Norah Jones, Michele Branch, Nelly Furtado, Sade, Dee Carstensen, Sheryl Crow, Ani Difranco, My Friend The Chocolate Cake, Brian Kennedy, Buddha Bar, Ravi Shankar, Shweta Jhaveri, Zakhir Hussein, Shakira, Yair Dalal and the Al Ol Ensemble, Yellow Jackets, Cheb Mami, Sting, Cheb Khaled, Amr Diab, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Amr Ismail, Sami Jusef, Matchbox 20, U2, Van Morrison, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Joan Baez, Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits, Ben Harper, Bonga, Lucky Dube, Michael Franti, and so many more.
Sounds Like
Fans say, time and again: Joni Mitchell. Bakhoor has elicited comparisons to Tracy Chapman. kd lang. Joan Baez. One listener at a concert summed it up best. "Lorelei is like an impressionistic painting, haunting, fascinating."
You be the judge.
More music and free downloads at the Orderly Bazaar or loreleiloveridge.com.
BAKHOOR is also now on sale at one of the coolest independent record stores in the UK, Piccadilly Records, and online from iTunes, CD Baby (look left), and other major online retailers like Amazon.com. Discounted on CD Baby if you buy and gift one to a friend, as well!
LORELEI LOVERIDGE AND THE 'MULTI-CULTURAL TOUR-DE-FORCE' BAKHOOR
Canadian artist Lorelei Loveridge (songwriter, performer, world-traveller, teacher, arts manager, coach, consultant, writer, photographer, director of theatre and jill-of-all-trades in the wonderful world of independent music) lived for 11 years in Saudi Arabia, pre and post 9/11, and loved it. She experienced religious zealots, compound invasions, a terrorist chase, earthquake, tsunami, war in Lebanon, crazy drivers, nutty expats and more, and survived to tell the tales in story and song.
Her physical, personal, and musical journey is documented in Bakhoor, a 4-year, 15-song album project recorded in India, Canada and Saudi Arabia. It features some of the finest players from across the globe including Brian Hughes (producer of Loreena McKennitt), Harry Manx and Lester Quitzau.
A contemporary acoustic songwriter who draws comparisons with Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell, Loveridge pairs a passionate political sense with an understanding of the complex personal stories that go beyond politics. Loveridge and Canadian producer Rob Hewes have woven the sounds of tabla, oud, darbuka, Tibetan overtone chants, violin, bazouki, Latin/African/slide blues guitar into a richly-textured, multicultural tour-de-force.
While "Home is Where the Heart Is"—a song about the pain of a mother and her Palestinian daughter—is the first single off of the album, U.S. songwriter and guitar legend Dick Wagner says this of Loveridge and Bakhoor: "Her vocals are hauntingly emotive, her songs are beautifully structured folk/pop creations and her musicians are world-class interpreters of her musical vision…The brilliant 'Oh, India' sets the tone and atmosphere for this musical journey…a journey you won't forget. I personally love Lorelei's music and recommend it to all seekers of sophisticated yet accessible music."
"Lovely voice...be very proud of where you have taken your music." - David Kershenbaum (Producer, Tracy Chapman)
FROM THE ALBUM LINER NOTES...
Perhaps her parents had some inkling of her musical destiny when they christened her Lorelei, the Teutonic siren who lured men to their deaths with her songs. Or perhaps they were amused by the thought of how all those l's would sound rolling off the tongues of radio DJs.
But whatever the case, Lorelei Loveridge has the distinction of possessing a name and a voice that manages to insinuate and wrap itself about a room like the trails of bakhoor that are a staple of the many Saudi weddings she has witnessed during her decade-long spell in one of the world's most closed and inaccessible societies.
After the release of her critically acclaimed first album, Endless Contradictions, in 1995, Lorelei found herself strangely adrift, her budding music career fulfilling neither her expectations of success nor happiness.
With characteristic determination, she shook off her creative malaise and set off a year later on her own version of the Australian walkabout, venturing into the exotic realms of the greater world and her inner self, ultimately discovering what many world travelers have long known: Our lives come into sharper focus in direct proportion to our distance from our origins. That is, the farther we travel, the closer we are to home.
So for the last decade, Lorelei has been striving as might a marathon runner "to go the distance" with her music. Since her departure from Canada's Frozen North, she has opened at Dublin's Da Club for folk rocker Andy White. She's sampled sounds in ancient Nabatean tombs, dabbled with Gamelan bamboo xylophones in the rice paddies of Bali and performed in concert in the Arabian Desert.
In the process, she's racked up passport stamps from nearly two dozen different countries, absorbing and taking pleasure in "the images and textures of life around me." She explains: "The chaos of people in places eating, talking, selling, dancing, driving, working, all inspire some process in me that eventually manages to hook an idea or combine several and distill into a song. There's a magic in chaos and overstimulation."
While in Benares (Varanasi), India, she lived for a month in 1998 on a street notorious for pumping raw sewage into the Ganges. The street's name: Orderly Bazaar, an appellation that surely evokes the endless contradictions that have dogged Lorelei throughout her life. So, of course, it made perfect sense to adopt this handle for her record label and her particular brand of "roots rock ethnic jazz fusion."
In this second CD, Lorelei employs her impressive lyrical skills embroidering a patchwork of impressionistic word paintings, what she calls "landscapes of imagination and experience," of a world far removed from her native Canada, far flung from poodle-clipped lawns, reality TV and linoleum kitchens with their neat rows of tidy spice racks.
Abandoning house, car and even cats, she finds all she really needs——horseshoes, petty cash and a ride to the next town—in "I Need to Go," a song that harkens back to her Canadian country roots and the music of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. She croons, "I need a whiskey drunken poet's bed/On which to lay my body down," yearning for "a million miles between me/And everything that I know."
That million miles places her in Malaysia on Boxing Day in 2004 when the tsunami struck and in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 when Israeli warplanes began bombing the Beirut airport, and her lyrics bear witness to these events and many others of the troubled turn of the 20th century.
She laments about politicians who "lie to the world and deny they killed a schoolgirl" and religious zealots who "breed the next generation's will to fight." However, her lyrics convey the complexity and nuances of these events, the varying shades of grey of a life experienced through travel and a life lived in the face of adversity. She doesn't take sides but rather makes clear that there is a beauty in the complexity and that there is hope that people can find the tolerant middle ground, though it may always seem a stone's throw away.
Her songs are as haunting as sala'a, the daily prayer call offered five times a day towards Mecca. But what emerges from her music is a contemporary Oriental world, beyond the clichés of camels, caravans, palm trees and belly dancers. Lorelei's Arabia is a land where young men in long white thobes sporting the traditional red-checkered ghutras and veiled women in their fluttering black abayas exchange phone numbers via Bluetooth and clamor to invest in the Saudi stock exchange. Where an 11-year old boy reacts to witnessing his first public execution. Where desert motorists turn two-lane backroads into four-lane speedways. Where a beggar refuses the hand-out offered to him. Where a mother worries, as her daughter must decide her future with a husband in jail in Jerusalem, and Lorelei asking what many of us long to, "What good will martyrdom do?"
In the end, her music can't help but reach out to us, envelope us with its smoke and musk, touch us with its passion and conviction. Her music is aromatic. As we walk away from it, it leaves its frankincense, patchouli and sandalwood, and its fleeting impressions of life on the move, lingering in the linings of our pockets and on the lapels of our jackets. Bakhoor.
A LITTLE DITTY FROM 'IN THE CITY', EUROPE'S BIGGEST CITY-BASED MUSIC FESTIVAL, FEATURING GUESTS ZOE MULFORD (U.S.) AND ROSIE SMITH (U.K.).
WHAT WENT ON BETWEEN LORELEI LOVERIDGE AND HER PRODUCER ROB HEWES DURING THE CANADIAN CD LAUNCH:
Thanks for the add Lorelei, your voice reminds me of both Sarah Maclachlan and Ani Defranco. With Harry Manx playing in the background I'm completely sold. You have a new fan. Love and peace. Marina
I am so glad that we ended up touching base. I am in awe of your voice and the sound you have achieved. I will spread the good word to all i know here in OZ. LOVE LOVE LOVE your tracks and the way you are able to tell a story. Another light shining brightly.
hi lorelei! great work! I notice you're improving the world music stlyle. I like the influences. Visit our myspace page and leave a comment ;) regards, circus ensemble
