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

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. Its name refers to

Lal Shahbaz Qalandar Hazrat Sayyid Usman Marwandi, (1177 - 19 February 1274) popularly known as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (), was a Sufi saint and poet of present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lal Shahbaz Qalandar was born in Marwand, Sistan to a family from Baghdad ...

, a Sufi saint who is a major inspiration behind the musical genre of

qawwali Qawwali (Punjabi language, Punjabi: (Shahmukhi), (Gurmukhi); Urdu: (Nastaʿlīq, Nasta'liq); Hindi: क़व्वाली (Devanagari); Bengali language, Bengali: কাওয়ালি (Bengali alphabet, Bengali)) is a form of Sufi Isl ...

. Its members are brother-and-sister Pakistani vocalists

Sukhawat Ali Khan Sukhawat Ali Khan (born 1950), 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 musi ...

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 when he was emperor of the

Mughal Empire The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. Quote: "Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the d ...

. 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 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