root salad Amira Kheir
From Sudan to London via Italy, and now with an international band. Zuzana Novak hears tell.
I
t was her new, second album that Amira Kheir showcased with her band on Womad’s Charlie Gillett stage last summer, and when we spoke, she was very much considering how to focus her direction from there. “You’re playing for years and years and years and then all of a sudden a lot of things start to happen at the same time. I guess it’s about staying focused but at the same time increasing the capacity of the mechanisms that you’re working with. So now is the time I really want to get a manager.”
Her confident intuition about finding the right manager and the time it might take was evident. “I’ve come across a lot of people with whom I could have worked and there were potential situations which could be developed but it’s really about finding someone that you feel ‘this person under- stands who I am, what I’m doing and what I’m trying to do with it.’”
The formation of her band and her musical style over the past decade has also taken this natural, organic approach, com- bined with an astute understanding of the need for clarity of roles to achieve her vision.
“For me, since I’ve been in London [she was born in Sudan and brought up in Italy], it’s been a journey of connecting different musicians and playing the music of different people. But this band came along slowly over a long time… we just connected and it felt right and every time a new person came into the mix, it felt right.”
“London is the place where you have some of the best musicians in the world. You can find phenomenal ones – that’s not the problem – it’s more about the energy and the story you can tell together. Because you can get all the best musicians in the world, but if you don’t have the right energy together, it’s not going to work.”
The energy of her current company of musicians together creates an onstage atmosphere as epic as the hot desert wind. With them hailing from some far-flung places in the world – the guitarist is from Colombia, percussionist from Chile, oud player from Sudan, trumpet player from Jamaica and double bassist from Italy – Amira acknowledges the importance of their collective experience. “These are six life experiences now that are being chan- nelled into this overall expression. For me, that’s really powerful and in a sense that goes beyond ‘who does what?’, because the final result is just one thing.”
But to get there, she recognises the need for leadership to drive the creative
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process: “There has to be the organisation to say ‘this is your role, this is what every- one’s role is’ and everyone has to be clear on that. It has to be.”
A
mira’s role, aside from the natural leadership that she has devel- oped (aided in part, she says, by growing up with two older
brothers to spar with), is to sing and to write the songs, and she uses a guitar and her three languages – Arabic, Italian and English – to do this. As a child, she sang from an early age and was always encour- aged. “I was just always really enjoying it! I remember [at school, in Turin] we had a lot of plays and musicals.” She mentions an attempt at a band, but it was very short-lived and it was really only when she came to London to study at SOAS that she started to connect with other musicians.
Her chosen degree was in Politics and Development. “There was a point at school where I really wanted to study music and I thought about that and said ‘no’. I knew it was what I was going to do anyway. I didn’t want to institutionalise it in that way.”
The choice she made was to get a greater awareness of the world. “There are some things you know, in some way inside you, that are going to be your path, but
somehow I also wanted to develop a differ- ent part of me, and meet the people I was going to meet and hope the music would be connected to that.”
But it’s not politics that she focuses on with her music, though people ask her a lot about this due to her Sudanese background. “My music is absolutely not political. My political statement is that music is beyond that. Music is beyond politics. For me, play- ing here yesterday, so many people came and listened and were saying ‘this is amaz- ing, I feel so good after this.’”
Indeed, she takes her inspiration from people. “I write about the really unexpect- ed things I observe in people; about learn- ing about fear, overcoming it – that’s never- ending; and what you can build with peo- ple, interactions, love, of course.”
So with all this drive and focus, where to next? “The direction is difficult to define clearly. It’s something more subconscious… but it’s hard to know where it’s going.”
Perhaps she cannot exactly describe where her voyage of discovery will take her and her crew, but it’s certain we can expect to benefit from their storytelling along the way. F
amirakheir.com
Photo: © Judith Burrows
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