Tour Dates

APR 26 Minot Area Council of the Arts Minot, ND
MAY 04 Mueller Center Hot Springs, SD
MAY 09 Red Rock Center for the Arts Fairmont, MN
JUN 19 The Bassment Saskatoon, SK
JUN 20 Vancouver International Jazz Festival 2025
Jun 21 – Jun 22 Victoria International Jazz Festival

The Cedar Cultural Center was a hub of world music on Friday night with musicians from around the globe.

Opening the evening was Genet Abate, a singer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, now living in Minneapolis.

Abate took the stage in colorful attire to sing songs of the local tribes in her east African country. She said she was planning to have dancers with her, but the best laid plans had her taking the stage as a solo act.

In between songs, she took questions from the audience and said that it was a year before that she played the same stage. She said she is part of a band that has taken part in the Twin Cities Jazz Festival, then added that any upcoming shows can be found on her Instagram account.

Farah Siraj next took the stage with an intimate group of musicians that included a Flamenco guitarist, Andreas Arnold, and Kane Mathis playing the Turkish Oud. Siraj is from Amman, Jordan, but she is a citizen of the world, moving to Spain at the age of sixteen; studying musical composition at Trinity College of Music in London and graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Along the way she has absorbed musical genres like flamenco, tango, jazz, middle eastern music and a splash of pop.

Siraj said the Cedar was the first stop on her North American Tour. She said we were lucky to have such a place in the Twin Cities for not many music venues highlight global music.

Siraj started off the evening with a new song on her upcoming album “Ya Bahr” which means “sea” in Arabic. She then asked if there were any lovers of flamenco and asked the crowd to make noise. “Don’t be shy. I love it.”

The crowd was not shy and was treated to songs in English, Spanish and Arabic, tinged with flamenco guitar and the Turkish Oud with a lovely voice that sang songs that ranging from missing a loved one to the genocide in the Darfur “To the Sudanese Woman”.

Siraj sang Jordanian folk songs and even scatted a little. But the highlight of the evening was a song she wrote with Indian composer A.R. Rahman. She told a circuitous story about how the song came to be, which had her manager, Danielle, laughing in the front row and Mathis looking at his watch. The story was hard to follow, but some highlights involved facelifts, possibly pulling a fire alarm at Heathrow Airport, getting free coffee, teaching in India, her husband’s looks and her dogged will to meet a musical hero, which finally happened when she met Rahman and they wrote “Zariya”, a song that reached #1 on the Indian music chart.

It was by far the best story about a song I’ve heard yet.