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Transcending
New World Borders

By kevinjamesgardner and Yi Hai Lai

The Ali Khan Band is Sukhawat Ali Khan, Riffat Salamat Khan and Richard Michos. They will dance and play with you at CELLspace’s 246(i) World Remix on June 1. Photo courtesy of the Ali Khan Band.

Down a heady cocktail of Qawwali, bhangra, funk, hip-hop and dance with the Ali Khan Band at 246(i) World Remix, a premiere concert for a new world music series at CELLspace. The music series, spearheaded by CELLspace’s Soundlab cluster, presents a playful paradigm of cultural diversity and exchange as social art form. And what an honor to have the Ali Khan Band, starring the latest and most popular offspring of a 500-year-old Sufi Muslim singing tradition, blast off this new paradigm.

Dressed all in black, complete with chapeau and heavy muted-silver jewelry, Sukhawat Ali Khan looks like an urbanized South American mystic-healer. This calm, broad-shouldered man actually hails from Pakistan, having moved to the Bay Area six years ago with his sister, Riffat Salamat Khan. Together with Riffat’s American bassist husband, Richard Michos, the blissful siblings form the core of the Ali Khan Band, whose musical evolution out of traditional Sufi sect devotional song into 21st century fusion can be charted on their two albums, Tawsir and Zindagi (Urdu for “life”), released by City of Tribes. Energizing ancient tradition with their exuberance for the universal, Ali Khan’s Zindagi hurls you through musical time and space. Grab your passport and whirl like a dervish to ecstatic words and rich rhythms, resting now and then amidst the warm, pulsating humps of a smiling, flying camel.

“Other musicians have experimented and blended West and East,” Khan explains in a recent interview with AsianWeek. “Our contribution is that we are live, we do it on stage. We make music that is very danceable, romantic, with folk and Sufi in the blend, with Western grooves, jazz or reggae. I want our music to make people feel joy, just have fun and forget about the stress that they create for themselves.” Leaning forward in a velvet armchair at a café in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond, the groovy guru punctuates his beliefs with succinct drumbeats on the worn wooden coffee table.

“I believe music lets people get closer faster than any other form of communication,” Khan shares. “The message is peace and freedom. If you say it nicely with music, people will get it.”

So, come and get it. 246(i) World Remix brings together great talent and masterful insight to encourage the kind of relationships that form in the process of making music. The driving force becomes a collective spirit that yields, as Khan expresses, a desire to see others enjoy the experience. The number 246 crops up in the legend of how many diverse indigenous tribes lived in sustainable harmony together in the San Francisco Bay Area before the arrival of Western borders. The producers of World Remix want to tear down those borders and foster artistic migration where (i) = indigenous = independent = interconnected = the infinite mix = no human is illegal.

“This is a critical moment in history for re-instituting the language(s) of music as the primary mode of human interaction from neighborhood to global relations,” the invitation exclaims.

Reach Yi Hai Lai at ylai@asianweek.com