Haram

Sometimes you turn a corner in your hometown and run into unexpected and incredible global music.

Described as “Arabic music, from Iraqi folk to Egyptian radio music, lovingly reinterpreted by Vancouver’s most creative musicians”, Gordon Grdina’s Haram is a sterling example of this very thing. JUNO Award-winner and Canadian oud virtuoso Grdina leads a 10-piece powerhouse Arabic/avant-garde ensemble from our very own city that will knock your socks off!

Using Arabic music from great composers like Farid Al-Atrache and Oum Khalsoum as a starting point, Haram’s music constantly shifts directions while building to euphoric crescendos. This cross-cultural, boundary-annihilating music will appeal equally to lovers of world, folk, jazz, avant-garde, and indie music–a brilliant mix of effortless cohesion and wild abandon.

“The music’s backbone is traditional, but wild outbursts of free improvisation and subtle injections of noise make it quite unlike anything you’d hear in the shisha dens of Cairo or Baghdad.” – Alex Varty, The Georgia Straight.

Haram is a Vancouver super-group of outstanding musicians, many of whom have played the festival in the past–on their own and in other contexts. Haram is Gordon Grdina, Emad Armoush, François Houle, Jesse Zubot, JP Carter, and Kenton Loewen.

Haram is Arabic for “forbidden” but when these guys hit the stage, anything and everything is permitted!

– ND