‘Beja Power!': Music as resistance on Sudan's Red Sea coast
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Loading... - Sophia Afari
- 26 Sep 2022
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As a young musician growing up in Port Sudan in the early 1990s, Noori Jaber fortuitously stumbled across the neck of a well-preserved guitar near a junkyard.
After being gifted a tambour – a four-stringed lyre also known as the krar – by his father, the 18-year-old Noori forged it with the salvaged guitar using his own welding and tuning techniques to craft an electrified tambo-guitar.
It was an instrumental hybridisation that would serve a greater purpose nearly three decades later, on Ostinato Records’ newly released album, Beja Power! Electric Soul & Brass from Sudan’s Red Sea Coast.
For Noori – who is from the Beja community, which primarily lives along eastern Sudan’s Red Sea coast – music expresses his long-marginalised people’s struggle to keep their culture alive.
Over six entrancing tracks, Noori and his Dorpa Band – which came together in 2016 – look to spread the Beja sound to a wider audience, in an album that the label claims is the first-ever international release of Beja music. Read More...
