Tickets:
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Bahar Ensemble: Bahar Ensemble performs Middle-Eastern music, including Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, Egyptian, Lebanese. For nearly five years, the Bahar Ensemble has brought Middle Eastern Music to the Midwest. Ahmed Tofiq came from Iraqi Kurdistan at the end of 2013, to earn a Master's in Music at Western Michigan University on Violin. He was both a student of classical music and the traditions of his homeland. "I grew up with this," Tofiq says of his traditional music. His father, cousins, and all of his extended family, didn't have "the technologies we have" to hear whatever might be popular with the rest of the world. Family and other musicians would gather to play and share new sounds, with openness, saying, "Okay, I heard this song, I'm going to share." Arriving in Kalamazoo, he thought, "I know something that I want to share with everyone." So Tofiq and fellow Iraqi musician and WMU music student Bashdar Sdiq formed the Bahar Ensemble. Beau Bothwell picked the oud, a pear-shaped, fretless stringed instrument, a bit as an undergrad, he says, but then he got a chance to get more experience on the instrument when he joined Bahar at its beginning. He's also Assistant Professor of Music at Kalamazoo College, an expert in ethnomusicology whose research is steeped in the music and culture of the Middle East. Liz Youker plays the Cello and unlike most other music, she performs the melodic lines 1 octave down in parallel with both Ahmed and Beau. She is also the Director of Education and Community Engagement at KSO. Dede Alder is an eclectic multi-genre singer and percussionist who became focused on Arabic drumming later in her career. The newest Bahar member Carolyn Koebel has played various world music percussion forms for the past 20 years in Kalamazoo.
Koebel says, "This is really the expertise between Beau and Ahmed, with (Bothwell's) ethnomusicology background and study, and then (Tofiq's) cultural and ancestral legacy. There's a reason you don't hear this music played in this region and it is because you don't have people with the expertise and the cultural integrity and knowledge."
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