Pakistani Artist Arieb Azhar to perform in City Hall

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 3, 2012 For more information, please contact: Miah Michaelsen, Assistant Economic Development Director for the Arts, City of Bloomington, 349.3534

Pakistani Artist Arieb Azhar to perform in City Hall

Bloomington, IN - BEAD will host Pakistani singer-songwriter Arieb Azhar for an informal lunch hour concert in City Hall Council Chambers, 401 N. Morton St., at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 5, 2012.

Azhar is part of Center StageSM (www.centerstageUS.org). An initiative of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Center Stage brings compelling contemporary artists from Haiti, Indonesia and Pakistan to the United States to engage the American people in cultural diplomacy as a way to create opportunities for greater understanding. Administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts, with funding from the Asian Cultural Council, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, this public-private partnership is the largest public diplomacy effort to bring foreign artists to American stages in recent history.

Azhar learned music playing guitar as a Karachi teenager and found his voice, drifting from crumbling Soviet Minsk to the streets of war-torn Zagreb, where he discovered Sufi poetry and songs of Irish resistance and Roma delight. Azhar, after returning to Islamabad, crafted a sonic world of his own, transforming the strikingly philosophical 19th-century poetry of Sufi devotees with worldly arrangements that range from rootsy guitar lines to soaring sweeps of vocal ecstasy. With the driving power of both rock and qawwali (Pakistan's globally savored Muslim devotional music), Azhar's songs have a delicacy and atmospheric texture that flow from his long stint as a busker and pub player in Eastern Europe.

For more information, contact Miah Michaelsen, Assistant Economic Development Director for the Arts, at michaelm@bloomington.in.gov or 812.349.3534.

###