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moimoi writesThe “Exit West” Playlist
This September, the Chicago Pubic Library selected Moshsin Hamid's novel, Exit West, as its "One Book, One Chicago" selection for 2020, describing is as "..an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands."
And for another year, the Library invited us here at CHIRP to create]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3oA1fNLQs5VjtxQlAefgiB?si=bk2fXwoxQ_K30JTONEGSbw">create[/url] a playlist to accompany the reading.
CHIRP Radio volunteer and DJ Moizza Khan reflects on the novel and presents a playlist]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3oA1fNLQs5VjtxQlAefgiB?si=bk2fXwoxQ_K30JTONEGSbw">playlist[/url] of music that captures the themes and spirit of this work.
“We are all migrants through time.”
In 1968, my dad came to Chicago as an international student from India, working multiple jobs and living with multiple roommates as he studied engineering at the UIC Circle campus. Shortly after his arrival, he got word that his father back in Hyderabad had passed away. He never got to say goodbye and, over time and migration, he would lose nearly all direct family ties to India.
Life in the Midwest has never been particularly welcoming to foreigners, and though my childhood was in many ways typical, I never fit in or felt the same nostalgia for the suburbs as the kids I grew up with.
My goal was to spend at least half of my 20s outside the U.S. and the only thing that kept me from achieving this was my father’s health problems after he became a widower. My greatest fear was that, like him, I would get word of his passing from thousands of miles away and never get to say goodbye.
DJ Mick writesCritical Rotation: “The King of Sudanese Jazz” by Sharhabil Ahmed
Twice a month, CHIRP DJ and Features Co-Director Mick takes a deep dive into two albums currently in rotation on CHIRP's charts that he thinks are worth some special attention. If you haven't given these albums a listen in their entirety, let Mick make the case for why you should!
Sharhabil Ahmed
The King of Sudanese Jazz
Habibi Funk
Sharhabil Ahmed is once again holding court in his kingdom long lost to the age.
His palace has now risen like Atlantis from the briny broth of the sea or the City of Babylon from the sands of time, thanks to the relentless crate excavation efforts of Jannis Stürtz and his north-Africa allied, Berlin-based, Habibi Funk label.
Standing as the first and only proper collection of Ahmed's works to be released for mass enjoyment in the 21st Century, The King Of Sudanese Jazz is both a historical document and thoroughly tanalizing rock 'n roll record. Now in his 80s, Ahmed was, is, and will be for as long as the time permits, a man of taste and vision.
DJ Mick writesCritical Rotation: “Chicago Waves” by Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson
Twice a month, CHIRP DJ and Features Co-Director Mick takes a deep dive into two albums currently in rotation on CHIRP's charts that he thinks are worth some special attention. If you haven't given these albums a listen in their entirety, let Mick make the case for why you should!
Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson
Chicago Waves
International Anthem
Chicago Waves is likely the most Athenian collection of improvised jazz to be released this year.
Springing fully formed from the hands, mouths, and minds of collaborators Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Chicago Waves was debuted as an impromptu performed during the release show of Jeremy Cunnigham’s stupendous The Weather Up There, where the duo had been invited as special guest performers.
There was no precursor to the performance and no indication of its content. It merely emerged as you hear it on captured on the album, now released by Chicago’s best new jazz imprint, International Anthem.
DJ Mick writesCritical Rotation: Naujawanan Baidar (S/T)
Twice a month, CHIRP DJ and Features Co-Director Mick takes a deep dive into two albums currently in rotation on CHIRP's charts that he thinks are worth some special attention. If you haven't given these albums a listen in their entirety, let Mick make the case for why you should!
Naujawanan Baidar
Naujawanan Baidar
Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube
The Afghanistan that we have come to know in the 21st century, through nightly news broadcasts on network TV and the op eds that flourish in “sensible” centrist online news spaces, is a caricature of a functional society and civil state.
Most of this reporting and editorializing assumes that the society that came into focus following the United States invasion on October 7, 2001, a backwards, medieval state in the grips of perpetual war and religious zealotry, was the country’s quintessence. A persistent state of affairs that had been in play for as long as the sun has risen over the hills of the Helmand Province.
The truth is that the Afghanistan we know today was never an inevitability. Throughout most of the 20th Century, the urban centers of Afghanistan were generally considered to be modern and hospitable, beckoning Western tourists to visit what was lauded by some to be the “Paris of the East,” namely Kabul.
DJ Mick writesCritical Rotation: “Miles” by Blu & Exile
Twice a month, CHIRP DJ and Features Co-Director Mick takes a deep dive into two albums currently in rotation on CHIRP's charts that he thinks are worth some special attention. If you haven't given these albums a listen in their entirety, let Mick make the case for why you should!
Blu & Exile
Miles
Dirty Science
Blu & Exile are the names of the LA hip-hop artists whose collaboration makes the uplifting, jazz-rap, throwback Miles possible, but the combination of their names could just as soon by a statement of purpose.
On the duo's first album since 2012's Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them reflects on the ways that life and death, living and not quite thriving, expectations and practicalities, projections and rebukes, and legacy and liberty intersect in the day to day life of a man of color in the United States.
All the while, using the many shades that the color blue as a symbolic filter for the ambivalence and triumph of being. Exile for his part constructs lush, living soundscapes of hybrid jazz and R'nB that sound both immediate and simultaneously distant, unmoored from time but steeped in history.