Aga Khan Music Awards winners honoured for exceptional creativity

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

The laureates of the 2022 Aga Khan Music Awards have been named. The triennial Awards, established by the Aga Khan in 2018, recognise exceptional creativity, promise and enterprise in music in societies across the world in which Muslims have a significant presence.

Award winners and recipients of a Special Mention will share a prize fund of $500,000 as well as opportunities for professional development. Laureates will be celebrated at a ceremony and series of affiliated events in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, organised in conjunction with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture on October 29-31.

Zakir Hussain from India has won the Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

The laureates of the Aga Khan Music Awards 2022 are winners Zakir Hussain (India), who has won the Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement in recognition of “his highly visible model of enlightened cross-cultural musicianship that has elevated the status of the tabla both in India and around the world through countless artistic collaborations, concert tours, commissions, recordings and film scores.” Afel Bocoum (Mali) is a singer and guitar player from Niafunke, Mali, whose music combines acoustic guitar with local instruments to echo the sound of “desert blues” in an earthier, tradition-based style. Asin Khan Langa (India), a sarangi player, singer, composer and community activist from Rajasthan’s hereditary Langa musical community, who performs Sufi poetry set to traditional and newly composed melodies.

Peni Candra Rini is a composer, improviser, vocalist and educator from Indonesia.

Coumbane Mint Ely Warakane (Mauritania), who is a singer and ardin (harp) player from Trarza, southwest Mauritania, who performs the music of Mauritanian griots in a deeply traditional style. Daud Khan Sadozai (Afghanistan), a leading exponent of the Afghan rubab who has had a major impact on the preservation, development and dissemination of Afghan music worldwide.

Peni Candra Rini (Indonesia), a composer, improviser, vocalist and educator whose knowledge of traditional Indonesian performing arts informs her creation of new works produced worldwide. Soumik Datta (UK), a sarod player who fuses his training in Hindustani classical music with pop, rock, electronica and film soundtracks to raise awareness about urgent social issues. Yahya Hussein Abdallah (Tanzania), who is a singer and composer of devotional songs and reciter of the Qur’an from Dar es Salaam,Tanzania, who composes and sings in Swahili as well as some of Tanzania’s 126 local languages. Yasamin Shahhosseini (Iran), leading young master of the oud who is reimagining the place of this instrument in Iranian music through innovative compositions and improvisations.

Afel Bocoum is a singer and guitar player from Mali.

Zarsanga (Pakistan), a singer from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, known as the Queen of Pashtun Folklore for her career-long devotion to the orally transmitted traditional music of tribal Pashtuns. Special Mentions are Dilshad Khan (India), a tenth-generation sarangi player from a hereditary lineage in Rajasthan who is expanding the language of the sarangi in film music and other projects.

Golshan Ensemble (Iran), which consists of four women who perform Iranian traditional music with a contemporary sound and are active as teachers, with a special focus on transmitting their musical tradition to girls and women. Sain Zahoor (Pakistan), who is a Punjabi musician with a lifelong practice of singing Sufi poetry in local shrines and festivals.

Daud Khan Sadozai from Afghanistan is a leading exponent of the rubab.

Seyyed Mohammad Musavi & Mahoor Institute (Iran). Musavi is the Founder and long-time director of Mahoor Institute of Culture and Arts, who has made seminal contributions to the development of Iranian music and musicology. Zulkifli & Bur’am (Aceh, Indonesia) who are revitalisers of Acehnese song traditions among youth through their participation in Bur’am, a traditional singing and drumming ensemble established by Zulkifli.

The Master Jury also named Musallam al-Kathiry as the winner of a special award for Excellence in Service to Omani Musical Heritage. Al-Kathiry, a music researcher, arts manager, performer and composer from Muscat, has made important contributions to the collection, documentation, preservation and dissemination of Omani music.

Opportunities for winners include commissions for the creation of new works, contracts for recordings and artist management, support for pilot education initiatives, and technical or curatorial consultancies for music archiving, preservation and dissemination projects. The Master Jury that selected the winners from a pool of close to 400 nominations, consisted of six distinguished arts professionals from Azerbaijan, Bahrain, India, Turkey, Tunisia and the United States.

Soumik Datta from the UK raises social awareness through the sarod.

They were Shaikha Hala Bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Divya Bhatia, Rachel Cooper, Yurdal Tokcan and Dhafer Youssef. The Aga Khan Music Awards – administered by the Aga Khan Music Programme, an endeavour of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture – are governed by a Steering Committee co-chaired by the Aga Khan and his brother, Amyn Aga Khan.

The other members of the Steering Committee are Ara Guzelimian, Special Advisor, Provost Emeritus, The Juilliard School, and Artistic and Executive Director, Ojai Music Festival; Salima Hashmi, Professor Emeritus, Beaconhouse National University; Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, University of Central Asia (UCA); Joseph Melillo, Executive Producer, Emeritus, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); Sir Jonathan Mills, Director, Edinburgh International Culture Summit; and Zeyba Rahman, Director of the Building Bridges Program at the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

The Aga Khan Music Awards reflect the conviction of the Aga Khan, 49th hereditary Imam of the Ismaili Muslims, that music can serve as a cultural anchor, deepening a sense of community, identity and heritage, while simultaneously reaching out in powerful ways to people of different backgrounds. While contributing to the preservation and ongoing development of musical heritage, many of the laureates draw on the power of music to raise awareness about social and environmental issues.