India Resounding in New York

The New York Times > Arts > Music > Critic's Notebook: "Jazz musicians have been absorbing ideas and collaborating with Indian musicians at least since the 1960's. Hip-hop has latched on to Indian rhythms, most notably last year when Jay-Z added a rap to Panjabi MC's 'Mundian To Bach Ke' to remake it as 'Beware of the Boys.' In New York's clubs, the sounds of Bollywood and other South Asian fusions have been drawing crowds for years: some to dance, some to listen, some to mingle and network.

Aladdin, a Bangladeshi comic who grew up in Spanish Harlem, is developing a one-man show for the Public Theater about growing up surrounded by hip-hop and salsa, tentatively titled "Indio," and a play called "The Halal Brothers," about a Muslim restaurant in Harlem. The New York wave of South Asian music was preceded by influential South Asian hybrids from England. "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music," a documentary by Vivek Bald now making the rounds of film festivals, details the way established Indian and Pakistani communities in London confronted racism with music. DJ Rekha's Basement Bhangra, which has been renamed Bhangra Against Bush during election season.

Through the decades, filmi have tossed together everything from electro to salsa to surf music to funk with vocals that hint at ancient Indian traditions. A few weeks ago, the sound of a man singing a ghazal, a love poem from an ancient Persian tradition that made its way to India, hovered above the room at Kush, a lounge on the Lower East Side done up in quasi-Moroccan style. So did the haze of a drug that's now illegal in most other New York City clubs: tobacco, wafting from hookahs on the bar."