Siti Muharam is the great granddaughter of Siti Binti Saad, the mother of taarab, and the first Zanzibari recording artist. Point Zanzibar out to Western music critics and they'll struggle to locate it on the map. But Arabic music, Indian rhythm and Swahili poetry don't just make for the type of 'fusion' palatable to them. Siti Binti Saad didn't need the Atlantic and didn't need approval because she pre-dated the canon itself.
Siti Of Unguja is not a tribute record. Muharam strips the string section back, brings the Kidumbak street percussion forward and makes something that is simultaneously the oldest version of this music and a completely new one.
John Coltrane in 1960 took a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune and started losing his mind inside it. The drone, the scales and that refusal to resolve. In My Favourite Things he was reaching toward something the jazz tradition had spent a century pretending didn't exist. But Siti was already there.
For decades, we've been taught to hear music through its context. You remove context and most of what we call the 'canon' is just geography and gatekeeping.
In that spirit, at end of the session, we’ll ask an important question:
Who gets to decide where the centre of the world is?
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