World Music Night Featuring Triad and Barakka
January 24 at 8:00 pm-10:30 pm
$20.00
Tickets $20 online, $25 at the door (online ticket sales end at 6:30 pm on the night of the show)
Doors open at 7:30 pm
Triad
Triad blends West African and Indian elements to create unique, rhythmic and melodic instrumental soundscapes. Their music is dynamic, ranging from lyrical and atmospheric to fiery crescendos.
Each musician brings a level of mastery that creates healing trance-inducing improvisations that sound like compositions.
Radha – tabla
Raji Malik – guitar
Raji Malik has performed and recorded hard rock and instrumental Indian-influenced music in the Philadelphia area for the past 30 years. He is self-taught and started playing guitar when he was 19. Raji’s initial musical influences were the great rock guitarists Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), Jimi Hendrix, and David Gilmour (Pink Floyd). Then he discovered Shakti, featuring 3 masterful Indian musicians and guitar legend John Mclaughlin playing a modified sitar-like acoustic guitar. Raji promptly put away his electric guitar and immersed himself in the pure tones of the acoustic guitar. Raji finds deep inspiration from many brilliant “Modern Fingerstyle” guitarists who are all disciples of the late Michael Hedges, who reinvented the acoustic guitar with his harmonic percussive playing. Raji hopes that his music brings peace, healing, and inspiration.
May this music bring you an appreciation of your goodness and a deeper sense of interconnection. May we all continue to challenge ourselves to grow with honest self-reflection so that we may more clearly channel love. That is why we are here.
Shawn Hennessey– uke bass and percussion
A Latin Grammy-nominate percussionist, from his work with El Caribefunk,Shawn is also a prolific songwriter and producer based in Philadelphia. He performs regularly with a variety of notable national and local acts, including bassist Bakithi Kumalo of Paul Simon’s band, Uprooted featuring Michael Glabicki of Rusted Root, Bollywood star Jeffrey Iqbal, Trinidelphia, Ryan Tennis, The Disco Biscuits and Don McCloskey.
His two passion projects over the past decade have been Hennessey Bonfire— lush, organic, original songs soulfully rooted against the backdrop of world rhythms and sounds— and Leana Song, a genre-defying fusion of traditional and contemporary Afro Cuban music, the likes of which have landed Shawn on major Spotify playlists alongside world music icons.
RADHA GOPINATH DAS: tabla and percussion
Radha Gopinath Das spontaneously began playing the mridanga at the age of two and was leading kirtan and bhajan as a young child. He began studying the tabla with Lenny Seidmann and continued his learning with legendary South Indian percussionist T.H. Vikku Vinayakram. He has collaborated and furthered his studies with tabla maestro Ustad Zakir
Barakka
Barakka is a Philadelphia-based, multi-national, multi-ethnic band led by singer/guitarist and İstanbul native Barış Kaya. The band has been playing consistently since 2010. Barakka’s music, like its members, takes its influence from a very wide variety of sources, which can plainly be heard through their various recordings and videos. In the U.S. it is easy to characterize this as world music, but the combination of sounds and styles is certainly not unique to listeners of Turkish music. Barakka’s strength is that their sound has come together as the result of friends from different parts of the world who have found magic in the way their shared backgrounds can combine into a unique music experience.
This style has gotten the attention of various groups and organizations the band has been honored to work with. Over the years, Barakka has been fortunate to share the stage multiple times with such Turkish music figures as Moğollar (in their first-ever US performance), Yeni Türkü, Mirkelam, Mehmet Erdem, Gripin, and Mor Ve Ötesi. Organizations such as the Turkish-American Friendship Society and the Collingswood Arts Commission have relied on the group to bring its unique music to audiences in the U.S. over the years. The band has appeared in a very wide variety of venues and events, from New York clubs such as Drom, Mehanata, and Nublu to Philadelphia area appearances at World Café Live, Franky Bradley’s, The Legendary Dobbs, Turks Head Festival, and an appearance at the Wells Fargo Center before a Philadelphia 76ers NBA game.
The group’s sound is based on its original songwriting. These songs, along with a carefully chosen body of traditional and cover songs, are enriched by the instrumental interplay between guitar and oud. Band arrangements are born out of this relationship, bringing out the passion and energy of the songs. This unique combination began in the Old City section of Philadelphia, where the duo of Roger Mgrdichian (oud) and Joseph Tayoun (darbuka) were the house musicians at a local Turkish restaurant, Konak, in the historic Old City neighborhood. This was only blocks from where they made their mark in the city, spearheading a world music renaissance in the late 1990s centered around the Tayoun family’s Middle East Restaurant. Mgrdichian and Tayoun collaborated on many diverse projects over the years and are founding members of the Indian-Middle Eastern ensemble Jaffna. A longstanding process of experimentation and fusion had begun, flourishing whenever new and exciting musicians arrived in the city.
Barış Kaya began working at Konak in 2007 only a few years after arriving in the US and quickly brought his music to the scene. In Turkey, the singer and guitarist was primarily a rock musician, having played in several bands with Western influences and modern sounds. He also was an accomplished songwriter, having had some early success with the song Ölüm in 2004, which expanded his style with a delicate acoustic folk sound. It wasn’t long before the 3 musicians were regularly playing together, finding much common ground despite seemingly different musical backgrounds. The irony of a Turkish-born rock musician arriving in the US and playing with Armenian-American and Lebanese-American musicians, who both learned to play Turkish and Middle Eastern music while born in the US, was not lost on them. Nor was it lost on patrons, who enjoyed the nontradi0onal combination which in many ways easily mirrored the east/west folk-rock approach of such Turkish music pioneers as Moğollar and Yeni Türkü known as Anadolu Rock. The possibility of actually working with these legends was not something the trio had ever anticipated in its future, but once their sound started to grow and arrangements became more sophisticated, newer songs enabled an expanded band and exciting opportunities.
Joseph’s brother William Tayoun was soon recruited to play piano and keyboards with the group, which added elements of classical and progressive rock as well as a healthy background in Middle Eastern sounds and keyboard effects. Different bass players and drummers were added to the mix soon after, until the band came close to defining a sound which they were proud of. The CD Uzaklardan was recorded in 2012 in the studio of their then-drummer Jim Hamilton (Boyz 2 Men). Internationally celebrated drummer Engin Kaan Gunaydin (New York Gypsy All-Stars) who had played with the band in the past, is also featured on several songs.
The album represented a landmark in multi-hyphenated music (east-west, folk-rock, Turkish-American, multi-ethnic, and multi-national, to name a few) and immediately made its impact on fans and critics as well. New York Music Daily raved that, even with the majority of the record’s lyrics sung in Turkish, “their relentlessly intense, mostly minor-key anthems are memorable and o=en haun>ng, transcending any language barrier.” The band found this effect to be a big part of their appeal, as American audiences could appreciate the playing, melodicism, and emotions in the music, which seemed to resonate even stronger with the inclusion of non-Western instruments. Turkish audiences also appreciated the band’s approach, having accomplished this subtle fusion of styles as a natural consequence of friends simply writing and playing music together, regardless of their backgrounds.
Barakka has been fortunate to work with some visionary filmmakers over the years, starting with Marc Brodzik of Philadelphia’s own Woodshop Films and the music video for Ağit (2013). The anti-war anthem skillfully weaves band performance footage with emotional archival footage, marking its message with the repeated refrain “There must be another way,” which can be seen as an appropriate credo for the band.
Barakka made its first trip to Turkey as a band in the spring of 2014. Unfortunately, several scheduled performances were canceled as the country was devastated by the Soma mine explosion shortly after their arrival. 300 miners lost their lives, and live music was suspended during the national period of mourning. Filmed and directed by Andrew Geller, the music video for X, along with the film Uzaklardan – From a Distance, document this sad time in Turkey as the band tried to make sense of things amidst this tragedy. Subsequent videos for Alevler İçindeyim (2019) and Son (2020) were both made by visiting filmmaker Cevahir Unal, as the band welcomed new drummer Poyraz Aldemir, a Turkish-born musician residing in Brooklyn, New York.
During the global COVID-19 pandemic, the band stayed busy by creating 2 stay-at-home videos: Hediye, which was shot in pieces by band members in their homes (end edited by Andrew Geller), and the animated Hepsi Bu, which sees them all rendered as cartoon characters in a lighthearted spoof of television commercials. The band’s newest video, their
treatment of the Turkish pop hit Kınalı Bebek, was directed by Kat Tingum in 2022. Barakka has had 2 recent tours of Turkey, making a special effort to bring music to many smaller cities which have not seen much touring from bands since the onset of COVID and the ensuing economic hardships. Since 2022 the band has played in Gelibolu, Çanakkale, Kayaköy, Mersin, Adana, İzmir, Eskişehir, and Van, in addition to several shows in İstanbul. While Barakka continues to write and develop new music, the band has always prided itself on interpreting and celebrating the classic works of Turkish composers such as Aşık Veysel, Tanburi Cemil Bey, Şehrazat, Erkin Koray and Ara Dinkjian.
https://www.barakkamusic.com/
https://www.facebook.com/grupbarakka/
https://www.instagram.com/barakkamusic
If you purchased a ticket, we have you on our guest list, please tell us your name when you come in for the show.
By Car or By Train
The East Falls Train Station is a short walk from the Fallser Club. Parking in East Falls is no problem! There is ample free on-street parking near the East Falls train station driveway at 3610 Midvale Ave and a paid municipal lot three blocks away at 4100 Ridge Ave. Midvale Ave and Ridge Ave are both well-lit!