Reem Kelani

The Palestinian singer, musician and broadcaster Reem Kelani released her debut CD in February 2006.

Born in Manchester in the UK and brought up in Kuwait, Reem’s father comes from Ya’bad near Jenin and her mother from Nazareth in Galilee.

Reem enjoyed early exposure to all sorts of music. She learnt the piano and listened to the Jazz standards her father used to sing at home. She studied the Qur’an as a child and used to hear the calls to prayer about her in Kuwait. Life in the Diaspora also meant that she was exposed to the music of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, East Africa, the Levant and Egypt. It was whilst at a family wedding in the Galilee that Reem, as a child, was first taken by Palestinian music.

Reem has been recording and collating folk songs from women in her maternal home of Nazareth, in the refugee camps of Palestine and Lebanon and elsewhere in the Diaspora. Now considered as one of the foremost researchers and performers of Palestinian music, Reem Kelani brings you ‘Sprinting Gazelle – Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora.’ Some of the songs on the CD are Reem’s research and arrangement of traditional (and some very old) Palestinian songs; the others are her own musical settings of popular and resistance poetry by the likes of Mahmoud Darwish, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Rashid Husain and Mahmoud Salim al-Hout.

Reem’s band includes a Jazz rhythm section comprising Zoe Rahman on piano, Idris Rahman on tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet, Oli Hayhurst on double bass and Patrick Illingworth on drums. Egyptian violinist Samy Bishai and Iranian percussionist Fariborz Kiani complete the line-up.

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