Kiran Ahluwalia and Timariwen, “Mustt Mustt”, 2011
Kiran Ahluwalia is an Indian singer, songwriter who infuses African desert blues and Western musical styles. She was born in Patna, grew up in Delhi and moved to Toronto at the age of nine. After completing her MBA at Dalhousie University, she returned to Toronto with the plan of being in the financial services industry. However, she changed her mind and went back to India to study music and then returned to Toronto to build her career as a musician. Kiran Ahluwalia is married to guitar player and co-arranger Rez Abbasi, and currently lives in New York.
Tinariwen (Tamasheq: “deserts”) is a Grammy Award-winning group of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. The band was formed in 1979 in Tamanrasset, Algeria, but returned to Mali after a cease-fire in the 1990s. The group first started to gain a following outside the Sahara region in 2001 with the release of “The Radio Tisdas Sessions”, and with performances at Festival au Désert in Mali and the Roskilde Festival in Denmark.