Thursday, April 29, 2010

Nadia Kazmi

Nadia is a singer/songwriter born and raised in Calgary, Canada who now lives in Brooklyn, NY. She combines her varied influences of Rock (Jimmy, Led Zep, Pink Floyd . . . and yes: Queen!) and Soul (Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder, Prince) with poetic lyrics (Leonard Cohen). Nadia is helping to diversify the current musical landscape by creating pop/rock music with conscious lyrics and interesting melodies while still retaining catchy hooks and popular appeal.

Nadia has recently finished recording her debut album with grammy nominated producer Alex Elena and Josh Valleau (Alice Smith) in New York and Los Angeles. She is currently playing in New York and Canada and will be playing shows and festivals throughout North America over the fall to promote her first independent full-length album: ARRIVAL.

I became aware of Nadia via my Google alerts for "Leonard Cohen".  I read an interview of Nadia by Donald Gibson where one of the questions was:
You also have a great appreciation for Leonard Cohen and his songwriting.

He’s my favorite artist of all time…Actually, for my next album I’m doing Leonard Cohen songs. I know it’s been done before many times, but I’m trying to do something a little more interesting because I’m going to infuse it with that rock/soul element that I have for the rest of my stuff. So I’m really going to change the songs quite a lot.

Read more:  blogcritics.org

This intrigues me enough to see if there was any video around. And I found this amazing video of a great track from her new album Arrival.  Having heard this I eagerly await her "Leonard Cohen" album, she sounds like a worthy performer who would interpret his songs in a meaningful way.

Julian

The video for the first single off the album Arrival is now up! This was filmed in Paris in a friend's apartment
Directed and shot by Michael Ingledew.