Photos from the first day of Aar Maanta’s residency here in the Twin Cities.

Aar Maanta, Nahini, and Ruth visited Project for Pride and Living by Van Cleve Park in SE Minneapolis on Monday, January 23rd. While they spent the afternoon with 20+ East African youth, the three band members helped them work on their poetry-writing skills, played instruments (the oud, maracas, and djembe), danced, and taught them about British accents. All of us, including the photographer (yours truly), had a great time. Do you see that Aar Maanta is wearing a furry ear-flap hat? He got that at the Mall of America! Welcome to Minnesota winter.

The Cedar’s mission is to further intercultural appreciation and understanding through global music and dance. Programs like this, especially with a band like Aar Maanta, are exactly our jam. Why might that be? Aar Maanta is a multi-national Somali music band; in some ways, they are a microcosm of global music today. In fact, Aar Maanta set up his band in order to reflect the diversity of his musical influences and his base city of London. Besides Aar Maanta (whose real name is Hassan Abdirahman), who left Somalia for the UK in the late 1980s, the band members are: Maciej Pysz, a Polish guitarist, Ruth Goller, an Italian bassist (who sings in Somali !), Nahini Doumbia, a Malian percussionist, and Pharaoh Smeaton-Russell, a Nepalese-Scottish drummer raised in Brixton. Despite the increase in expatriate Somalis around the world, there are no live bands that perform Somali music outside of the Horn of Africa. Aar Maanta is the only band in Europe that is successfully creating this new generation of Somali sound, fusing traditional Somali music with a medley of contemporary and international influences.

We have a couple more community programs scheduled before the public concert on Thursday the 26th:

• a poetry and music workshop at PPL in New Hope
• a daytime educational performance for the Cedar Riverside Community School (located in Riverside Plaza)
• a writing workshop with Ka Joog Organization, a non-profit that aims to improve the lives of Somali youth.

[The Cedar’s programs and events are supported in part by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota States Legislature, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Aar Maanta’s residency is made possible by an Arts Access grant from the MSAB.]