Bio:
Nabihah Iqbal is a musician, producer, DJ and broadcaster from London.
Her debut album, ‘Weighing of the Heart’, was released via Ninja Tune in December 2017 and has since garnered huge critical acclaim from the likes of The Guardian, Pitchfork, Dazed, The Observer, Q Magazine, BBC Radio 1 and 6Music. She is currently an artist-in-residence at London’s iconic cultural institution, Somerset House, where she is writing and recording her second album.
Aside from working on her own music, Nabihah has hosted a bi-weekly show on NTS Radio since 2013, exploring musical traditions and cultures without boundaries. The success of this show, and the following that Nabihah has built up as a DJ and tastemaker, caught the attention of the BBC and she has frequently appeared on their networks since 2018, presenting shows on BBC Radio 1, 1Xtra, Asian Network, World Service and 6Music. In December 2020, Nabihah launched a monthly radio show, ‘New Music Energy’, which is dedicated entirely to new artists and new music.
She has toured extensively around the world, both as a live act and as a DJ. Performance highlights include the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, as well as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Barbican, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, K11 Art Institute in Shanghai, MoMA PS1 in New York, Synthposium in Moscow, Inner Varnika festival in Australia and SXSW in Austin, TX, Glastonbury Festival, Warehouse Project, Printworks, Boiler Room, Worldwide Festival and Bestival.
Inter-disciplinary projects form an important part of Nabihah’s work. She has received several commissions from other corners of the arts, where she has collaborated with Chinese artist Zhang Ding, been commissioned by Tate to compose music for the Turner Prize, collaborated with Wolfgang Tillmans as part of his Tate Modern exhibition and was recently involved in a group performance at the Barbican as part of its major Basquiat retrospective.
1n 2019, Nabihah launched her ‘Glory To Sound’ project at Somerset House in London. She has been curating a series of events (talks, live music, club nights) which explore the reasons why we love music. Guests include Wolfgang Tillmans, David Olusoga, Gilles Peterson, SOPHIE and Kassem Mosse. You can find out more here.
Nabihah is also very interested in music from an academic perspective and she has been invited to give lectures and participate in discussions, including at the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, the Royal College of Art and the London Documentary Film Festival. She has also written articles for various publications including Dazed and Vice.
Nabihah studied a joint honours BA in History and Ethnomusicology at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and it was during her time as an undergraduate that her musical horizons widened further. She took classes in various music styles including Gamelan and the Turkish classical tradition. Her main performance instrument was the Sitar. After SOAS, she moved to Cambridge University to study a postgraduate MPhil focused on South African history. She then moved back to London, where she did a law conversion degree, passed the Bar and simultaneously started getting more involved in throwing parties and making music.
Nabihah sits on the board of trustees for the Institute of Contemporary art (ICA), Hand Of, an arts and education charity dedicated to enriching the education of disadvantaged children and young people in the UK, and she is also on the advisory board of Making Tracks, an international music residency programme that explores strategies for music-based environmental engagement.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).