Female voices rise above repression
Virtual version of ‘ Let Her Sing’ show has roots around world
Banned. Censored. Arrested. Scorned. For some women raising their voice is more than an act of selfexpression.
“Let Her Sing: A Celebration of Female Voices” is a yearly concert focusing on vocalists who defy patriarchal restrictions, state repression and cultural marginalization, and this latest installment has adapted to the necessities of social distancing. Recorded last month at Freight & Salvage, the online concert premieres Saturday, Jan. 16, and will be available to stream for a limited time after that date.
Copresented with the Berkeley venue and streamed via its website, the fourth annual “Let Her Sing” concert is the latest production by Diaspora Arts Connection, the East Bay organization that champions North American musicians with roots in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
“Not all the women have been suppressed, but each woman has a story about their challenges and what they want,” said Nazy Kaviani, founder of Diaspora Arts Connection.
Saturday’s sevenact bill includes the internationally renowned artists Marjan and Mahsa Vahdat, Iranian sisters who have carved out illustrious careers singing together and separately in Europe and America while unable to perform publicly in the nation where they were born and raised.
With Mahsa Vahdat living in Berkeley and the sisters’ collaboration with Kronos Quartet on the acclaimed 2019 album “Placeless,” they’re hardly strangers to Bay Area audiences. But “Let Her Sing” also serves as an introduction to earlycareer musicians and artists largely unknown outside their communities. A recent transplant to South San Francisco, Evin Sah is a Kurdish musician from Turkey, where Kurdish language and culture has often been repressed by the state; Mina Alali is a 23yearold Iranian American singersongwriter from Davis who has released three albums of original pop tunes; and San Francisco’s Leila Motaei, better known under her stage name Rabbit Quinn, is an Azerbaijani American singersongwriter with a sound reminiscent of English pop singer Kate Bush.
“Style is not a determining factor. It’s a really diverse group musically,” Kaviani said. “I’m Iranian, but my work is about immigrant artists, Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian. If they’re living here and don’t know anybody in the business, they might end up playing in somebody’s garage.”
A central part of Kaviani’s mission is to introduce artists like Mai Khoi to a wider audience. She has performed in San Jose and Orange County, but “Let Her Sing” is one of Khoi’s first California events outside the Vietnamese community.
A controversial pop star in Vietnam who has pushed against strictures imposed both by the communist government and conservative notions of female propriety, she has recorded songs with explicit sexual references while delivering pointed social and political critiques.
“Women have to censor themselves in Vietnam,” said Khoi, who recently started a yearlong artist residency in Pittsburgh at City of Asylum, an organization that supports endangered artists. “Society rejects them first. They can’t express themselves freely.”
Khoi, a restlessly creative artist who has been blending traditional Vietnamese instruments and jazz in recent years, became a leading voice opposing Vietnam’s authoritarian government. While attempting to run for a seat in the national assembly on a prodemocracy platform in 2016, she met with President Barack Obama. She also garnered headlines in 2019 when she greeted President Trump in Hanoi with a sign reading “Piss on you Trump,” citing his misogyny and lack of support for human rights.
Police harassment, concert raids and eventually a performance ban had made life in Vietnam increasingly untenable. A recipient of the Human Rights Foundation’s Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent, Khoi fled Vietnam in fall 2019 when Joe Piscatella’s documentary “Mai Khoi and the Dissidents” premiered at Doc NYU. She spent her first year in the New York City Artist Safe Haven Residency Program in Westbeth, a housing complex for artists.
“My home, my country, doesn’t allow me to perform anymore,” she said. “To start my career here I need time. ... The hard thing is to get into the future here with confidence. To live as a musician here is not easy.”
Like all of the women featured in “Let Her Sing,” Khoi tells some of her story in an interview segment with Oakland singersongwriter and anti incarceration activist Naima Shalhoub, who is also a featured performer. Each singer performs two songs with a house ensemble led by Iranianborn Armenian songwriter and pro Diaspora
ducer Erwin Khachikian.
Unlike the convivial hangouts during previous “Let Her Sing” productions, the necessities of social distancing didn’t allow the women many opportunities to get to know each other. “But I got to dive into their stories, each woman’s different set of challenges,” Shalhoub said.
“The theme running through all of us is our relationship to the voice in terms of its ability to be a vessel, to be a messenger through music,” she continued. “Everyone had different answers to the questions, yet the thread was there, and you can hear it in the beautiful, glorious voices.”
Meanwhile, Kaviani is already planning for the next edition of “Let Her Sing,” scheduled for Sept. 11 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
“Hopefully everything will go well,” she said, “and we can have performances with an audience again.”