Latifa Noor

Latifa Noor Elizabeth Anderson is an improvising cellist and vocalist who has performed throughout the United States, Australia, Italy, Germany, Finland, Israel, Japan and India. As cellist of the Meliora Quartet she was winner of the Naumburg Award. She taught for ten years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and currently performs as cellist of the Carolina Piano Trio and with the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center. As a North Indian vocalist and cellist she has also performed worldwide and it was through her connection with Indian raga that she became inspired to create this CD of original improvisations for cello, voice and tamboura. As a recording artist she has recorded for Telarc, Nonesuch, RCA and a solo CD of the transcriptions of Luigi Silva. The process of synthesizing multiple musical styles was simultaneously a musical challenge, a discovery of the shared spiritual qualities of Eastern and Western music and a manifestation of the wish that music might someday be the path to harmony among human beings. This ideal was expressed by Sufi musician and teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan when he said, quot; Someday music will be the means for expressing universal religion.quot; Pianist Barbara McKenzie, pianist, has been hailed by critics as quot;a discovery which has charmed us allquot; (Le Matin). Since 1980 Ms. McKenzie's career has taken her into the concert halls and international music festivals of Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy. She was selected by the NEA to tour as a musical ambassador for the U.S. State Department in eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and for debuts in Leningrad and Moscow. She is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, a conservatory prize winner and is the recipient of many awards and prizes as pianist of the McKenzie-Ware Duo, including the International Chamber Music Competition in Paris, the Young Concert Artists Guild Competition in New York and the International Brahms Competition in Hamburg. Upon returning to her native North Carolina after living a decade in West Germany, she was selected as artist-in-residence by the North Carolina Arts Council. In this capacity, she founded the American Music Festival in 1990 and in 1996 co-founded The Chamber Music Society of Wilmington. NOTES ON THE MUSIC Sufi Prayers These prayers are selections from a group of daily prayers created by Hazrat Inayat Khan as he reached out to his Western students, giving them practices in their own language. They convey the essence of the prayers from his own esoteric training in India. My improvisations were inspired by my experience of Indian ragas, and my love of the prayers. The improvisations are rhythmically free, using tamboura as accompaniment with improvisational lines from the cello and voice. Although there are aspects of formal raga in each improvisation, my intent was to evoke the essence of each raga, allowing the message of the prayer be of foremost importance. Invocation : Welcome to the Divine. Nazar : (glance), a blessing of the food. Saum : (repose), a morning prayer. Pir : (elder) a morning prayer. Salat : (blessing or benediction) a midday prayer. Khatum : (closing) an evening prayer. With Asha in the Redwoods The title describes exactly the derivation of this piece. I am so grateful to Asha Greer and to the Mendocino Redwoods for their inspiration for this solo cello free improvisation. Spiegel i'm Spiegel Spiegel i'm Spiegel, (Mirror in Mirror) was composed in 1978 and exists also in versi