Sprinting Gazelle: Palestinian Songs

Kelani has a voice of amazing power and intensity, but it's always controlled, and there's a moving vulnerability there too. The subject matter of Sprinting Gazelle also fascin ates - it's important that we hear songs learned from Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, for instance.

It particularly helps that Kelani herself writes so lucidly about the process by which she came to record the album in the liner notes of what is a handsomely packaged CD. Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Editor, Observer Music Monthly. The Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 25 February, 2006
Reem Kelani
Sprinting Gazelle
Fuse
When a self-produced album by an unknown Palestinian singer gets as much attention and better reviews than the Arctic Monkeys in mainstream publications such as Time Out and London's Evening Standard, you know something significant is afoot. Reem Kelani's achievement is all the more impressive for the fact that her music is challenging stuff. Born in Manchester of Palestinian parents, raised in Kuwait, but n ow based in west London, Kelani collects folk songs from old Palestinian women and performs them in an unflinchingly austere manner with subtle jazz-inflected arrangements.
While the tunes are trickily ornamented, the tone of Kelani's singing is grave and unadorned, with a conviction that suggests she would happily have performed the whole album unaccompanied. Violin and bass clarinet cohere in driving bagpipe-like drones, while Zoe Rahman's piano has a deliciously sombre quasi-classical feel. Combined with the often cantor-like quality of Kelani's voice, it creates poignant echoes of Jewish klezmer music at its most reflective. While the sufferings of the Palestinian people loom large over this powerful album, its very existence feels like a sign of hope. Mark Hudson

3. The Financial Times, 25 February 2006

Sprinting Gazelle
Reem Kelani
Fuse
Kelani was born in Manchester but soaked up the music of the Arabian penins ular growing up in Kuwait. Sprinting Gazelle collects traditional songs from the Palestinian diaspora as well as setting poems to music. Some arrangements are classically Middle Eastern, others use a jazz backing. Kelani herself is a forceful, compelling singer, heavy with anger and defiance: Sprinting Gazelle adds up to a strident musical manifesto for Palestinian nationalism. Not easy listening, but impossible to ignore. David Honigmann

4. Metro, Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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Reem Kelani: Sprinting Gazelle (Fuse)

Born in Britain to Palestinian parents, singer Reem Kelani travelled to her homeland to archive the songs and lullabies still sung by the women in refugee camps in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. Several tracks on Sprinting Gazelle are rooted deep in history: the opening song, As Nazarene Women Crossed The Meadow, was originally sung by women as their men went off to fight in the Ottoman army. Waves of grief radiate from the newer material, too, which includes new arrangements of resistance poetry: the music to Mawwaal, a poem written by Mahmoud Darwish in 1967, was composed to mark the anniversary of the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. Kelani's music is by turns joyous and desperate, with every sinewy note and impassioned lyric imbued with a rare sense of urgency. Claire Allfree