From jazz to hip hop, Afro-South Asian music collaborations reflect imagined, more liberatory worlds
A conversation with Elliott Powell, author of ‘Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music’. Hip hop singer Missy Elliott at the 44th Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux. | Valentin Flauraud/Reuters
Afro-South Asian (American) musical alliances demonstrate an “other side” of Black life, history, and politics, argues Elliott Powell in his new book,
Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press 2020).
Powell covers over a half-century of Black and South Asian American musical collaborations, starting from the 1960s. Included in this study are John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Rick James, OutKast, Missy Elliott, Truth Hurts, Timbaland, and also Badal Roy, Lata Mangeshkar, Rajé Shwari and others.