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music | By Gary Cristall T i e ·WVk.M M The Capilano College Performing Arts Theatre, the Rogue Folk Club, and the Vancouver Folk Music Festival are once again joining forces to bring you the Cap Folk 'n' Roots series; a series dedicated to bringing a diverse array of exceptional folk/roots artists from around the globe. It is a season which offers something for all fans of music from folk, blue-grass, world, Celtic, blues, and gospel with artists from all over Canada and beyond including France, Cuba, USA, Wales, and Ireland. Indeed the term folk music today is an umbrella term which encompasses music from all cultures and genres - the boundaries seem to be limitless. The explosion of interest in world music over the last decade and a half is one of the most intriguing features of the globalization of listening tastes in the northern hemisphere. Starting with the Graceland phenomenon in the late 1980's and the resulting surge of appreciation for African artists and carrying on through the Buenavista Social Club's recent creation of a mass audience for Cuban music, a cornucopia of diverse music has changed the rules. What was once the province of cult fans of "ethnic" music is now part of mass appeal popular music. Not only has this meant that music from away has garnered a significant audience; it has also allowed Canadian artists with roots in various cultures room to explore and create work that reflects their dual cultural citizenship. One of the leading representatives of this trend is Kiran Ahluwalia who will be making her Cap Folk V Roots series debut on Sunday, October 19. Born in India but raised in suburban Toronto, Kiran is the very model of the model bicultural Canadian. Fluent in four languages and - effortlessly at home in both mainstream Canadian culture and the Punjabi-Canadian world she was raised in, Kiran first came to notice of the music world as an interpreter of traditional music of India and Pakistan. This, however, was not enough, and Kiran began creating her own musical settings for traditional and contemporary texts. Her first CD, Kashish, nominated for a Juno award, contained both repertoire exported from the Indian sub-continent and hybrid creations fashioned on this side of the ocean. Her second recording, Beyond Boundaries, lives up to its name and introduces listeners to the marvels of Canadian ghazals. The ghazal, Kiran's specialty, is a song form that came to life in Persia and traveled to what is now India and Pakistan. It exists somewhere between the classical and popular tradition. Ghazals begin life as poems and with the addition of music, become songs. They have an unbroken 700 year tradition and that tradition is alive and well in the South Asian literary diaspora. Unknown to most Canadians, there is a vibrant literary scene in most Canadian cities, where poets from Indian and Pakistani backgrounds create and read their work. Kiran Ahluwalia entered this hive of creative activity looking for words for her music and she was not disappointed. Tahira Masoor, a home-maker and mother; Rafi Raza, an electrical engineer and Rasheed Nadeem, whose day job is as a taxi driver, live in Toronto where they are deeply involved in a number of literary magazines and organizations. Their poems, written in Punjabi and Urdu, provide the texts which, combined with Kiran's music, make an original contribution to the ghazal tradition, perhaps the first recorded ghazals to be entirely created in Canada. In one of them, Rafi Raza abandons the usual ghazal theme of