Reem Kelani is a Diaspora Palestinian singer, musician and broadcaster. She was born in Manchester, raised in Kuwait and is now based in London. Her father comes from Yabad near Jenin in the West Bank and her mother from Nazareth in Galilee.

Kelani started singing in public at the age of four. She was initially influenced by the Lebanese singer Fairuz and by the Jazz standards her father used to play on his record player. She studied the Quran as a child and used to hear the calls to prayer about her in Kuwait. Life in the Diaspora also meant that she was exposed to the music of the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Egypt, Iran and East Africa. A family wedding Reem attended in Galilee in the seventies sparked her interest in Palestinian music.

Kelani returned to the UK in 1989. A two-year project on Palestine at the British Museum (1990-92) consolidated her focus on Palestinian music. Since then, she has spent time recording songs from the older women in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, in the Diaspora and in her maternal home of Nazareth.

Kelani gives workshops on Arabic and Palestinian music in schools and colleges around the UK. She also gives visiting lectures at colleges and universities. In 2000, she merited an entry in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, including a biography under Palestinian Music.

Kelani is also a regular broadcaster. She wrote and presented Distant Chords for BBC Radio Four, featuring the music of migrant communities in the UK (Afghan, Yemeni, Kurdish, Armenian, Micronesian and Portuguese). She also presented In Praise of God for the BBC World Service, in which she featured stories and songs praising religious legends shared in historic Palestine.

Now considered as one of the foremost researchers and performers of Palestinian music, Kelani recently released her debut album Sprinting Gazelle Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora on Fuse Records to critical acclaim. The production of Sprinting Gazelle, which Kelani undertook on her own and without the support of a record company, represents the culmination of years of striving to bring Palestinian music and culture to a wider audience. Commercial and political independence also meant that Kelani could maintain her musical and cultural integrity.

In her music, Kelani does not separate the personal from the collective, or the sacred from the secular. Songs of love, harvest, weddings and separation mix freely with songs of praise and meditation. She views her musical journey as both historical and political, personal and collective. She seeks to point out suffering and to highlight celebration. Her journey is a musical one through the written and oral history of a people who are proud of their collective sense of poetry, stories, music and existence.

Throughout the past 16 years, Kelani has toured widely in Europe, the Middle East and America.

Photo by Şahan Nuhoğlu