We’re in foggy San Fran (only I see it’s not so misty in the winter) and we just ate some Indian food at Rotee and now I wanna follow it up with some musical dessert, so where do we go? Well, I didn’t plan for it to work out so picture perfect, but Cheb i Sabbah was having a record release party for Devotion (which you can buy here in MP3 form for under 8 bucks), his latest for Six Degrees Records. His is a platter of prayers representing Hinduism, Sikhism and Sufi Islam that is combined with modern studio production to create a magical fusion of east and west, ancient and futuristic, and without compromising the integrity of the original spiritual music. It’s easy for Cheb (or Haim, as the people in my tribe know him), because his source music comes straight from the source, as the album was recorded entirely in India, utilizing the talents of local musicians.

I emailed a contact at Six Degrees to see if we can be “sorted” so last minute and to my surprise the artist himself got back to me with confirmation, so THANK YOU CHEB! Conceivably, if we’d came into town earlier in the week, we could have caught him at Nickies, a sweet spot where he recently resumed his long-time Tuesday night residency, but
Temple was a swanky (in a tribal-techno-Miami Vice way) place to be as well. We walked all the way down Market Street, stepping over passed-out homeless people, getting interrogated by pissed-off homeless people, and made our way to Howard Street – a couple of blocks south of Market between 1st and 3rd. The area reminds me of the Meat Packing District or Tribeca in NYC, you can see that there’s money and nightlife here, but they haven’t figured out a way to make the unfortunates disappear the way Giuliani did – but that’s another story, right? The hip locals (or asshole tourists that wanna look cool like me) have dubbed this area, SoMa, for, uh, South of Market. There was a long line at the club and even the lucky folks on the guest list had to wait until the restaurant inside, Prana, was done serving dinner.

We didn’t know which room he’d be in, so we walked downstairs where there was a drum circle that was just starting up. It was nice and dark, and the “stone” walls didn’t look nearly as Indiana Jones-ish as they do in the pictures. And there was a huge Buddha and this performer there to greet us.

(this and other shots noted were provided by Garret Wilson, who had a “bigger” camera than me, THANKS!)
(room pics from Temple’s website)
We navigated through the “Catacombs” and into the “Destiny Lounge,” a 2001-themed room with a heavy sound system.

(there was another bar here too)

We chilled in this room for a while until we noticed people going upstairs for the Cheb i, so of course, we followed them up into Temple’s main room – “The Shrine,” marble floors and all.


Backing him up on stage were Salar Nadar (Tabla) and Preetam Mayall (Dhol), both of whom kept up a thunderous beat serious enough to make it rain like in that movie, Lagaan.
(Above is another of Garret’s shots)

A belly dance troupe joined the stage and that got the crowd even more into the music, which we could see made Cheb happier as well. The thing that stinks about SF is that no matter how cool the public transit system is, the BART still stops at 1:05, even on the freakin’ weekend, so if we didn’t want to shell out 50 bucks to make it back to our hotel near the airport we would have to split a little early. That means that I didn’t get to catch Karsh Kale who also came in to perform tonight. Oh well, at least I got a sample of bangin’ Bhangra going on in this town. Thanks again to Cheb i Sabbah and Ryan at Six Degrees for inviting me out!
P.S. You can read my Music Connection profile we did back in 2000 by clicking the click!