This is from my time in Azerbaijan. For Republic Day last year, I collaborated with two local musicians and music teachers, twins Sevindik and Sarvan, to create a medley of Western and Azerbaijani songs. (The “Oh Susanna” bit was their idea — the melody was familiar to them, but they’d never heard the words.) The distinctive stringed instrument you hear is called the tar, played by Sevindik muallim (“tar” means string in Persian, and you can note the importance of this root in the words “guitar” and “sitar,” among others). The pictures in this slideshow are a mixture of shots from my time in Azerbaijan; the first and last shots are of us performing this!
The Sophisticated Savage, Carla’s book about her experiences in Ecuador, is now available for purchase from Lulu.com.
To read more about the book, click here. Or, to listen to a related audio documentary with real audio footage of Carla and Fredy on the Galapagos Islands (and accompanying pictures), take a look at the following video:
There’s a new channel for videos from Carla Seidl on YouTube. If you are a YouTube user, you can subscribe to be updated when I upload any new videos. Slideshow to accompany the audio piece “Cannibal Theme Park” coming soon! Please also visit to rate or comment on “Azerbaijani Housewife.”
Carla will be returning to the US for just over a month in early May before she heads to Mauritania for another round of Peace Corps service. You can catch her while she’s here at these New-York-area performances:
Saturday, May 16th at 9pm at Cubbyhole Coffeehouse in Poughkeepsie, NY
Sunday, May 24th at 7:45 at The Bitter End, New York, NY
Saturday, June 6th, 7:30-8:30 at Cool Beanz, St. James, NY
Carla’s music is featured in a new iMix on iTunes called “Relax, Inspire: music for unwinding, reconnecting, and reflecting, featuring some of the best voices in female folk.” Other artists in the mix are Laura Nyro, Indigo Girls, Kate Chadbourne, Suzanne Vega, Lucy Kaplansky, and Kris Delmhorst. Click below to download or rate the mix.
Returning to Azerbaijan this month, Carla filmed (and was filmed in) a video for her song, “Azerbaijani Housewife,” off of her debut album Under My Skin. Footage was shot in a rural village in the region of Oguz in the north of Azerbaijan. Activities shown are typical of the ones Seidl observed among village women during her service as a Peace Corps Volunteer but are not intended to represent the activities of Azerbaijani women in larger towns or the capital city of Baku.
