NO blues is the crossroad where folk-blues and Arabic music meet. Specializing in a unique worldbeat hybrid of American folk, blues, and the rhythmically unfixed Middle Eastern traditional style known as taqsim, Netherlands-based No Blues call what they play “Arabicana,” and it’s an apt term. In over a decade the band made seven albums with heartfelt music. songs about ‘ordinary people’, love and grief, played and sung in a tradition that is characteristic to both folk blues and Arabic music.
Live the band plays with Anne-Maarten van Heuvelen (double bass/ lead vocals), Haytham Safia (U’d, Arabic lute/ lead vocals) Osama Meleegi (percussion/ lead vocals) and Janos Koolen (guitar). After almost twenty years on the road, gigs from India to Mexico, and seven successful album releases, the band that combines two world’s that do not seem compatible, is still going strong. The NO blues fanbase still grows every day by people that hear the band for the first time and are moved by what seems impossible.
