Nowruz Festival

jazzhane and Moods cordially invite you to the Nowruz Festival and welcome spring and the new year. Shortly after the equinox, we will celebrate the Nowruz Festival for the third time on Saturday, March 22, 2025. Nowruz means “new day” and has been celebrated for 3,000 years by over 300 million people in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Bajar, the Kurdish-rock band led by frontman Vedat Yıldırım (founding member of the internationally acclaimed Kardeş Türküler), blends folk, rock, and traditional eastern tunes: a project born in urban Istanbul’s hybrid neighborhoods and streets.

Singing in both Kurdish and Turkish, the band creates music, that is deeply political, challenges and protests the ongoing ghettoization of minorities, racial and cultural discrimination, inequality, democracy, and freedom.

Perhaps, this is best seen in their cover version of «They Don’t Care About Us», which they have recorded with Defjen, a daf-percussion-collective from Istanbul. A tour de force: reinterpreting and blending Michael Jackson’s masterpiece with Eastern tunes, switching Brazilian percussions with the Daf, and adding Vedat’s strong Kurdish voice, the song is a call - once again and after more than a quarter of a century - for freedom and justice.

Kefaya & Elaha Soroor is an award-winning collective that combines synth-rock, post-punk and psychedelic jazz with the rich textures of Afghan folk music to create a sound that transcends boundaries and genres. Accordingly, the collaboration was praised by the Guardian as one of the most fascinating new bands of the year.
Elaha Soroor had achieved great fame in her home country thanks to the show Afghan Star. When the young singer spoke out against Sharia law, she received death threats and had to flee to London. Here she met the band Kefaya and the idea for this album immediately began to mature. The result is an album that is intended as a statement against the prejudices against the Afghan people.