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| Qalali People Band at Aga Khan Music Awards 2025 (Photograph: Joao Peixoto) |
Eleven artists have been honoured on the weekend as this 12 months’s winners of the Aga Khan Music Awards in a ceremony within the Southbank Centre, London. The Awards introduced collectively the world’s music trade in a worldwide celebration of cultural heritage in partnership with EFG London Jazz Pageant, marking the primary time the Awards have been held in the UK.
Winners got here from Morocco, Türkiye, Bahrain, Iran, Lebanon, India, Mali, Palestine, Greece, Pakistan and Senegal with a particular Patron’s Award celebratomg two exceptional musical lineages of the good poet, composer, musician and Sufi saint Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), who was instrumental in shaping a big a part of the music and cultural historical past of South Asia.
On the ceremony, audiences loved performances from winners Qalali People Band, Kamilya Jubran, Senny Camara, Farah Kaddour, Derya Türkan, Kyriakos Kalaitzidis, and Jordi Savall, David Mayoral, Yurdal Tokcan, and Hamid El Kasri and Gnawa Kouyous, alongside Karim Ziad.
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| Farah Kaddour, Senny Camara, Kamilya Jubran at Aga Khan Music Awards 2025 (Photograph: Joao Peixoto) |
Full Checklist of Winners of the 2025 Aga Khan Music Awards
- Sahba Aminikia (Iran/USA) – Composer and social innovator Sahba Aminikia is the founder and inventive director of the Flying Carpet Pageant.
- Mariam Bagayoko (Mali) – Singer, dancer, and instrumentalist. By her mentorship of girls and ladies, she has performed a significant function in sustaining Mali’s musical and dance traditions.
- Senny Camara (Senegal) – A kora participant, singer, and songwriter, she provides a luminous and distinctly female voice inside Senegal’s musical panorama.
- Kamilya Jubran (Palestine/France) – A pioneering voice in modern Arabic music, she attracts on her Palestinian roots to discover new inventive instructions and adventurous cross-cultural collaborations.
- Farah Kaddour (Lebanon) – Composer, performer, and scholar. She has expanded the expressive potential of the buzuq, a long-necked fretted lute with historical Center Japanese origins.
- Kyriakos Kalaitzidis (Greece) – An oud participant, composer, and scholar, he illuminates the deep connections between Islamic and Euro-Mediterranean musical traditions, and has championed analysis and efficiency of music from the Levant.
- Hamid El Kasri (Morocco) – A singer, guembri participant and maâlem (grasp musician) within the Gnawa custom, he’s devoted to preserving and renewing Morocco’s musical heritage.
- Qalali People Band (Bahrain) – Established over a century in the past, the Band is devoted to performing and preserving Bahrain’s wealthy seafaring musical heritage. The ensemble is famend for its renditions of sawt—a well-liked city musical style—and fijri, the standard music of Bahrain’s pearl divers.
- Ustad Naseeruddin Saami (Pakistan) – A torchbearer of the Delhi gharana (hereditary lineage) of Hindustani music, Ustad Naseeruddin Saami traces his inventive lineage to Amir Khusrau.
- Derya Türkan (Türkiye) – A classical kemençe participant, composer, and educator, he has introduced Turkish classical and people music to audiences worldwide. He’s identified for mixing Turkish traditions with jazz and European classical idioms.
- Naseer and Nazeer Ahmed Khan Warsi (India) – Main exponents of qawwali, the devotional Sufi music of South Asia, brothers belong to a household lineage tracing again to the Qawaal Bachhey (youngsters of qawwali)—the singers and musicians skilled by Amir Khusrau (1253-1325), the founding father of qawwali.
His Late Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV (1936-2025) was the forty ninth hereditary Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims and the founding father of the Aga Khan Growth Community. One manifestation of his hereditary tasks was a deep engagement with improvement spanning greater than sixty years. He established the Aga Khan Music Programme in 2000.
Full particulars from the Aga Khan Growth Community web site.
