Soul singer Zeshan B was born in Chicago, but from a glance at his bio you might not expect him to have rooted his debut solo album so strongly in black music—he’s the son of Muslim Indian immigrants, and that “B” stands for “Bagewadi.” He studied opera in college—we were in the same program nearly a decade ago—and he’s trained to sing qawwali, an ancient Sufi devotional music, as well as ghazal, a south Asian poetic form that often refracts romantic love through the lens of Islamic mysticism.
I sang in gospel choir in high school, and during my classical studies at university I always missed my roots. And my roots, as much as they were the Indo-Pakistani music my folks always listened to, were also gospel music and R&B and soul. When I started my opera career, I was getting hired by opera companies, but I felt constrained—like I wasn’t doing what was really me. That is why I came back to this music. It was a return to my roots.
As for why now—when Black Lives Matter came into existence, I strongly supported its message and the awareness it was creating. Things took somewhat of a personal turn when Sandra Bland died. Sandy—I knew her in high school. She was in my same circle of friends, though we weren’t super tight. Her death under mysterious circumstances was a personal shock. It galvanized me and made feel that I had to do something about this vis-a-vis Nina Simone’s artist mandate.
Speaking as a Muslim American, I didn’t get my way with this election. But disenfranchised indigenous minorities have not gotten their way for hundreds of years. Look at their resilience. We have to come together and fight for their rights, because they are fighting for ours. We have lived comfortably because of their fight. We must take up their struggle and fight alongside them.
And as the child of Muslim immigrants, I take it very personally that Trump’s policy has been antagonistic towards immigrants and Muslims, because I can’t think of people who are more American and patriotic than my parents. They love America. There is, of course, an attachment to the homeland of India, but they consider America their country. That Trump is going around filling people with hate and asserting how American white people are and that we don’t belong here—I take offense to that.
