Reem Kelani
ريم كيلاني
Singer, music researcher, and broadcaster
Palestinian-British singer and researcher who has spent three decades collecting, reviving, and performing traditional Palestinian song, blending it with jazz.
Reem Kelani was born in Manchester in 1963 to a Palestinian family — her father a physician from Ya’bad near Jenin, her mother from Nazareth — and was raised and educated in Kuwait, where she studied biology at Kuwait University and worked for four years as a marine biologist. A family wedding in a village near Nazareth in her childhood first fixed her attention on Palestinian song. She moved to London in 1989 on a British Council scholarship, and a stint leading music workshops at the British Museum’s Palestinian Costume Exhibition (1990–1992) turned her from researching fish and shrimp, as she likes to put it, into researching traditional songs.
Over three decades Kelani has documented old wedding songs, lullabies, and songs of parting across Palestine, the refugee camps of Lebanon, and the wider diaspora, performing them with a band that sets Arabic instruments alongside a jazz rhythm section. Her debut album, Sprinting Gazelle – Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora (2006), was self-produced after some twenty years of field research and was later added to England’s Model Music Curriculum for schools; a second album, Live at the Tabernacle, followed in 2016. A longtime BBC broadcaster — she wrote and presented the Radio 4 series Distant Chords (2001–2003) and Songs for Tahrir (2012) — in 2024 she released her setting of Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” as a benefit single for UNRWA. She lives in London.
Selected works
- Sprinting Gazelle – Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora (2006)
- Live at the Tabernacle (2016)
- Songs for Tahrir — BBC Radio 4 documentary (2012)
- “If I Must Die” — benefit single for UNRWA (2024)
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.