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The Story So Far"Shareef and Dylan agree, sometimes when things get a little nutty you just gotta toss on the cowboy hat and sing some country songs...[His] songs draw their power from the raw emotional honesty in his lyrics and his singing - he lays it all out up there and it's a beautiful thing...if people still say 'keeping it real', that's what Shareef does." Shareef Ali is a songwriter, composer and performer living in Oakland, California. The warm twang of a '72 Telecaster or the comforting pluck of an Alvarez steel-string acoustic serve as a backdrop to poignant and revealing lyrics reminiscent of Leonard Cohen or Conor Oberst. A delicate trust is forged between artist and audience, "a feeling that he's building fragile, intricate worlds inside a wind tunnel, fully aware that they may be caught in a gust at any moment," Britnelle Bell writes. Shareef's verse is set over elegant chord progressions, classical in craft and variation: though familiar forms recur in the terrain, the journey ends in quite a different place than the one in which it began. Shareef Ali's parents traveled from opposite corners of the globe to raise their two children in the American Midwest, landing in St. Louis, Missouri. Shareef began performing his original songs at sixteen before attending Oberlin College, where studied Music Composition with Randy Coleman, Lewis Nielson and Richard Hoffman. "Amor Combate", Shareef's setting of Pablo Neruda's "Oda y germinaciones", was featured at the 2004 Midwest Composers' Symposium held at the University of Michigan. Shareef Ali moved to the Bay Area in 2007 and the next year recorded a five-song solo acoustic demo, Music From And Inspired By Our Doomed Love Affair. Since then, he has performed at such venues as the Rockit Room, House Of Shields, Grant & Green, Socha Café and Bazaar Café in San Francisco and Nomad Café in Oakland; he has also appeared as the Featured Act at the Hotel Utah open mic in San Francisco and Starry Plough open mic in Berkeley. Shareef is sometimes accompanied by The Radical Folksonomy, featuring fellow Oberlin grads Guy Brown on guitar; jazz pianist Erika Oba; and singer Sarah Thompson. Recent show history2010
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Contact Shareef Ali, Songwriter at shareef@shareefali.com. Want to book a show? Like to hear about upcoming shows, new recordings and the like? Interested in making music together? Want to hear more music? Love what Shareef Ali does, and wish to support it? |
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![]() All content, including but not limited to songs, lyrics, music, audio, video, images and text, © 2008-2009 by Shareef Ali Elfiki, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. |
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