Rag Radio: Award-Winning World Music Band Atash Spreads its Message of Peace

Joining us in performance and conversation are five members of the award-winning Austin-based World Music band, Atash.

Voted Best World Music Band at the prestigious Austin Music Awards for six years running, Atash combines master musicians from around the globe who create a powerful original sound. Their professed goal is to spread peace and love around the world with their music.

The band takes its name from a Farsi word for fire, and “Everything is Music,” the title of their last album, comes from a poem by 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Rumi. Members of the band who perform on this episode of Rag Radio are Executive Director John Moon (violin); Musical Director Roberto Riggio (‘oud); Singer-Songwriter, and Poet Mohammad Firoozi (vocals, percussion); Chris Hausler (drums); Dylan Jones (upright bass).

Atash, which is currently appearing in a special nine-week residency at an historic venue on downtown Austin’s famed Sixth Street, has spread its music and its message on the East and West Coasts, in Taiwan, China, Spain, México, and elsewhere, gaining legions of fans and sharing stages with numerous major acts. The Austin Chronicle writes about Atash: “The catch-all assignation of world music remains way too small to encompass a sound this big… What makes the nine-person Austin ensemble’s ambitious musicality truly transformative is its dedication to a deepening soulfulness through virtuosity. From Hindustani classicism to Iranian bandari music, Spanish flamenco, and French gypsy jazz.”

Rag Radio Host and Producer Thorne Dreyer was a pioneer of the ’60s underground press movement and a leader in SDS and the New Left, and managed Pacifica Radio’s KPFT-FM in Houston. Dreyer edits The Rag Blog, an Internet news magazine with an international following, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Rag Radio engineer and associate producer is Tracey Schulz.

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The syndicated show is broadcast (and streamed) live Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is later rebroadcast and streamed on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Houston Pacifica’s KPFT HD-3 90.1, and by KKRN, 88.5-FM in Round Mountain, CA — and as a featured podcast at VT. Contact: [email protected].

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