Arif Jinha is a Canadian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer based in Ottawa. Arif is a psychiatric surviving artist and scholar, of Gujarati Ganda-Persian-English migrant roots, a spiritually fluid murid of the Ismaili Tariqah. Arif blends sacred, North American roots and world music as spiritual practise, personal healing and development, and consolidated creative and published works.
Along with performance, Arif also facilitates kirtan, dhikr and sound healing in community contexts. This practise spans guitar, voice, sitar, bass, piano (and piano tuning), ukulele - and listening - the heart of music and cooperation (working on the latter lol).
Feet on ground, Arif is a semi-retired, a caregiver and worker at Anishinaabe Algonquin lands, near the Kichi Zibi. Three decades of musical study yields Arif's coming offering - River Music. This a living synthesis of Indian, jazz and Western theory and practise, North American black music and many folk/roots traditions into one, as a teaching and composing and improvisation method, no sheets!
This work is shaped by local community, by land, water, sky, and inner fire, and an interior life that takes everything to heart, to mind and to ground, eventually! That same interior life has been diagnosed as bipolar 1, and the recovery journey is core information for songs and for inspiring faith and determination, in the way of recovery, in the way of attending to life as devotion, as folk ceremony, as cherished moments together, and released in peace.
In 2013, Arif received an Ontario Arts Council grant to deepen his studies in sitar, studies he had begun with Hardeep Buckshi, and now with Ustad Mushfiq Hashemi. Arif's work moves between solo composition and collaboration — with artists, activists, healers, and community organizers — rooted in the conviction that music is not separate from how we live together. Before the pandemic, his Songs of Love and Healing concerts — no microphone, sacred and secular music woven together, full audience participation — embodied that conviction in form as much as content
Solidarity with all survivors! Taking less seriously now, this temporary, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes mad as hell - imperfectable life! Always getting better :)
Big love!
Arif
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