When cultural awareness reaches a certain high water mark, old artistic forms can start to become recognized by a global community. It takes time for people to learn how to read the forms the cultural expressions take, and it takes some time to get exposure to different levels of performance before audiences decide they can like something. It’s a bit of a strange phenomenon, but it repeats itself year after year with different entertainment forms. It’s especially true in traditional music from any culture, and the rough forms that are closer to the sounds in the streets sometimes get lost to the versions that have the help of the studios to make them more poppy.

Artists like Natacha Atlas have the fortune to engage with the best of the studio professionals. In her case her artistry is strong enough that the roots of the music some through, and it can come to be seen as a natural evolution and a product of time, rather than slickness. She’s bringing her extraordinary talents to Miami Beach at the end of July to the Colony Theater, and this is a very exciting chance to hear her own fusion of traditional Middle Eastern music with pop electronica.

Natacha Atlas has a world reputation that’s strong enough to pull people from all over to the Miami Beach hotels just to hear her play live, and the locals have a great possibility to see what the sounds are all about. She considers herself a kind of hybrid of European and Middle Eastern identities, growing up in a Moroccan neighborhood in Belgium, to parents of Moroccan, Egyptian, Palestinian, and English ancestry. Her music is a hybrid fusion of these traditions, and the results are stunningly seductive. She’s been performing since the 90s, and has a very solid reputation in the world music scene. Hiphop meets bellydance, and it will be lovely to see how the crowds start to move when they realize what they’re in for.

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