London – I walked into Barbican Hall last Friday evening with a heavy heart and an open mind. What I experienced at Sada (Echo): Music from Palestine was far more than a concert—it was a convergence of memory, resistance, and raw, unfiltered beauty. Part of the Shubbak Festival, this performance brought together three Palestinian voices—Rola Azar, Dana Salah, and DAM—each with their own sound, style, and story, yet bound together by the shared rhythm of a people in defiance and celebration.
In a moment when the world is raising its voice—demanding access to medical aid, food, and above all, a ceasefire for Palestinians—this evening of music couldn’t have come at a more urgent or poignant time. With every note, Sada reminded us that behind headlines and numbers are human stories, human rhythms. Palestinian music has always carried the weight of memory and resistance, but tonight, it reverberated with an aching clarity. It became not just a cultural act, but a moral one.
Rola Azar opened the evening with a voice that seemed to emerge from the very soil of Palestine—earthy, rich, and steeped in longing. She doesn’t just sing traditional Palestinian music; she embodies it. Her performance was a call to remember, to mourn, and to preserve. At one point, the room felt utterly still, as if holding its collective breath to listen not just to the music, but to the history behind it.
Dana Salah brought a different kind of energy—joyful, rebellious, utterly contemporary. Her signature Falahi Pop blends the intimacy of Arabic folklore with the pulse of global sounds like reggaeton. It’s music that refuses to be boxed in. In her hands, tradition isn’t something static—it dances. Her set was a reminder that joy, too, is resistance. That even amidst devastation, there is a fierce right to celebration, to love, to life.
Then came DAM, and the temperature shifted. Their presence was electric—rap as testimony, beats as protest. Their lyrics hit like truth-telling firecrackers, illuminating what so often gets obscured. The group’s unapologetic commitment to telling the Palestinian story through hip-hop felt both intimate and political, poetic and hard-hitting. Even if you didn’t understand every Arabic word, the emotion, the message, the demand for justice was unmistakable.
But what made Sada truly unforgettable was the way these three acts met on stage—not just in collaboration, but in communion. They wove a shared narrative, one that held centuries of displacement, decades of defiance, and the fierce tenderness of a people who refuse to disappear.
After the concert, the Barbican foyers pulsed with sound—DJ beats keeping the conversation alive, the celebration uncontained. A sonic exhale after the intensity of the performance, but also a continuation of its spirit: this music doesn’t end when the lights go down.
Sada means “echo”—and that’s exactly what it was: an echo of stories still unfolding, of voices rising, of a culture that insists on being heard, seen, and felt. In these times, when silence is complicity and music is defiance, this evening wasn’t just timely. It was necessary.
It stayed with me long after I left the Barbican—not just as music in my ears, but as something deeper, stirring in the chest. A reminder that Palestine is not only a place of suffering—it is a place of beauty, art, and the most enduring of human things: hope.