By Errol Nazareth

At age 17, the last place you may want to be is inside a tiny space on New Orleans' Bourbon St. watching a performance by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

 Sure, I questioned what I was doing there -- it was my Dad's idea -- but looking back, I realized that a seed was planted in my head that no teen would've planted on his own.

 Those seeds are now bearing a rich harvest.

 The pilgrimages I've made to New Orleans and Chicago for their jazz festivals and countless interviews I've conducted with jazz musicians, including giants like Wynton Marsalis and Dave Brubeck, are proof of that.

 Local singer Kiran Ahluwalia's introduction to ghazals -- a song form that originated in Persia around the 10th century and introduced to India four centuries later -- was somewhat similar.

 Between ages 10 and 16, Ahluwalia accompanied her parents to concerts in people's homes, but probably never imagined returning to India to study music or releasing a sublime recording in 2001.

 Kashish: Attraction, Ahluwalia's debut CD, recently arrived in stores. It features her exquisite voice beautifully accompanied by sarangi, tabla, harmonium, guitar, bass and Latin percussion.

 "I don't remember there being a turning point in terms of a concert that stuck out in my mind," the India-born, Toronto-based Ahluwalia says. "It was just that whole atmosphere that I really loved."

 The "atmosphere" became secondary after further exploration into the music's history and trips to India, where she studied classical music, ghazals and Punjabi folk music.

 "The poetry of ghazals is so deep, it's just something that touches you," Ahluwalia says. "There's just something about the music and poetry all coming together and the way the melody is so lilting that touched me.

 "We all turn to something when we're trying to find peace of some kind, and for me it was music, and the kind of music that really brought it all together, made sense of the world somehow, was ghazal music."

 An Arabic word that literally means "talking to women," ghazals are hands-down the most evocative and melancholic love songs in existence.

 Singing them, though, isn't as easy as you may think.

 "The challenges of ghazals are that you have a melody and you improvise in it," Ahluwalia explains. "You also have to stay true to it while bringing out something new in it.

 "The words can be hard to understand if you've chosen very classic, literary ghazals," she adds. "You have to study them and figure out what was happening in the writer's life when he wrote it and how you can interpret the ghazal.

 "And in terms of composing, it's not a pop song and it's not classical, so it's in a genre of its own and that can be challenging, too."

 Aware that an album of ghazals would make for an intense, cerebral listening experience, Ahluwalia wisely chose to include a couple of Punjabi folk songs, "light-hearted ghazals," and a composition inspired by a line from a qawwali, a Sufi devotional poem. The qawwali was penned by master poet Amir Khusrau, who's widely credited with inventing the sitar and tabla and introducing ghazals to India in the 13th century.

 So, given that Ahluwalia has devoted her life to singing these heart-breaking love songs, I wonder if she's a hopeless romantic.

 "I don't think with my head usually," she laughs. "I usually think with my heart and maybe that's why I am attracted to ghazals because they're all about emotions and the heart.

 "They're not very logical."