Asylum in New Mexican Maqam

In the dry mountains of New Mexico, an Iraqi oud (lute) master raises homing pigeons. Persecuted for a single potent song, he fled his native land, only to be deprived of his beloved instruments at the border. Yet like the birds he cares for, he has homed in a new nest, where quarter tones can be urged from accordions, rock stars and classical violinists can play Iraqi maqam, and Middle Eastern lullabies echo in Pueblo Indian words.

Meet Rahim AlHaj, oud mastermind and composer behind Little Earth. On the album, a loose but poignant affiliation of musicians from a plethora of places and backgrounds tackle the filigree beauty of Iraqi maqam. Bill Frisell and Peter Buck, Cape Verde’s Maria de Barros and Mali’s Yacouba Sissoko, sitar and Iranian ney virtuosi all explore new territory mapped out by AlHaj’s deep sense of both maqam tradition and the expressive possibilities of global music.

“It was a dream, to compose music for all the world,” AlHaj chuckles. “The challenge of the project was to do more than just get together and jam. It was not just for fun.”

A favorite student of esteemed Iraqi oud player Munir Bashir, AlHaj was trained in both Iraqi maqam and Western classical music. He soon gained a sterling reputation as a performer, eventually leading decades later to Grammy nominations and recordings with the Smithsonian.

He also honed his skills as a composer, skills he has coaxed into full flower on Little Earth, where he transforms musical forms like sama’i (“Sama’i Baghdad”) and Iraqi sea chanteys (“Sailors Three”) into elegant pieces for unexpected instruments.

“Though most sama’i are written for traditional Arabic instruments, I wrote it for a Western string quartet, but they have to play it in the Arabic way, including the special intonation and microtones—we have eight notes between B and B-flat” AlHaj explains. “It was unique, the first time this form was performed by Western musicians on classical strings.”

Though highly successful in his musical career from an early age, AlHaj’s heart cried out against the suffering he saw around him in Iraq, especially with the advent of the brutal Iran-Iraq War that killed millions. “When I started to understand the world, I started to understand justice,” AlHaj reflects. “I felt like I was responsible and obligated to make all my music give voice to the voiceless.”

This desire moved him to set a friend’s poem to music and the resulting song of resistance—titled “Why?”—spread like wildfire from Iraqi to Iraqi. Soon it was being sung everywhere, and AlHaj found himself in one of Saddam’s prisons.

Only two years later did AlHaj end up at the border with Syria, free to go yet deprived of his precious ouds. After several years in exile, he was granted asylum in the United States, where he landed in Albuquerque thanks to a strange cultural misunderstanding: Thinking that, as a Middle Easterner, AlHaj would feel more at home in New Mexico’s arid climate, his sponsoring organization sent the new refugee to the deserts of the Southwest. A world away from the fecund land he had fled.

Yet this mishap put AlHaj in a state rich in diversity with thriving global music connections. And as he settled into his new life, he began to seek out musicians eager to bring their voices to AlHaj’s stunning oud, careful compositions, and heartfelt message.

“The musicians use their own sound and environment—I don’t want them to imitate me—but they need to play the composition right, with the influence from the Middle East and the maqam,” AlHaj notes. “This music is composed music; we’re not just jamming. It’s all written.”

Within these compositions, however, collaborators found new means of expression, using a language that they shared with AlHaj. Robert Mirabal, the Taos Pueblo Indian renaissance man and flute player, turned an Iraqi lullaby into a statement in his language of Tewa (“Lullaby”). Guy Klucevsek managed miraculously to get his accordion to hit the right quarter tones (“The Searching”), while Chinese p’ip’a (lute) player Liu Fung found a way to make her pentatonic work with AlHaj’s maqam modes (“River”), all to his great amazement.

The musical encounters often had a strong dose of kismet, as AlHaj’s work with Cape Verdean singer Maria de Barros proves. When recording took AlHaj to California, he met with de Barros and they struck up a conversation. AlHaj mentioned a piece dedicated to the memory of his mother and the warmth that emanated from her, de Barros exclaimed that she had Portuguese lyrics about her mother. The result (“Missing You/Mae Querida”) was more than a Cape Verdean morna being played by an oud; it was the bittersweet swing of de Barros’s home intertwined with the soulfulness of Iraqi maqam.

This soulfulness—the moan of a woman in mourning, the sigh of a palm tree collapsing under gun fire—remains AlHaj’s constant companion. It, and AlHaj’s political commitment to peace, continue to inform his work, and led him to close collaboration with a musical legend from his country’s erstwhile enemy, Housein Omoumi, master of the Iranian ney (traditional flute).

These elements are felt most powerfully in “Qassim,” a piece memorializing his vivacious and optimistic cousin killed during the U.S. occupation. “I needed to tell my cousin’s story in music. Iraqi women cry out in grief from their stomach, very low,” AlHaj reflects. “The piece starts with the sound of the horror at what happened. An Iraqi woman’s cry, thanks to Stephen Kent’s didjeridoo, and the rhythm of the piece are driving, insisting to be heard.”

Beyond the sorrow and insistence on telling the stories of those without voice, AlHaj has found a new contentment and sense of place in the U.S., and more mournful pieces are joined by sprightly expressions of pure joy. Works like “Morning in Hyattville,” inspired by a cheeky mockingbird and augmented by guitarist Bill Frisell, and “Athens to Baghdad” where AlHaj explores what he playfully calls “a place of sweetness” with his friend and sometime collaborator Peter Buck of REM.

It is this union of the bitter and sweet, the harsh and the soothing, which gives AlHaj’s vision its punch. For AlHaj, his work is about far more than curious peregrinations and sonic juxtaposition. It’s about finding a path to peace and ending the suffering of the women and children, the bold minds and kind spirits, he witnessed.

“Of course, musicians from opposite sides in conflict can come together and make music,” AlHaj states. “But we must figure out how to make music together before we become enemies, or we will prove ourselves fools. If we can hold that ideal high, as a principle, we can make it into fact. We will make it real and the earth will indeed become little.”

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At a dargah (Islamic shrine) situated in the south-east part of India, the singers sing devotional songs in the Qawwali style, with percussion accompaniment. The lyrics are a mix of the local south Indian language, Tamil and Arabic, while the music style is that of northwestern India. Read on to learn more about the album.

This is from our album Nagore Sessions: a unique musical collaboration featuring Sufi, Indian, Middle Eastern and Western elements.
In the lonesome voice of a Sri Lankan fisherman or a Thai market seller’s flute vibrate sorrow and substance, heart and hope. The reverberations of the 2004 tsunami along the Indian Ocean coasts, as expressed in the everyday music of ordinary people, have global resonance, sounds that can connect and inspire.

Putting these sounds into the innovative hands of global DJs, A New Day: Laya Project Remixed reveals fresh facets and possibilities, as tablas lock into the perfect dub and overlooked voices intertwine with sinuous bass or bouncing, joyful breakbeats.

“We really wanted to spark an emotional reaction, while still being very respectful of the people involved,” explains Laya Project director and producer Sonya Mazumdar. “The remixes add another, rich dimension, to help those outside these communities to connect.”

To create connection, the remixers on A New Day were recruited for their keen ears for global music and their experience working thoughtfully to blend tradition and digital production, beats and soul. This was of crucial importance to EarthSync, the team that had dedicated years to produce a fitting tribute to the peoples in coastal communities from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, the Maldives, India, and Myanmar (Burma).

Recorded on site during impromptu sessions over the course of more than two years in dozens of overlooked areas, this music spans national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. The remixes, staying true to the tracks’ spirit, span genres and sounds, embracing other elements to shed new light on the Project’s mission: to reveal the joy, creativity, and strength of the everyday people who had faced the trial and heartbreak of the tsunami.

“I was happy to see how the remixers, without being told where to go and what to do, understood the method and spirit of the music, and took it to their own musical space,” reflects Patrick Sebag, music producer of the original Laya Project (and remixer of “Laya Mantra”).

To unfold this new musical space, A New Day producer Joshua Jacobs drew on some of the strongest forces on the global dance floor, an established corps of DJs reveling in the possibilities of traditional music from around the planet.

The voice of a simple woman from the Maldives rings powerfully over a springy pulse of deep bass (“Farihi (Fabian Alsultany Remix)”). The trebly overtones of a jaw harp and elegant beats bring out new sides of an Indian Sufi song Ya Allah (“The Please Wipe Our Tears Remix (Cheb i Sabbah)”). The song of two beacons of Thai tradition float, filled with ethereal longing, in a contemplative sea of ambient samples and chords (“Waterside Tales (Bombay Dub Orchestra’s Blade Runner Remix)”).

“The Pitch Black remix of ‘A New Day’ is a great of example of the power of remixes,” notes Jacobs. “They created an incredible slow and ethereal dub version of the track, which is magical for yoga.”

“Remixes, especially for Laya Project, allow the message of Laya and the sound of the villages in these six countries to reach new audiences and age groups,” Jacobs explains. “This album will reach the dance floor, trance festivals, lounges, and even TV commercials and feature films, which will greatly expand awareness of the Laya Project and the people affected by the 2004 Tsunami.”

“The name we chose speaks volumes: ‘Laya’ is a really resonant and rich Sanskrit word,” Mazumdar muses. “Along with many other things, it can mean fusion, union, and embrace, all elements that echo in these remixes. It’s the essence of what we and the remixers hope for.”

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But the inveterate showman and former folk dancer’s wry exploration of sex and post-socialist society carries echoes of the dissolution of his erstwhile homeland, Yugoslavia. An “emotional emigrant” who fled the chaos of war and moral collapse by retreating into his own creativity, Magnifico sought asylum in music, a love he discovered decades ago as a young man, when his father bought him his first guitar.

His songs, while raising the roof, raise eyebrows and spark debate about everything from xenophobia to homophobia, dominating charts in the former Yugoslavia and Italy. He has crafted songs that unabashedly chant “Magnifico is queer” and parody Slovenes’ insults for Southern Slavs, tracks meant to shock, critique, and amuse.

Several generations of fans frequent the singer and actor’s flamboyant shows, where they sing along to the provocative lyrics and savor the furious Balkan beats, part of a new culture tempered by conflict and buzzing with vitality. Slovene teens scream at a Magnifico sighting, while local intellectuals chew on his post-modern shape-shifting significance. This is all part of the tongue-in-cheek fun for the actor and songwriter, whose surprisingly grounded life offstage includes a beloved wife and family, and a down-to-earth perspective on his party-hearty repertoire.

Now Magnifico is being unleashed on the world at large with Magnification, in a blast of Balkan- and Roma-scented funk, r&b, and soul… and even a flirtation with cowboys and Mexican-style horns. Tracks hail from Magnifico’s latest limited edition Slovenian release, along with several freshly minted songs from the songwriter’s ever fertile mind.

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La Différence, the legendary singer addresses this deeply personal issue–albinism in Africa—and gives it an urgent global resonance that takes his songs from Bamako to Beirut. As Keita’s famed “golden voice” cathartically croons in the title track, “I’m a black man, my skin is white and I like it, it’s my difference/I’m a white man, my blood is black, I love that, it’s the difference that’s beautiful.”

The distinction is often interpreted as an ill omen in his native Mali, and invited a life of ridicule, making Keita an outcast in his own community. Society, including public schools in Mali, perpetuates harmful beliefs about albinos, and they are often shunned, ridiculed, and even killed for superstitious purposes.

Although he and others have come to terms with albinism, Keita has struggled long and desperately with the stigma attached to his skin color. Though born into a noted caste of musicians with direct links to Sounjata Keita–the heroic 13th-century warrior-prince who edified the ancient Malian Empire–Keita was forbidden to play music growing up. He was also disowned by his father, kicked out of school, and rejected by the local aristocracy.

Filled with unrealized musical ambitions, Keita had no choice but to leave Mali as a young man. Armed with the strength of his convictions, he travelled to neighboring Ivory Coast, then Paris, London, and New York, where his skin color could not keep him from expressing his artistic vision. His perseverance paid off throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as he became an internationally recognized icon thanks to his gravely voice, innovative musical arrangements, and profoundly poetic lyrics.

In 1997, Keita’s fame helped him to overcome the stigma attached to albinism that persisted in West Africa, allowing him to make a triumphant return to Mali. Cautiously re-entering a community that once shunned him, he discovered a newfound acceptance, which allowed him to re-establish roots there, including building a studio in the capital of Bamako.

La Différence is the latest in a trilogy of acclaimed acoustic oriented recordings (Moffou 2002, M’Bemba 2006) that were primarily recorded at Keita’s Bamako studio. The intimate acoustic environment of La Différence allows Keita’s vocal timbres to shimmer and soar, highlighting their poetic nuances and the poignant themes of his lyrics. While the album is dedicated to the plight of albinos in Africa, leading with its title track that aims to increase the global awareness of this cause, the remainder of the album delves into a wide range of social and political issues.

Over a thick sanguine female vocal chorus and rhythmic guitar riffs, “Ekolo d’Amour” seeks to inform listeners about the ecological devastation that has befallen Africa. Fusing the powerful traditional tones of the 21-stringed kora with a contemporary guitar-rich, down-tempo, polyrhythmic groove, “San Ka Na” cites a specific example of ecological destruction, alerting audiences of the need to protect Africa’s Niger River, upon whose banks Keita played as a child. With a rough and urgent voice, Keita scorns local politicians for their neglect and complacency regarding such problems.

These compositions also point to the global nature of this album, which was recorded across three continents, including sessions in Los Angeles, Paris, and Bamako, among others. String arrangements written by noted producer Patrice Renson (M., Vanessa Paradis, Ben Ricour, Amadou and Mariam) and recorded in Beirut with Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf give the album a subtle orchestral depth. On several songs, the plucked strings of a Middle-Eastern oud mingle with the West African ngoni (lute), creating a swirling melodic texture of Arab-infused African tones.

La Différence also finds the singer re-imagining a few previous recordings with a new palette of sounds. Harnessing the deeply echoing, bluesy textures of guest guitarists Bill Frisell and Seb Martel, an intimate rendition of 1995’s “Folon” offers a stripped-down, horn-absent version that allows Keita’s haunting voice to pierce the mellow cosmopolitan soundscape. With producer John Henry, Keita reaches back to the 1970s, recalling his days with the Ambassadeurs du Motel band in Bamako, with a new incarnation of “Seydou.”

Departing from the original track (“Seydou Bathily”), this softer version bathes Keita’s voice in a rich sonic world of resonant vocal refrains, Arabic-tinged string arrangements, interlocking guitar tones, and a multilayered percussion ensemble that merges sounds from Africa and the Middle East. Given that these songs have been refined by Keita and his band over the course of many years, some for decades, it is no wonder why his delivery comes across with a relaxed, sophisticated confidence.

Further linking La Différence with Keita’s long musical career, the melody of “Djélé” is decorated by the intricate balafon work of Keletigui Diabaté, a monumental figure in Malian music and one of Keita’s most faithful musical partners, helping him to develop as a guitarist over the course of almost four decades. Drawing on his international sojourns, “Djélé” reinforces Keita’s cosmopolitan approach to this album as the breathy tones of an accordion dance with a concert piano over top a bed of deep electric bass, legato orchestral strings, plucked African lutes, and a global array of polyrhythmic percussive timbres.

While listeners may lose themselves in the sophisticated blend of sounds found on La Différence, Keita has not lost site of the ultimate inspiration for this project–the men and women who still suffer with the stigma and health risks of albinism in Africa. As Keita remarked in a recent Mondomix interview, “It’s very, very important for me to help albino people, because they need help, and it is my duty, because I am albino, too.”

To combat the prejudices that regularly threaten albino Africans, the singer has pledged that all the proceeds from this work will be funnelled into his foundation, Salif Keita pour les Albinos.

Since 2001, this charity has tirelessly worked to erase the stigma attached to albinos in Africa, and provide care and assistance to albinos in need of refuge and medical attention, including protection from the sun. Keita knows its dangers first hand, losing his sister to skin cancer in the 1990s. Over the past four years, Keita has donated proceeds from record sales and tours to purchase sunscreen for Africans in need, and build a school and health clinic in Bamako.

La Différence is an intimate journey into Keita’s personal struggles. Singing a hymn of universal tolerance Keita poetically claims, “some of us are black, some are white/all that difference has a purpose…for us to complete each other/let everyone receive love and dignity/the world will be a more beautiful place.”

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Sephardic salsa and Southeast Asian-Jewish standup. New music rituals and ancient inscriptions. Parades and jam sessions, world premieres and kid’s music. This is a no-holds-barred party that does what America’s premier Jewish music festival has done for 25 years: break down the walls between past and future, between multifaceted possibilities of Jewish culture and audiences at large.

The Bay Area’s Jewish Music Festival marks its two and a half decades with a day of free outdoor festivities for all ages and background at the Yerba Buena Gardens on July 11, 2010, including instrument building workshops, instant choruses, klezmer jams, and performances running from kid-friendly to hip. “We want these outdoor events to celebrate the local Bay Area scene, where the klezmer revival started and where global music and Jewish music blend in our musically diverse community,” explains Festival Director Ellie Shapiro.

In addition to the fun free-for-all, the Festival is presenting several groundbreaking multi-media, multi-platform performances, the edgy interpretation of Jewish roots that has become part and parcel of its mission. July will see the world premier of a commissioned music and dance piece by composer Dan Plonsey (Dan Plonsey’s Bar Mitzvah); a strikingly sensual installation hinting at the secret lives of Babylonian women (The Bowls Project); and the rave-worthy, trans-Mediterranean electro-dance of Watcha Clan, direct from Marseilles, France.

New music composer Dan Plonsey has worked with everyone from avant-jazz legend Anthony Braxton to highly imaginative author Harvey Pekar, and has garnered extensive awards and fellowships for his innovative yet wryly grounded musical projects. Plonsey, who was raised in a secular Jewish family, had never undergone the ritual himself. Instead, he has composed Dan Plonsey’s Bar Mitzvah, an exploration with choreographer Eric Kupers and the Dandelion Dancetheater of the meaning of ceremony and the transition to adulthood, commissioned by the Festival and premiering in association with the Contemporary Jewish Museum.  Avant garde dance veteran Anna Halprin will also be on hand July 8, 7 pm at the CJM for a special preview performance.

The Bowls Project takes ancient inscriptions from clay incantation bowls, buried to magical ends underneath Babylonian houses and incised with wishes and hopes from the mundane to the erotic. Jewlia Eisenberg, the vocal and conceptual dynamo behind the punk/funk/Balkan/Jewish group Charming Hostess, transforms these ancient inscriptions into a visual and sonic experience that interweaves the past—Babylon was a major center of Jewish culture at the time—with the present, today’s Iraq; the spiritual with the personal. To invoke the bowls, the project unfolds in a dome structure, with the inscriptions projected on its interior thanks to video artist Shezad Dawood. Eisenberg will lead a workshop digging into the project earlier in the day, and then festival goers will be able to interact with the space independently.

The Silver Anniversary Festival season culminates on July 18, in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and with the global electronica phenomenon Watcha Clan performing as part of their summer New Frequencies program. Their sound brings hard-hitting beats to North African, Sephardic, French, and just about every other Mediterranean groove imaginable. The band’s high-energy performances are led by vocalist Sistah K, who celebrates and mutates her Jewish background into addictive and irrepressible calls to dance. Watcha Clan’s multicultural take on roots parallels the Festival’s own mission.

“The Festival’s mission has always been to present music that both celebrates Jewish experience in innovative ways and engages the broader community,” Shapiro reflects. “The outdoor events really explore what it means to be Jewish in the multicultural world and embrace what the Bay Area is about, as a hub of multicultural life.” This hub is home to a rich mix of local artists who will be performing in the park and are shifting the boundaries of what it means to participate in Jewish culture.

Artists like Middle Eastern percussion master Dror Sinai or artists like singer Kat Parra, who was mentored by Patti Cathcart of Tuck and Patti but who dove into the salsa scene, opening for major acts like singer Celia Cruz. At the same time, Parra began uncovering her family’s Sephardic roots, which she discovered worked beautifully with the Afro-Latin rhythms she had come to love. “It feels to me like a natural next step as the Sephardic music can be so vibrant and infectious in its melodies,” Parra explains. “The melodies actually easily fit within an Afro-diasporic rhythmic context, as does the timelessness of the lyrics.”

With another unexpected perspective on Jewish culture, comedian Joe Nguyen draws on his experience as a person of both Vietnamese and Jewish background, finding the funny side of his heritage in his funky hometown of San Francisco. Eprhyme and Joshua Walters add hip-hop to the mix.

The day in the park will also honor the Bay Area’s unmatched contribution to Jewish culture—the 1970s revival of klezmer that jump-started two generations of innovative musicians. The old-school mastery of groups like the Red Hot Chachkas, recently lauded for their holiday performance with the San Francisco Symphony, which will pair perfectly with the younger innovators like KugelPlex, who bring in other global elements from Africa to the Balkans as they take on Jewish tradition.

Yet the party is about more than merely savoring Jewish music; it’s about making it. That’s why the July day in the park kicks off with an interactive, second-line parade led by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars founding member, Glenn Hartman, and with family activities like an instrument petting zoo with “zookeepers” from the Mission- based Community Music Center and an instrument making workshop at CJM that turns found objects into sonorous sensations that will feature in the day’s closing parade. Veteran kid’s music performers Ira Levin, Gerry Tenney and Elana Jagoda will keep the younger crowd in the mood.

Older participants will get a chance to burst into song as part of an instant chorus, designed by Jewish a cappella group Vocolot’s Linda Hirschhorn to get even the rustiest of vocal chords harmonizing, or to polish their old-world licks as part of a klezmer jam session hosted by local klezmorim. “We’ve had a hundred people show up in the past for these jams,” Shapiro laughs. “The sound was amazing.”  In addition to the klezmer jam / workshop – there will be workshops on Middle Eastern modes (maqamat) and rhthyms.

“The interaction and the innovation is what the festival is really about,” notes Shapiro. “As much as it’s honoring the roots of Jewish culture, it’s also pushing it forward and articulating whole new ways relating to it. While, of course, having a good time in the bargain.”

Originally posted by: World Music News Wire

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