Arabic music (not elsewhere classified)

Shadi Jamil apparently performing in Aleppo:

LIVE NOW from Syria's Aleppo: Massive concert held at the Citadel Theater to celebrate the defeat of terrorism & the return of normal life. pic.twitter.com/uwRjBHWN8w

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) July 25, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBGfSgOpH7E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7kr6TiwMWI

Christian Lebanese singer Julia Boutros pays tribute to Hassan Nasrallah:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGK6KvbkujE

(Not news, but felt like posting it and this performance is a little less over-the-top than the one I saw previously.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKdz8gnY5v0

https://stepfeed.com/lebanese-fell-completely-in-love-with-julia-boutros-all-over-again-7552

this performance is a little less over-the-top than the one I saw previously

Also, the bouzouk solo at the beginning, though brief, is a nice touch.

Notice the size of her audiences. I know about Arab music I don't necessarily talk about (and that does not otherwise get mentioned here). On the other hand, I am being honest when I say I don't really keep up with most of it.

Speaking of not keeping up (and therefore not knowing stuff), yes, there is a much larger Arab indie scene becoming available to mostly internet- and Spotify-dependent western listeners like me than I remember being there not that long ago, but maybe I wasn't looking. Mostly realizing this after looking at the related artists for the most interesting Nadah El Shazly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvB83JBBnQ4

And check the Asmahan sample on this Psychaleppo track (for a moment I definitely recognized it without knowing what it was):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-6SQjdgdg4

Have not noticed the Psychaleppo mentioned anywhere at all. I'm not sure it splits the difference between traditional Arab music and electronic music in a way I find completely satisfying, but I haven't even heard it all yet. I posted something by them a long time ago (but if I mentioned them by name I must have misspelled it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH_MY9T-PQU

Sanpaku nominated this for our poll, and I have to admit I didn't know it existed, and in fact had lost track of what Mar-Khalife has been doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nwCbZfPxcY

This is the Asmahan song extensively sampled in the Hello PsychAleppo song above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV1pbIzcpB8

From what I gather (from interviews and articles here and there), he is drawing a parallel between his own existence as a Syrian in exile, or as a Syrian refugee.

She was a Druze princess! I never get tired of bringing that up.

The results of Hello Aleppo's manipulation of the Asmahan sample, in Anqa, at times have a curious resemblance to the beginning of Circuit des Yeux's "Paper Bag," which I am just hearing for the first time (and about which, I found myself thinking: wait, I've heard this before):

https://circuitdesyeux.bandcamp.com/album/reaching-for-indigo

Please stop comparing Nadeh El Shazly to Bjork. El Shazly's vocal ornamentation is generally rooted in classical Arabic singing.

I still haven't done a very good job at all of describing her album. That inadequate label "experimental" definitely fits (inadequately). Electronics, collage, somewhat free form jazz. But sometimes perfectly familiar Arab rhythms, melodies, timbres. And generally her vocals are within that tradition.

Please stop comparing Nadeh El Shazly to Bjork.

Reviewers.

Maybe this is Morse (c)ode from the Zeitgeist.

"Please stop comparing Nadeh El Shazly female singers to Bjork."

May trigger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lOA1zqag24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u9uMsWBmLo

There was a new Mohammed Assaf album in 2017. Just discovered it. So far it sounds nothing like him and I am not impressed.

There's a track with Gente de Zona. Yes, a collaboration with a washed up Cubaton act. (Maybe they aren't washed up. I can't tell the difference when it comes to cubaton.)

It sounds slightly edgy for 2002.

Was trying to whistle this, coming out of the work parking structure this morning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79bT7MbP8qs

I can completely relate to it while laughing at the same time.

Old school Arab mp3 (well, rar) blog:

http://lazyproduction-arabtunes.blogspot.com/

That's great, thanks!

You're welcome. I bookmarked it a couple years back but have hardly looked at it (not sure why). I accidentally let Windows set my default for .rar's to Adobe Acrobat and now I can't make it let me set a sane default. (I swear this was all much easier a decade ago.)

If you've more of these links I'm def up for it. Iran suspiciously absent form the blog!

(Does this help with your file association problem?)

I'll look at that when I am back at my home PC.

I'm not sure if you're joking about Iran.

In the right pane there's a list of countries (and regions) he covers:

ALGERIA الجزائر
ARMENIA أرمينيا
EGYPT مصر
EURABIA أورابيا
IRAQ العراق
JORDAN الأردن
LEBANON لبنان
MOROCCO المغرب.
PALESTINE فلسطين
SAUDI ARABIA العربية السعودية
SYRIA سوريا
TUNISIA تونس
YEMEN

Was legit surprised Iran doesn't feature.

But Iran doesn't fall under the Arab category though, either linguistically or ethnically. They never became Arabized by conquest, that I know of. If so, it didn't last long. Turkey is not there either. Granted, he does throw in Armenia, but probably because they are an important minority in Syria and Lebanon.

(Well, they did mostly convert to Islam, so I guess that's an Arabization of sorts, but they've maintained a strongly distinct Persian culture.)

Some people like Partisan Girl make a case against using "Arab" to apply to most of the people it's even applied to but there's still more reason to apply it where it is applied than to apply it to Iran just because of Arab conquest a long time ago (that didn't defeat a distinct sense of Persian identity). I think I may start trying to use "Levantine" more, but I have trouble remembering what's included and what isn't.

Big parts of Iraq are way closer to Persian culture, in and language as well. Was hoping there'd be a Kurdish category tbh. Still good stuff.

I don't think Iranian music is all that popular with Arabs though, in general. I agree though that Iraq is a pretty big outlier in certain ways, culturally. I don't really know too much about that though.

I still like this Diamanda Galas interview excerpt I've posted before:

DIAMANDA: Interestingly enough, since 9/11, a lot of people coming from the Middle East are saying there would be no blues if there were no muezzin singing, and I said, “Well, you know, the reason I won’t argue with that is that music comes from Byzantium, from the mixture of all these cultures in the Middle East, including Anatolia, Turkey, Greece.” Where did the music of Islam come from? Well, it came from the Arabs, originally. Who did the Arabs get it from? The Arabs took it from the Greeks. They all changed music together in that melting pot of the Black Sea and Egypt and Turkey; in all those Arab countries, there was this exchange of music. So you have this bending of the tones, and you don’t just have a five-note scale—what is that? All these taqsims and the makams, all these scales.

And that is what I hear when I listen to most interesting blues music, which I feel is from Somalia and Ethiopia right now, because they have to get up there and be really good qaraami singers—the improvised music of that whole part of the world—and then they have to be pop singers and blues singers, too. So they get up and they start the solo with the qaraami, then they go into the song, and they go back into the qaraami. The qaraami is sung by church singers also. But these are real singers—I hear it and I think about where the blues is, what the Americans have done to it since then, which is just: repeat.

ARTHUR: Though they seem to specialize in it, that overly reverent regard for musical genres’ classic forms—stylizing them till they petrify hard enough to put them up on museum shelves—is not an exclusively American problem.

DIAMANDA: But when people try to get into this ethnic purity thing, like with Wynton Marsalis or Stanley Crouch, it’s the same thing that people do when they think about Armenian music—“Well, this scale or sound here is probably Turkish.” And I say, “How do you know if it’s Turkish or not?”

ARTHUR: A lot of musical idioms and techniques do get called Turkish; Western music critics use “Turkish music” as a big umbrella term.

DIAMANDA: That’s what Turkish imperialism is. They are a very rich country—in between what they get from America and what they get from Israel, they do real good. They can afford to have plundered the Assyrians, the Kurdish, the Greeks, the Armenians and many Arabic cultures and call it Turkish. They have borrowed from everyone, and other cultures as well have taken from them. But there is no such thing as a united Turkish music. That is just a bunch of shit.

This whole thing about insults to Turkish people, in Turkey they put people in jail for it. If you say you’re Assyrian, that means you’re insulting Turkish people; if you speak Greek, that’s an insult to Turkishness. And still, those two cultures melted into music that is now called Turkish music. Anatolia was a huge area that was inhabited by many cultures, and now they call it Turkey. And they say it’s “The Land of the Turks”—only because they killed everybody else off that lived there before.

ARTHUR: Of course, modern Greek musicians frequently refuse to sing certain songs because they think the song’s roots are in Islam. But in reality, they don’t know where that song came from.

DIAMANDA: There are a lot of people who refuse to perform certain music because they think they’re performing music by the enemy tribe. And they’re not. It’s part of their own music. The Turks employed Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and Jews to compose music for the sultans. Then they called it “Turkish music.”

https://arthurmag.com/2009/01/25/vengeance-is-hers-a-conversation-with-diamanda-galas-by-john-payne-from-arthur-no-28march-2008/

I've read that some years ago. Diamanda otm obv.

Old-school Iranian singers still come to the Washington DC area on tour (there's a large Iranian population in the Virginia suburbs of DC). Ebi was just here and Googoosh is coming back.

To repeat more or less the same point I was trying to make, in my limited experience, an awful lot of Arabs don't even necessarily listen to that broad a sampling of Arab music. Khaleeji music goes in and out of favor, but a lot of people in core Levantine countries don't really bother with it. So Iranian music is even further removed. And people in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan aren't necessarily listening to a lot of North African music. So it's really unsurprising to find no Iranian music on an Arab music blog (especially if it's run by an Arab).

And the Kurds aren't particularly well-loved in much of the Levant either. Politics always plays into these things. Khaleeji music was becoming more popular outside the Gulf states before the first Gulf War, but that dropped off a lot in response to the Gulf War--or so I have been told. No data to back that up!

There used to be a forum called Arian World or something like that, that I downloaded lots of Iranian music from, but it doesn't appear to be around any more.

I did glance at my bookmarks last night to see if I had anything helpful to offer, but I found lots of dead links.

That Nadah El Shazly album is absolutely incredible. I'm loving the encounter of Arabic classical vocals, free jazz and 'experimental' music (shitty descriptor, etc.). What else should I check out?

Hear classic film music from the golden age of Arab cinema, the 1930s to the 1960s. Top composer-performers from Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria created music for the most popular films and theater in the Arab world. Simon Shaheen performs on the ‘ud (Arab lute) and violin, joined by the Syrian vocalist Nadia Raies and an ensemble with ney (Arab flute), qanun (Arab zither), cello, and percussion.

Saw this show for free tonight. Always pleasant, but it sounded even more than that on the 3 songs where Syrian vocalist (and current Berklee school of music student0 Nadia Raies sing with Shaheen on oud, the 3 violinists, the flute player, cello, percussionist and great young qanun player. Shaheen talked about the songs in between (they did some classic old film ones and some of his compositions that are inspired by old stuff)

With Rudiph gone (after his invective-filled meltdown) this thread has gotten much quieter

Habibi Funk Records, in Germany, was mentioned in other threads after they brought out this compilation of 1970s-1980s Arabic funk and jazz:

- https://habibifunkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/habibi-funk-007-an-eclectic-selection-of-music-from-the-arab-world

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2216664489_7.jpg

-

They released a radio session comp of Kamal Keila from Sudan (see Rolling Reissues 2018 ), and the latest one is a full album reissue, Jazz, Jazz, Jazz by the Sudanese band The Scorpions & Saif Abu Bakr, with bandleader Amir Sax:

- https://habibifunkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/habibi-funk-009-jazz-jazz-jazz

"He told us stories about him meeting Jimmy Cliff and [Louis] Armstrong when they visited Sudan and how he and his band mates from The Scorpions played extensively in Kuwait, both in club residencies as well as for television. Amir brought tons of incredible photos illustrating not only the bands history but the vivid cultural live in the many music clubs in Khartoum of the 1970s. During this decade up until 1983 the capital was home to a huge number of clubs and concert halls. This scene started to perish after Nimeiry's turn towards the implementation of Sharia law in 1983. During the first decade of his rule he had actively supported various artists of the Jazz scene and was even taking artist like Kamal Keila along with him to trips throughout Africa. The 1989 coup of Bashir and his generals then caused the final blow to a once thriving scene." – (Jannis Stuerz, Habibi Funk)

will try to check that out

Just be wary of the "jazz" title –

"To Western ears, the title Jazz, Jazz, Jazz will seem something of a red herring. This is music more pop-structured than typical jazz with the nine blood-raw recordings powered by an engine of funky organ work and upbeat guitar lines. Leading most arrangements by the hand are the powerful and striking brass sections." – (Dean Van Nguyen)

Also this past year, the Gisma Group from northern Sudan appeared on a collaborative album in New Zealand, Haja.

The group play traditional wedding music in the style aghani al-banat, "girls' music", which is also associated with Alsarah from Alsarah & the Nubatones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSF7QrzoiD0

On the album, the Gisma Group are centre-stage on the tracks "Haja" and "Like the Moon". More of Gisma's songs are remixed into the other tracks featuring NZ musicians, in a kind of fusion. I like how it's turned out, though something about the remixing seems a bit 'off', not sure what...

- https://nzmusician.co.nz/lessons/x-factory-in-praise-of-the-adults-haja/
-

btw there's almost certainly an aghani al-banat rabbithole to go down. The group's leader, Gisma, studied under Hawa al-Tagtaga, who had a role in Sudanese history via her music.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qWzoTh1nv2o/mqdefault.jpg

"Born around 1924 in northern Kordofan, Hawa moved to the capital at the tender age of 14 years to begin the career of a popular performer and entertainer. Over the years, she became an icon of Sudanese womanhood and popular culture. Hawa made the Sudanese happy. She immortalized the key figures of the Sudanese anti-colonial movement in the simple ‘open access’ lyrics and tunes of the nas (common people), and earned a living from the dual function of dance instructor and singer at the weddings of the effendiya and the merchant class."
- http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article44931 (Archived)

But I can't find any of her early music online (only songs on low-budget TV shows)