Dove's Eye View

Arabic Music Video Fun

Everybody needs a little pop-tart MTV bellydancing: YouTube - Arabic Music Video - Noura - Noura (Bellydancing).

The wonders of YouTube. Made my day...

Here's another one by the Four Cats, sort of the Spice Girls of the Arab world. I'll have to look up what "Antar" means - it's an epithet they're calling the man in question. "In the evening when he comes home, he tells me my (back) is broken!" The wife is slaving away at the chores, she dolls herself up for his return, covers herself in rose petals, the husband is a player in a white suit, winking and flirting with ladies on the street, but as soon as he comes home to the delicious dish, he turns tail and runs.

A little clip at the end indicates that this is a remake of an old pop song - a brassy diva in a Scarlett O'Hara dress sings it on what looks like 1970s television.

I have some purist friends who might roll their eyes, but this stuff makes me happy.

Aswat - Arabic Music at Mills

I'm going to this tonight: Aswat: Arabic Community Choir and Orchestra.

CCM Songlines Series ASWAT

Aswat choir and orchestra is a community group that presents Arabic folk and classical vocal and instrumental music.

Saturday, November 19, 2005, 8:00 pm

Mills College Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, California 94613

Saed Muhssin: Oud, Music director
Nabila Mango: Founding Member, Executive Director

$12 general, $6 seniors

Aswat is a project of Zawaya,

a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Arabic Music, Art, Poetry, Literature, Theature, and Culture through instruction and presentation.

Zawaya was established in 2001 by a group of Arabs and Americans in the Bay Area to promote the public expression of Arab art and culture. By providing a forum for exhibiting all forms of Arab culture, we strive to create understanding of this rich heritage.

Zawaya works with any and all existing Arab and American organizations that support Arab culture. We have recently collaborated successfully with The Arab Cultural Center and ADC-San Francisco Chapter.

Zawaya sponsors Aswat, the only Bay Area Arab community choir, which has been promoting Arabic music for several years. This multi-ethnic and diverse choir has performed at the Academy of Sciences, at Arab Festivals in San Francisco and Seattle, and at many colleges and universities. Performances have raised funds for Arab families in time of need, but the primary focus is on love of the music itself.

Lovely SF Chronicle piece on Aswat here.

A Song We Need Now

Bob Dylan is my mother's age. While he finger-picked in Greenwich coffee houses, my mother was sitting in at a lunch counter in Lynchburg, VA., trying to get a cup of coffee for her African American sister in the movement. Mom went to jail, then married my dad after she got out, went on to protest the Vietnam war and try to change this world we live in.

I grew up hearing about Dylan. He wasn't God in my house - J.S. Bach was - but I knew my parents' friends worshipped him. All the more reason to ignore him when I hit my teens. I liked Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, the Slits, James White and the Blacks, sometimes the Ramones, always the Stones. Also worshipped George Clinton, and swam in a sea of early hiphop in my days on the Lower East Side, 1980-84. Dan Zanes and the original Del Fuegos were my pals in college. I had no idea why Dylan was so important - his style didn't appeal to me in those days. The myopia of youth.

Watching the PBS documentary last night I was struck by several things. One of them was how much the punky mannerisms of my generation owe to Dylan in 1966 - the twitching, hand flapping, downcast eyes, head thrown back with eyes still looking away, a glance at the audience and then a scowl into the distance. And how much our late 70s shouters owed to his growl.

Another thing I realized, not last night but three years ago at a Tikkun conference in New York just after 9/11, is how Dylan's songs last. We sang "Blowin in the Wind", a congregation of progressive Jews, Christians & Muslims, holding hands at the Society for Ethical Culture, and I wept because the lyrics and the music were so right.

So this morning as I fry onions for my Arab literature class (long story), I put on Dylan's Biograph. "Masters of War" came on and I began weeping. It wasn't just the onions:

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

-Bob Dylan

Why, forty years later, do we still have masters of war?

Men and women dying for oil?

Old people drowning for want of a dollar for the levee, while their grandsons ship out to kill "sand niggers"?

Bob Dylan has lit me up this morning. I've had one foot in bourgeois America for the last decade and I am ready to turn my face away. The America I love is under attack from the right. I don't know what I'm going to do but this rag-head half-Arab ain't gonna be a complacent housewife no more.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...

Marcel Khalife named UNESCO Artist for Peace

Sabbah tips us: Marcel Khalife named UNESCO Artist for Peace.

...the Lebanese musician and writer was named UNESCO Artist for Peace on June 7 by UNESCO Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, at a ceremony at UNESCO Headquarters. Born in 1950 in Amchit, Mount Lebanon, Khalife first studied, then taught, the oud, or Arabic lute, at the Beirut National Conservatory. He began his career as a soloist and went on, in 1972, to create “Al Mayadine”, a group in his home village, to preserve the Arabic musical heritage with the oud. At the vanguard of innovative Middle-Eastern music, Khalifé’s original music makes him an ambassador of his culture.

Sabbah has been re-blogging my posts for some time now on a separate blog, but I only just figured out that he has a good news category at his personal blog. He covers "life, politics, art, culture, science, technology" and has been interviewed by the BBC regarding Arab bloggers. Bookmark both of Sabbah's blogs - he's a wonderful source.

MoorishGirl: Art Co-Op

The literary and cultural blogger Moorish Girl finds some hope in joint Israeli/Palestinian art efforts. This is one I didn't know about: a musical version of "The Yellow Wind".

Moorish Girl also found this piece that references the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The late Edward Said created this amazing Arab-Jewish youth orchestra 7 years ago, in cahoots with his dear friend the conductor Daniel Barenboim. The young musicians, from Israel and the Arab world, gather in Germany to play classical music together, and are also taken on a tour of a Nazi concentration camp. I'm gratified to see that the orchestra is still ongoing.

Miami String Quartet

My childhood friend Chauncey Patterson, who played quartets with me in high school when I was a violinist, sent me a link to his group's website under construction: the Miami String Quartet.

Chauncey wrote to me depressed about the election, looking for some hope. I say the Miami String Quartet is one of about a hundred thousand signs of hope in this country. Couple of reasons:

1) Let's be frank. Chauncey Patterson wouldn't be one of the top violists in this country if it weren't for the civil rights movement. We take this for granted but my school friends from North Carolina remember segregation. We're that old. The schools in Greensboro integrated when my classmates were in 3d grade, four years before I moved there. My friends remembered colored water fountains and bathrooms. My mother, of course, went to jail trying to integrate a lunch counter, before I was born.

And even in the New South, when Chauncey had to drive out to the country to play a quartet with us at some fancy mansion in a rural town in 1979, his mother drove with him and sat in the car. Young black men couldn't drive certain places alone, even if accompanied by a viola and plenty of Schubert sheet music. Maybe they still can't. Driving while Black is still a capital offense in many jurisdictions.

That's part of the past but it's part of an undercurrent in this country. Today I look at the faces in the Miami Quartet and I see the best of what this country is about. Nobody likes to make a fuss over this stuff because it's seen as possibly racist to notice, but here is a top string quartet with only 50% white Europeans (and I'm making assumptions here based on names and faces, it's possible the two folks I assume are white are just as mixed ethnicity as I am).

George W. Bush doesn't care much for classical music or Faure quartets. I believe his few gestures towards racial diversity are entirely fake. His political operatives have their knives out for the cultural riches of this country, and for the programs that made it possible to redress the effects of 3 centuries of slavery and oppression. So I see the Miami Quartet as one more piece of the quilt of resistance against W. The Quartet didn't intend to carry that political baggage, I'm sure. They are dedicated musicians, not demagogues.

My friends who are making their lives in the arts in America are part of my reasons for hoping. They are weaving the fabric of the culture I love, the America of music, art, literature, science, free inquiry and debate.

Body and Soul: I'm So Glad (Trouble Don't Last Always)

Jeanne D'arc at Body and Soul, gives us an essay and some mp3s on Otis Redding and Sam Cooke at I'm So Glad (Trouble Don't Last Always).

Go read and listen for some comfort.

Marcel Khalife Tours USA

The Lebanese composer and musician Marcel Khalife is now touring the USA, from October 15 to November 15. Seattle, San Francisco (November 4), Houston, Boston, Boulder, NYC, Washington and Chicago, among others.

Tour schedule here.

Khalife is a multi-talented musician and composer who plays the oud, leads a musical ensemble, writes music for ballets, orchestra and film, and tours relentlessly. Don't miss him!

Songs from a Random House

My old roommate, Alan Drogin, has been a principal in the band Songs from a Random House (SFARH) since back in the years of Bush I. (Allow me to wax nostalgic over a couple of great house parties from those days, in our enormous, funky Park Slope apartment with views of Lower Manhattan, NY Harbor, and the Statue of Liberty).

Alan is a fine musician and the band is delightful, unusual, highly skilled, extremely listenable. Self described as "New York's leading electric- ukulele/viola/upright bass/percussion/and voice combo", the New Yorker calls them "inventive" and the NY Times Magazine says "humorously surreal." SFARH just released a new album and have been getting nice press and radio coverage.

Irene Trudel on WFMU, which is a NYC station I'm pretty sure, just featured SFARH. You can view the archive here and of course have a listen. SFARH was featured on October 11, 2004.

Congratulations Alan and the guys for yet another great album.

Shaking to Sha'bi

The San Francisco Chronicle profiles Hakim, the massively popular Egyptian pop singer, here: Thanks to him, we may soon be shaking to sha'bi.

When I lived in Cairo in 1983, I was vaguely aware of "Sha'bi" pop music, as I heard it in the streets all the time. I rather liked a singer called 'Adaweya - I liked his raspy yowl. But then again, I was a punky downtown type in those days, and favored hip-hop long before most white people accepted it. Also liked Lou Reed, and Patti Smith, and the Buzzcocks. Sha'bi folks like that, with raspy yowls.

One afternoon in Cairo while hanging out in a downtown cafe, I saw a cartoon in an Egyptian newspaper of a man with a donkey's head. Max Rodenbeck, a fellow cafe denizen in those days, translated the caption for me. I read Arabic on about a first grade level - comics elude me. In it one guy told another that the donkey was the latest sha'bi singer.

If you live long enough, you'll see yesterday's outcasts become today's international superstars. I'll bet somewhere in Egypt, Sha'bi purists grumble that Hakim is a slick Johnny-come-lately, lacking the authentic howl and street cred of, say, 'Adaweyah. (And I have no idea what happened to 'Adaweyah, he may have crested and disappeared by 1984 for all I know).