12 - 18 April 2001
Issue No.529
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 April 2001 Issue No.529 |
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"Beautiful, inspiring, healing"
Nur Elmessiri takes the train to the last two nights of the Gourna Music Festival, attends a Jazz Ambassadors master class, and crosses cultures to the heart-beat of living things
Of music, Stevie Wonder said in his 1970's hit Sir Duke, "It's a language we all understand." This dictum could not have been better borne out than by two very different musical events that took place in the last two weeks: the third Gourna Festival of Traditional Upper Egyptian Music, 25-30 March, organised by the Gourna on line Society, a non-profit organisation comprised of French and Arab music lovers and presided over by Chantal Crousel and, last week, concerts given by the "Ambassadors" of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, a non-profit education organisation aiming to preserve the legacy of jazz and to bridge the gap between haves and have-nots in the musical world, with multi-Grammy winning pianist, and artistic director of the Institute, Herbie Hancock.
Khawagat (foreigners, sometimes pejorative) in charge of an Arabic (predominantly Sufi) music festival? Jazz at an opera house and a multi-thousand-a-semester university? It is true that when the trumpet took off his jacket, when the musicians began to mop their brows, when the staid lines of Ewart Hall began to loosen as the audience eased into decontracté mode, things began to fall into homely place. True, too, that those who knew Arabic were closer to the place from which El-Sheikh Ahmed El-Barrein and El-Sheikh Amin El-Dishnawi were singing than those who did not. Still, the cliché that, when good, music speaks straight to the heart proved -- for those who were fortunate enough to make it to those events -- true, and no mere vapid idealisation. Let yourself go, allow yourself to be borne aloft by the hard work of the performers (and of the organisers who made it possible for you to be in the presence of live music), by rhythms and melodies that, no matter how sophisticated, still retain a resemblance to your most fundamental style of being, the one you share with all humans, with all living creatures -- your heartbeat, the sound of your breath -- and the colour of your skin, the state of your pocket, your address do not, for that moment of music, really matter. What matters is joy -- and a sense of community.
"Jazz," Herbie Hancock, friendly, someone you know, unpretentiously wise, quick-witted, sophisticated, urbane, tells us at the 2pm 5 April AUC Ewart Hall master class, "isn't about the Afro-American experience, but the human experience. It's not about one people but about all people." And sure enough, when they play Maiden Voyage -- a melody Hancock wrote originally for a TV commercial for Yardley's men's cologne on a napkin given to him by an air hostess on a NY-LA flight when he asked for paper -- a member of the audience who is not African-American, let alone American, and has hardly had any previous contact with jazz, can follow, enjoy, even recognise parts of the music as if she had heard it before. Something ritzy, glitzy and way up there in the glamour clouds is going on; piano (Herbie Hancock, Danny Grisset), saxophone (Jason Goldman) and trumpet (Bryan Lipps) each tell a different, complicated solo story; but the bass (John Roche) and the drums (Robert Perkins), even while responding to the complex melodies floating above them, beat like the heart of all living things. And when glitz and guts meet, that's when the human body cannot but break into applause.
Or into Allahu Akbars -- if you are in Gourna in the presence of El-Sheikh Amin El-Dishnawi singing madih (songs praising the most beloved human being). Though the moulid is the "authentic" setting for this madih, one felt, having attended the event, that a festival bringing Europeans to Egypt, Cairenes to Upper Egypt, Dishnawis and Esnawis to Gourna, is no less valid a context for such songs. Even stones, we were told, are in a perpetual state of zikr (remembrance and praise of God). Love for the habib, the Beloved one, is so universal that once the song gets off the ground it does not matter where you are coming from. In his presence barley water becomes wine. So gentle he is, his feet leave no trace in the sand; so powerful, his footsteps are imprinted on rocks. Dishnawi is so courteous that the fact that some of us have not dressed properly for the occasion -- uncovered head, bare limbs -- seems to escape his notice. The Dishnawis, joined in the circle of zikr by others, sway to love of the Prophet, and in such love, sins and misdemeanours, consumption of alcohol, are incorporated, made integral to this happening.
Swaying to El-Sheikh Amin El-Dishnawi's madih
photo: Randa Shaath
"You pick a certain spot you want to land on," Hancock, like a Zen master, answers a question from the floor on how harmony is brought about. You can start from any chord. You can start with a substitute chord. You can start with the chord that leads to the chord that leads to the chord. The important thing is to have an idea about where you want to "land." "So, instead of taking the usual route, you might take another... That's how life works," Hancock reflects on all that jazz, "and music is like life."
Arriving is beside the point, El-Dishnawi sings when one of the swayers "arrives," swooning ecstatically, almost epileptically. No one is chastised for losing control, for not remaining anchored to the discipline of rhythm. The musicians gently slow it down, El-Dishnawi brings quietness by allowing his voice gradually to disappear, the swayers continue to sway -- and the majzoub (the "gravitated" one crazy with love) returns to where arrival is not the point.
El-Dishnawi sings of the importance of neighbours -- of how neighbourhood is in and of itself good. The more the merrier, and the more that is so the more adab (polite behaviour, correct consideration) is important. The more you let go to community, the more necessary is the hard discipline of keeping to the rhythm of your heart beat. Good adab, El-Dishnawi's smiling, open-faced demeanour in the strange setting of a predominantly Francophonic-organised Upper Egyptian music festival suggests, implies tolerance, a willingness to acknowledge that, with hard work and love, differences can be harmonised.
So, "though one person might change the direction," explains vocalist Vanessa Rubin, the others (other instrumentalists and the listeners) will pick up on this change and follow suit.
"We do not have to start from the beginning when we learn new songs." Hancock explains how it is that a member of the band can take the tune to "another level" while still remaining within the limits of a particular song. "Jazz," after all, Rubin reminds us, "has a repertoire and a vocabulary. The larger the vocabulary, the more you can harmonise." Which is just another way of saying that the more open-armed the approach to music, the more familiar it becomes. "Jazz," Hancock tells us in the early afternoon master class, "is an open form. It borrows from different cultures. It goes to different cultures. It is beautiful, inspiring, healing."
At the AUC concert that evening, Hancock courteously thanked all who had made the musical moment possible -- including the US State Department. A week earlier in Gourna, El-Sheikh Ahmed El-Barrein -- Esna's equivalent of a blues singer, blind, at times the clown, at others the cast-out, a man who uses his face as a drum skin, producing with this instrument strange beautiful sounds -- sang of a garden. It seemed that he was making unkind allusions to the awkward set-up of which his performance was a part. Still, his song continued, even places where intoxication of the unlofty sort takes place can provide good, warm hospitality to lovers of the Beloved. El-Barrein sang, too, of Al-Quds, and the Intifada. Al-Dishnawi and his listeners praised Ali the brave warrior and marvelled at how, at the entrance of Hiraa' cave, the most fragile, delicate members of the creation -- a spider's web, a dove's eggs -- once protected the Beloved of Allah from death at the hands of the army on his trail.
For spiders' webs and doves' eggs, one is thankful. And for stones which continually give praise and thanks. Thanks are due: to the organisers of the Gourna Festival (Chantal Crousel, Mohamed Berrada, Leila Kilani, Yahya Ibrahim, among others), the families of Gourna, including that of Sheikh Mohamed whose restaurant provided the kind of good food that made one feel at home, and the managers of Al-Marsam bed-and-breakfast for providing a space of calm and quiet; and to the organisers of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Ambassadors' performances and master class, namely, the US Embassy, The Cairo Opera House and the American University in Cairo.
For the train that took one to the backbone of Egypt, Upper Egypt, and for the musicians and singers who gave something live it is right to give praise and thanks.
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