26 July - 1 August 2001
Issue No.544
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 26 July - 1 August 2001 Issue No.544 |
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The bodies went
David Blake looks which way
George Kazazian; Cairo Opera House: Open Air Theatre, 18 July
Curtain up or down, end or beginning? Try the middle entry. There isn't one. And there are no check points around and they have erased the road maps.
Kazazian is free in his Pirandellian House of Deceptions. Who's talking about mad? You there? Do you really know where you are or what you are about?
Kazazian's music is the only practical thing around on his landscape and it depends on nothing. He's inclined to walk out of his own concerts leaving you in mid-Pacific or in the mythic deserts of blood and stone in Mexico or you are wafted to Palmyra where the bastions of the Roman Empire crumble about your feet. That's what used to be called movement before technology delivered you from one place to the other in a breath.
Kazazian's old concerts were a bean feast or like watching an Eisenstein movie. And even though all things were horribly lonely then, they were moving to a musical rhythm. Kazazian could do that: Hello Brazil, goodbye South America and it wasn't all about death it was living music.
All that has gone temporarily. Kazazian now is a chameleon-like figure. What is his music now? Something that sounds closer at hand, round some corner or other, a nippy new club moving to the yap-yap of the mobiles or the rumble of the tumbrils. The bodies have gone, only the heads are talking. They have discovered a new place to go which the press has not yet heard about. It is not the dance of Death, however; more the dance of ghosts. You can even marry a ghost now, a real live one in human clothes.
This is the latest Kazazian. Not bad. The old wandering stuff does not register any more. Kazazian is therefore rather metaphysical -- Donneish. So it's all over Clementine. Don't grumble; be remarkable.
Kazazian always was remarkable. He probably still is, but there is a lot of mutation about in music these days and he seems not sure how to trap it into notes. This is a new age and it makes difficulties even for pop -- cinders that leave bald black patches. Digest them music must. What a diet. The classics must digest, and so must Kazazian.
Bells ring, so dance like a bell. If you cannot, then dance like a bear. The age of Mahler and Stravinsky had composers bear dancing, the interesting ones that is, not the ones who had already turned into stone.
Kazazian copes easily with all the difficulties that arise for musicians these days. His composure saves him. Years ago, in the time when he played at the Ghouri Palace, he had a group of four very apt but awesome Saedi musicians. They did well, made a climax to the piece, which then trailed off and stopped; and then they, Kazazian and his troupe, gathered up their instruments and themselves and walked off the platform without so much as a nod in the direction of the audience who were expecting more. The audience had not even applauded, but witnessed the platform empty and the troupe making signs that all was over for that night. Things were improvisational at that time.
photo: Randa Shaath
These present pieces (and Kazazian himself) are still a mystery. The years have not dulled Kazazian's wayward ways. They have become part of his performance. The letter K stands for Kazazian. K is also the opening sound of Klingsor, the mysterious magician of music.
The pieces of the first half of the evening (for which there was no programme) were all of almost one piece. One would begin, go on, end?, pause?, yes end -- and then a new piece would jog into action. Jog is too active a word: it would slowly heave itself into action. There was no central dynamic and the noise factor, all important now, was at low level.
So it had a no-New York feel. The speed and tempo in these pieces have a laid-back, exhausted sense of sophistry. The effect was fascinating, decadent, late-late and picaresque. The Last Days of .... Fill in the blanks.
But colour the music had and a sense of richesse: late- late-Venetian, Byzantine-20th century. Its sophistry was like certain Matisse: without aiming at or imitating anything, the mood, the essence was there, one of extreme fatigue but illumined by thoughts and a latent, sharp and penetrating energy, and could be Death if Death can be thought of as getting away on a nice, safe unsinkable yacht.
The second half of the concert was even further away and further removed from the ordinary: it was in a dualist mood. There were many points of boredom. So, too, excitement: change to anything, might dive overboard, have no fear of sharks, or a dash over the mountains like Mazeppa on his steed, flanks trembling with eagerness to go, head thrown back, mane flying.
This night's end flight was either under the water or over the mountain. And it was Kazazian. You cannot buy a real face but you can buy a mask. His music has always been of the world, with its weakest and strangest of passions.
No need to dance if you've danced your best time away. Lounge and listen to the songs the aeons make. Not pop, not classic, not the waves of unease, but pleasure. Parts of the mask step in the sand and like Crusoe have the banality of a golden lining. It will all show up on the bill, Kazazian's fragrance therapy, this music created to help you get through tomorrow.
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