The forties revived
Amal Choucri Catta detects a sudden interest in a decade long gone
International songs, Dina Salah, Cairo Opera House, Open-Air Theatre, 15 July 9pm.
She sings, she dances, she screams her head off. She does many things, the most important of which is to give her audience a whale of a time.
Dina Salah is an incendiary blonde, and she exudes a refreshing sense of adventure, of expressive freedom, rooted in personalised technique. Her conquest of the stage started five years ago, at the Citadel's Summer Festival, with conductor-director Sherif Mohieddin, and at the Opera's Open- Air Theatre, where she discovered a love for international pop and jazz. She studied music and singing at the Arabic Music Academy and at the Cairo Conservatoire before becoming a member of Cairo Opera's choir. It was then she decided she wanted to go her own way. Not with opera, nor with Arabic music, but with practically everything else you can name.
She has formed her own band -- a more or less floating dozen of delightful musicians -- and in rushing from one successful performance to another she turned into an absolutely professional singer somewhere along the way. Last week she produced a singularly dynamic performance, letting herself go in virtuoso exuberance -- a combination of vocal prowess and breath-taking spontaneity seldom seen at the Opera's Open-Air Theatre.
That many in the audience were on their feet, dancing away, is testimony enough to the infectious rhythms she and the band produce. Add to that a sometimes biting wit, combined with an edge of unpredictability, a scorching beat and at times dazzling keyboard display and you have the perfect recipe to generate excitement.
She ended the first number with a breathless wow and lots of applause, before moving into a swirl of tonal colour and powerful percussion. Then, with a ravishing smile, Dina decided to go Latin.
"When marimba rhythms start to play, dance with me, make me sway" is one of those perennially popular tunes few singers can resist. And so we had the marimba rhythms for the third time this summer, and in truth they are delightfully reminiscent of last century's early 1940s' South-Sea tunes, of Dorothy Lamour in one of her many road films, most memorably The Road to Bali, phenomenally popular in its time. In later years the same rhythms were adopted by other Latin enthusiasts, and are applauded to this day, a constant of the jazz-map for six decades.
Dina Salah turned Latin several times, going into tumba tumba with evident relish. And if the session was getting a little rough at times, and the intonation seemingly sour, the swing and the drive of the band was always compelling. Their performance was a dazzling, never ending torrent of notes, with a multi- textured keyboard moving skilfully through the different scores and the brass, the string and rhythm players giving polyphony to the tunes.
The second part of Dina's concert began with a thrilling trumpet going into buoyant blues with co- singer Shehab Qassem and "give me one reason to stay here and I'll turn my back around". The obsessive beat and a powerful sound showcased Dina's talent as a blues-singer, revealing her skill at improvisation. She is, likewise, quite at home with rhythm, stretching out with the ecstatic abandon of a tenorman. The excitement she generates leaves her audience gasping at her energy, her invention, and at the way the most prodigious feats of range and technique are tossed off.
A couple of standards later and she is back into Latin with a loud and extremely colourful tumba la casa, inviting her audience to sing with her and clap to the beat, giving everything to the high-pitched woos. A perfectly appropriate "I will survive" led to the end of the evening and the neatly packaged pop of "La la la".
But if the audience thought their night had just begun Dina Salah had other things to do. Another round of the final sounds as encore, a smiling introduction of the members of the band, and she was off, the resounding applause echoing through the gardens.
Percussion concert, Nesma Abdel-Aziz, Cairo Opera House, Open-Air Theatre, 18 July, 9pm
Remember Carmen Miranda, she of the high heels and even higher hats, the latter usually made of extravagant concoctions of fruit and flowers woven together? The costumes may have been designed to disguise her diminutive stature but the gimmick worked, and for a generation the Latin tune tico tico will forever be associated with millinery resembling the fruit bowl centrepiece of a particularly decadent dinner party.
Perhaps Nesma Abdel-Aziz has not heard of Carmen Miranda. Perhaps she has not seen the colourful films that became all the rage in the 1940s. Yet she has adopted tico tico as her signature tune and this young Egyptian percussionist looks well on the way to stardom.
She has acquired fame with the marimba, a Latin-American percussion instrument of African origin, also known as the malimba. It resembles a stretched out xylophone comprising strips of wood of different lengths with tuned resonators underneath, the whole fixed on a frame and struck with drumsticks. Modern versions of the instrument are made with bars of rose-wood and tubular metal resonators which are struck with soft-headed hammers.
On Friday Nesma Abdel-Aziz gave us her own conception of marimba- playing at the Open-Air Theatre of Cairo's Opera House. The concert began with a video loop on a huge screen with Nesma playing -- what else? -- tico tico on her marimba.
The heat was unbearable, the theatre overcrowded, with many large families and a multitude of children taking up two whole rows and more at a time. A particularly ill-mannered audience, there was a great deal of idle gossip taking place during the performance, an unceasing round of chit chat, punctuated by occasional rounds of applause when the audience deemed it convenient.
Nesma Abdel-Aziz deserved better, both from her audience and the weather. She had taken the brave step of abandoning her better known, Latin-inspired material to concentrate instead on Arabic music, performing only three of her better-known Latin tunes. With a group of seven musicians she replaced the rest with versions of songs by Abdel- Wahab, Abdel-Halim Hafez, Umm Kulthoum, and tunes from Nasir Shamma, Omar Khairat and other Egyptian composers. She never announced the titles, though she smiled happily while keeping the audience guessing.
Among the many varied sequences and the quivering presto beats were nostalgic, melancholic tunes of broken vows and sad goodbyes. The strokes were soft, filled with grace and elegance, and the music often flowed into a haunting polyphony, spearheading the way to pure emotion. The drumsticks were gliding pianissimo over the bars, sometimes mesmerising even this audience into a sudden silence. Even the children stopped their chatter as the instrument outlined the wispily curling themes and it suddenly dawned on the audience that this was Umm Kulthoum's celebrated "You are my life". The audience demanded a repetition, which they got.
Among two lovely oud-solos was a new composition by Nasir Shamma, the experimental "Love of the birds", in which the oud sounded unusually high in pitch. An interesting piece of music that proved popular with the audience.
Nesma wanted more -- she turned to the tabla and the mizmar, inviting two instrumentalists to join her on stage. They gave us a pleasant medley of marimba and percussion, the instruments playing in a fascinating, original assembly. We moved from shamelessly romantic love songs to diabolic rhythms, from soft strokes to gripping beat.
