20 February 2008

Interview

BEIRUT: Marc Diab fell in love with music at the age of 3, or at least that's when he first remembers really listening. He started playing the piano at 5, and he started taking lessons at 7. His formal studies centered on jazz and classical, which means that now, some two decades later and in a contemporary Lebanese context, he can easily be called the product of a Western education.

Diab knows this, and one senses - while listening to his debut album "Duende," which courses through four very modern interpretations of four very ancient Arab-Andalusian songs - that he has deliberately positioned himself to be so accused.

Like a novice bullfighter in the ring with a red cape (an image that is actually evoked in the liner notes of "Duende"), Diab's album seems to be asking: "And then? So what? As musical forms, aren't the duende and tarab quite similar in terms of their emotional intensity? And who has the right to master one style over another, anyway? Why not fuse them? And how could a young musician - one who was born and has lived his entire life so far in Lebanon - possibly avoid fusing them?"

"Because I've been educated with Western music," says Diab, who records under the name Marc Ernest, after his godfather, "going toward oriental music is unknown. I can be easily attacked. Not everyone sees the possibilities. I'm not working on the historical. I am renewing something."

"Duende" assembles four compositions that have been handed down over 1,000 years from the muwashah tradition of Arab-Andulusian Spain. Muwashahat, or melodies, are ancient song structures that match poetry about such subjects as women and wine to

music of incredibly rich rhythmic complexity.

In, say, the 10th or 12th century, the forms were never written down but rather transmitted orally, developed and elaborated upon by different musicians. In many cases, they were subsequently forgotten. Much of the muwashahat tradition has been lost to time. (What remains was transcribed to sheet music much later, in the 19th and 20th centuries.)

Two years ago, the musicologist, musician and music theorist Ghada Shbeir recorded an album of 16 muwashahat, suitably if austerely titled "Al-Muwashahat." In contrast to Diab's, Shbeir's purpose was explicitly historical - to preserve and save a crumbling piece of musical history. With her formidable voice and a spare takht supporting her, Shbeir stayed close to the original song structures, and for her efforts she won a BBC World Music Award in 2007.

If Shbeir approached the music like a correct and respectable archaeologist, then Diab is a bit more like the British graffiti artist Bansky slinking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stealthily adding his own work to the halls of gilt-framed relics. Diab has reverence for the muwashahat form, sure, but he's also having fun with it, and making something new, and naturally, beneath all of that there is a hint of serious, even political, intent. "The music lies its own lies," Diab says cryptically, "and it is convinced by them."

Of course, there is a huge and singular difference between Shbeir's album and Diab's. On "Duende" there is only piano - no words, no vocals, no lyrics of love and longing, no ney, no oud, no nothing when it comes to the traditional ensemble of Arabic instrumentation.

Because Diab is transposing muwashahat to the piano (with its octave of eight whole notes and five half notes ), the best he can do is play compositions based on half tones as opposed to classical Arabic music's more typical quarter tones. Into the breach, then, comes Diab's playfulness, and an emotional rollercoaster ride that owes far more to the flexibility of jazz idioms, at least to a lay listener, than to the stricter architecture of classical Arabic forms.

The tracks on "Duende" range from four minutes to nearly 10. The first is by a composer unknown. The second (which is mis-stated on the CD's back cover) is a specific and relatively popular muwashahat form known as the "longa" (which, like Western classical music's minuet, allows a musician to essentially show off his or her skills), and is credited to Turkish composer Saady Aslay. The third, whose title translates loosely as "The Age of the Night Has Extended," is by Syrian songwriter Omar al-Batech. The fourth is attributed to Egypt's Sheikh Abdel-Rahim al-Masloub.

"The muwashahat form is very controversial," says Diab. "There's always an editorial line. They can be interpreted many ways and many versions have been known ... But it's not the words [that interest me] as a musician," he explains. "It's the melodies and the arrangements. I am working in a Western way," he adds. "But while the muwashahat is romantic, it can't be totally Westernized."

Two years in the making, "Duende" is, on the whole, a beautiful album, both nimble and pensive. In the liner notes, Diab characterizes the compositions as "a struggle; the struggle of a culture on the verge of extinction, of a civilization engaged in a perpetual quest for the raging and exhilarating desire of life." And he explains his own struggle as one wavering between a "classical formation, a passion for jazz and an oriental inspiration." Listeners loyal to any one of those three genres - classical, jazz or oriental - will probably find "Duende" both familiar and beguiling. This raises a key question about audience.

Who will listen to this album - created by a 25-year-old musician, recorded by Zeid Hamdan (Beirut's independent, experimental music maven) and Khaled Mouzannar (the composer responsible for the score to Nadine Labaki's "Caramel," among other films) and distributed by Incognito (the upstart label and distributor that is currently shouldering much of the weight of the city's young music scene)?

Diab says he hopes "Duende" will appeal to more than just the easily anticipated crowd. He frets over the idea that certain scenes on the city's cultural front, whether they are arranged around art or music, create bubbles of consciousness that are all, at the end of the day, false. He doesn't want the impact of his music to be limited to one bubble or another.

"It's more common music. The music can be listened to and appreciated," he suggests, by audiences whose knowledge of music ranges from cultivated to non-existent. "I hope it will be popular," he adds with a shrug.

"The muwashahat format is for me an emotional protest. I live these experiences," he says, flapping a hand toward the nearest window and referring generally to the situation in Lebanon, the region and the world, "in a controlled kind of way. Being numb is dangerous. It looks like people have made a wall and don't want to feel anymore. But what I am trying to say is that it's not a bad thing to feel." Even without the words, he adds: "The muwashahat is lyrical, in the most operatic sense." The four tracks on "Duende" may be rooted in 1,000 years of history, but at the same time, framed as such, they do sound piercingly relevant in these rather trying contemporary times.

Marc Ernest's "Duende" is out now from Incognito

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.