04 February 2012
BEIRUT: The Lebanese pianist and singer Mike Massy has come a long way since his days as an opera student. His new album “Ya Zaman,” which combines Middle Eastern sounds with jazz, is a far cry from his time at the National Higher Conservatory of Music, where he had “to sing very high notes without any microphone.”
“Ya Zaman” is Massy’s third album, and it was released late last year. Born in 1982, Massy began playing piano at a young age. He then entered the conservatory, where he specialized in Arabic opera. Passionate about theater, he also studied drama and jazz ballet, and danced with the renowned Lebanese Arabesque dance company.
In 2003, he released his first album “Ila Ssama Atba’ouka” which was made up of spiritual hymns. And in 2009, his second album “Sayf w Layl” was the fruit of a collaboration with vocalist Nada.
“Ya Zaman” (which he translates as “O Good Old Days,” also the name of the first track) is comprised of 12 songs, combining Middle Eastern percussion instruments – including the tabla, bendir and riq – with jazz and string instruments.
It took Massy nine years to compose and produce the music. He told The Daily Star that the album was the result of many emotional fluctuations, and that he wanted “to share every emotion [he] felt throughout these songs while writing them.”
The title also can be read as “the time that has passed,” and “Ya Zaman” can be seen as an album about nostalgia. Massy, though, made it clear that this is not a sad nostalgia but rather a joyful one, as “all the time we lived makes us who we are now.”
While the album represents what Massy himself felt through those nine years of work, it is also an album in which listeners may find something familiar. These melodic tracks deal with Lebanon, love and life – subjects that are basic fare for pop music – but Massy certainly has a unique way of tackling them.
Massy doesn’t sing about cliches but about “the details of what is going on,” he said.
In his track “Beyrouth,” Massy creates the image of a Beirut long forgotten. “I never sing about war ... I speak about a smell,” he said, “of old stuff in the souks of Beirut and I speak about a city that is actually dead [now].”
“Ya Zaman” was the result of Massy’s collaboration with 32 Lebanese and Belgian musicians. Recorded in Brussels, the album embraces both Middle Eastern rhythms with Western tunes.
He wrote the lyrics of “Lay Fiyyi Tir” (If Only I Could Fly) with Yvonne el-Hachem, of “Beyrouth” with Charbel Aoun and worked with Elie Youssef on the track “Khalasna Ba’a” (Enough is Enough).
Although the lyrics are in Arabic, non-Arabic speakers can still enjoy the album. The combinations of musical genres are likely to attract a wide-ranging audience. The mix enables listeners to imagine, feel and understand the various worlds into which Massy tries to draw them.
The album is made of “100 percent acoustic music,” as Massy called it. Nothing is computerized, and a short documentary about the making of the album can be seen on YouTube.
Many singers write lyrics before composing the melodies, but Massy worked other way around. He started composing the melodies “emotionally,” as he said, and it all “came naturally and spontaneously.”
This is something the listener can sense in “Ya Zaman.” We, too, fall naturally and emotionally into his world.
But Massy isn’t all saccharine; he’s taken a critical eye – towards himself as well as others. In “Khalasna Ba’a,” Massy shares his annoyance with cliches, and how many Lebanese are attracted to superficiality:
“Enough of these empty senseless words / ... Back and forth, up and down,” he sings.
In the song’s music video, Massy is sitting on a bench next to a plastic female dummy, trying to do whatever he can to seduce her and catch the [fake] girl’s attention.
Mike Massy’s “Ya Zaman” was released by Falak Productions.
Copyright The Daily Star 2012.
