14 July 2006

Interview

BEIRUT: For casual observers, the term "female Lebanese vocalist" conjures images of photogenic celebrities like Nancy Ajram and Haifa Wehbe making baby noises in cheesy music videos. Rima Khcheich has had her share of audio-visual exposure too, albeit in a more serious genre. In fact she may hold the record among Lebanese vocalists for the number of walk-on singing roles she's had on screen. Her best-known musical cameo was in Ghassan Salhab's feature "Terra Incongnita" (2002) but she also sang in Mahmoud Hojeij's "The Silent Majority" (2004) and in three different films by Muhammad Soueid.

"I studied communication arts at Lebanese American University," she shrugs. "So I know all those guys."

Family legend has it that Khcheich's father Kamal was practicing his qanun when he first noticed his three year old daughter's interest in music. Four years later, the little girl from Khiam appeared on the amateur music program "Layali Lubnan."

Today, at 32 years of age, she has the distinction of being the only classically trained vocalist of her generation mining the vein between Arabic tradition and popular tastes.

Khcheich's work springs from a musical dialogue traced back to the period of the Lebanese Civil War. While Salim Sahab's Beirut Group for Arabic Music labored to keep the classical tradition alive for audiences, another movement, embodied in the work of Ziad Rahbani, worked to change the way the music was composed and performed. In Rahbani's case, these innovations expressed themselves as a brand of fusion that others termed "oriental jazz."

Khcheich's work, as heard in her 2002 record "Orient Express" and her new CD "Yalalalli," belongs to this second category. Taking its name from a type of Arabic vocal improvisation, the new album is a lovely hybrid of classical vocal technique and jazz instrumentation and arrangements.

"Yalalalli" mingles the work of such giants as Sayyed Darwish and Fouad Abdul Majid with that of contemporary composers like Issam Hajj Ali and Rabih Mroueh. It features a mix of Beirut's best-known jazz composer-musicians - Ziad Rahbani, Joelle and Maurice Khoury - foreign talent - double bassist Tony Overwater and sax player Tom Horning - and a mix of younger local players.

The ensemble is complemented and unified by Khcheich's voice. Combining clarity and precision with technical and emotional range, her vocals are elusively nostalgic of a sound you may recognize but not recall, while simultaneously sounding utterly contemporary.

Like so many Arab vocalists, Khcheich has been influenced by Egyptian vocalists from early last century like Umm Khalthoum and Muhammed Abdel Wahhab. She includes Lebanese diva Fairouz among her influences, as she does Ziad Rahbani - who helped mix "Yalalalli" and contributed his piano grace notes to the track "Souleyma."

"It was wonderful having him involved in the record," says Khcheich. "He really influenced the sound. When he doesn't like something, he tells you directly."

The vocalist's most immediate influences are people she's worked with. Recently she recorded three tunes with Lebanese musician-composer Toufic Farroukh. She's also worked with Beirut oud player-composer Charbel Rouhana and the US-based Palestinian violinist-oud player Simon Shaheen, with whom she'll be performing in Massachusetts in August.

Khcheich veered toward jazz when she toured with the Dutch-Iraqi jazz ensemble Orient Express. She cut her first record with them.

"I'm much more relaxed on stage because of them," she says. "Now I know that the stage is my house. If I'm thirsty, I drink water. If I can't hear myself, I ask the technician to turn up the volume. This would be impossible singing classical music.

"When Orient Express toured Europe, I sang in jazz clubs for the first time. It's so much more relaxed than in formal venues. It's difficult to do so here. When Lebanese people are in restaurants they eat, drink, talk loudly - everything but pay attention to the performers."

Mingling jazz and classical Arabic music is no simple task. A lifetime of classical training made jazz a bit of a challenge for her. "A composer wrote a song for me called 'Yazou Tani,'" she says. "It was very difficult to sing because the intervals in jazz aren't the same as Arabic music."

Khcheich says vocal improvisation intimidated her at first. "There are several forms that allow for improvisation," she says. "The muwal allows the vocalist to improvise on a poetic text. I was working in another tradition, called dour, which doesn't have improvisation - though sometimes, before the dour, a vocalist will improvise a little."

There are musical challenges as well. Though there's a strong tradition of improvisation in some Arabic styles, eastern and western modalities are different. The most often-cited difference lies in the quarter note, which is common in eastern music but not in western.

"When you perform classical Arabic music, the orchestra provides the vocalist with everything she needs in terms of pitch and rhythm and so forth. When you sing with a jazz band, the vocalist and musicians are doing something different working separately, in parallel.

"Ordinarily it's hard to sing along with a bass because it doesn't give you the pitch. My bass player [Tony Overwater] has taught himself to do quarter notes but it's extremely difficult for the sax player, for instance. So when I perform with a jazz group, I sing the quarter notes myself.

"But I love the music that comes out of the collaboration," she smiles. "Jazz musicians are great to work with because they're so full of energy. They're always thinking. Classical musicians have a different frame of mind."

Another challenge facing vocalists wanting to make new music in a classical idiom is in finding capable writers. "It's difficult to find composers and lyricists who are good enough," she says.

"Basically we're always recycling old lyrics.

"I love the beautifully elaborate old lyrics, of course, but we don't communicate that way anymore. Ziad [Rahbani]'s lyrics are wonderful because they express beautiful, complex ideas in very simple terms. His lyrics sound the way we speak."

Capping the list of challenges to her music is the commercial one. She says she's still trying to find distributors for "Yalalalli" outside the Middle East. "The genre itself makes it a challenge. Producers aren't interested in it. The press isn't interested in it. It's just as well I'm not interested in being famous," she laughs.

"I'm not even very good at interviews."

Rima Khcheich's "Yalalalli" is produced by Chill Island (www.chillisland.com) and distributed in the Middle East by Temple Entertainment (+961 1 803 656, www.temple-entertainment.com).