from the San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Harmonious in spirit and sound, Aswat ensemble breaks barriers between Arabic, Western music
Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer
Barney Jones has been a musician all his life. He sings, composes and works as a sound designer and recording engineer. His credits are substantial, but when he sings with a local Arabic choir, he admits, “I have anxiety that I sound like a total dork to the Arabs.”
Jones is a member of Aswat, a multicultural ensemble of singers and musicians who play Arabic, Turkish and Andalucian music. It’s a unique amalgam, even among the richly diverse community of Bay Area musicians and choral groups. Roughly half the members are ethnic Arabs — Jordanian, Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian and Algerian — while the other half, like Jones, are Americans with European roots.
Aswat, which performs at 8 p.m. Saturday at Mills College, was founded five years ago by Nabila Mango, a San Mateo psychotherapist, singer and educator. From the onset, Mango sought to combine Western and Arab members in the group and to encourage American singers, like Jones, to perform solos in Arabic.
“It’s a bridge for both groups to connect to the other,” says Mango, who emigrated from Palestinian territory in 1965 and teaches Arabic language at Skyline College in San Mateo. “For most of us, it’s very therapeutic.”
At a recent evening rehearsal at the Arab Cultural Center in San Francisco, Mango took on the role of mother hen: rushing about, looking after everyone’s comfort, making sure a guest was well fed. She’s a live wire, an energy source, and the group seems to draw its emotional cues and lightheartedness from her.
Fifteen vocalists filled the center of the room, joking between songs, accompanied by a nay (a nine-jointed cane flute), Arabic tabla (goblet-shaped drum), riqq (a small tambourine), qanan (75-stringed zither), two ouds (similar to a lute or guitar) and two kamans (violins).
One of the oud players, Saed Muhssin, is Aswat’s musical director. A short, elegant man who came from Palestinian territory 12 years ago, Muhssin selects the repertoire and calls himself “kind of a purist.” He programs only folkloric and classical compositions and won’t abide contemporary Arabic pop, “which has become almost indistinguishable from Indian popular music or Western popular music. It gives up all the fine details of intonation.”
Mango started the group, she says, to foster cultural harmony and counter negative stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. “There is so much twisted information about Arabs in this country. I thought about how to reach Americans and tell them about the contributions of Arab civilization or Islamic civilization — to try to make them understand who I am.”
The best way to reach their hearts, Mango decided, was through music. “People are much less judgmental when you present to them the cultural aspect and much more judgmental when you talk about religion or politics. So I started with a choir because music is the universal language, right? The language of the soul.”
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For some, it’s a shock to hear Arabic sounds emerging from Western mouths. “The Arab community are extremely fascinated when they hear the Americans do solo,” Mango enthuses. “Just beyond themselves. Like, ‘How could they learn this impossible language and master the music?’ ”
Only once, Muhssin says, has anyone complained. It happened last weekend at a Women’s Building concert in San Francisco, where an American sang each solo for a Levantine classical piece. “He said, ‘You guys destroyed the song because they’re not Arab and they’re singing this traditional song and you can’t do this.’ My response was pretty much, ‘Thank you for your feedback. We will consider it.’ I ignored it because they did a wonderful job with a really complicated vocal part.”
Creating the right sound is tough, says Barney Jones, a tall, redheaded man who was born in Turkey — the son of a Foreign Service officer — and lived in the Middle East his first 10 years. “Singing in America and in Europe is all about vowels, while Arabic singing, like the language, revels in the consonants. “Probably the hardest consonant to get your mouth around is called the ‘ayn.’ It is made by gently constricting the throat and then snapping it open, and it always leads to a vowel. Americans usually sound like they’re gagging when they first try it.”
For Westerners, there’s also a long learning curve with the Maqamat, an Arabic system of scales and modes that includes complicated quarter notes. But for Mango, there’s nothing even slightly odd about cross-cultural musical exploration: “It’s just like the opera, right? If you have a musical ear and the right preparation, if you love that music, you can relate to it. It gets into your soul and bones and everything — so what’s wrong with that?”
After Sept. 11, 2001, Aswat lost a lot of members, both Arabs and Americans. “People were afraid to come to the building, to the Arab Cultural Center,” Mango says. “They were afraid to be affiliated with an Arab group. But my decision was: ‘We’re not going to stop. We’re not going to give in.’ ”
“The Arab Cultural Center received threats,” Muhssin adds. “People were afraid to be there. So, in addition to all the sadness I had because of what happened on Sept. 11, I was also saddened by the reactions of people going home and hiding, basically. That was the opposite lesson of what we should learn. We shouldn’t isolate ourselves; otherwise, we keep alive the suspicion. And suspicion is the cancer that causes people to do horrible things.”
Aswat vocalist Pat Ferrell, who is married to Jones, says she was drawn to Aswat in part because of its potential for community healing. “When Westerners hear the word ‘Arab,’ they sometimes feel fear. I understood this because most of the information I had about Arabs tended to promote that. I knew this ancient culture has great beauty to share — it’s just that I hadn’t been exposed to it. So I joined Aswat.”
At her first rehearsal, “that fear rose again and I asked myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ It also occurred to me that I had never had a conversation with an Arab before. Living in a diverse community like San Francisco, I found this surprising. The Arabs in Aswat were very warm, gentle and welcoming towards me. That relaxed me, so that at the second rehearsal, when Saed asked me to sing a solo in a language I had never heard before, I was open to it.”
Once she got comfortable in Arabic, Ferrell says, she felt a freedom she hadn’t experienced in Western music. “Because Arabic music has many extra notes compared to Western scales, I felt like a bird in flight — swooping up and down as I sang. Then I realized, ‘Ah, this freedom is the beauty.’ ”
Freedom, and in some cases unexpected connections. This year, Jones was in Chicago when he noticed the driver of his cab was an Arabic man. “Turned out he was from Iraq. So I said, ‘Hey, do you know this song?’ and started singing ‘treed minneh ti fah’ and he hooted and joined right in.
“There were three songs that we knew in common, so we kept singing and missed the exit on the freeway. Of course he turned off the meter. It was a truly exhilarating experience.”