وفي فلكولور ماغازين كتب كن هنت شيئا عن حمزة علاء الدين
Ken Hunt puts in a long-distance call to Nubian
oud maestro Hamza El Din
from Folkroots Magazine, November 1996
Although
it may sound ridiculous for someone who was brought up in a South
London street jocularly known as Commonwealth Street, African music
left no imprint on my youth. While the boom of West Indian basslines
lulled me to sleep in the late 1950s, no memory of Nigerian or Ghanian
music carried over into my adult life. It would take the folk revival
and the second volume of the Newport Folk Festival 1964: Evening
Concerts to introduce African music to my life. The first African music
I can consciously recall was by Hamza El Din, the living ambassador of
Nubian music, at the unattainable Newport Folk Festival. But by the
time the oudist and vocalist was featuring on the bill of the Newport
Folk Festival he already had a colourful life behind him and a still
more colourful one stretching out before him.
Hamza El Din's Nubian
homeland, famed for its striking rock formations, achieved fame of a
different sort when the engineering marvel of the Aswan Dam was
completed in 1902. In 1912 it was extended to harness the Upper Nile
more efficiently. On 10 July 1929 Hamza El Din was born at Wadi Halfa
near the Egypt-Sudan border. Five years later more land was flooded by
the newly extended Aswan Dam. His family moved before the building of
the better-known Aswan High Dam. Small wonder therefore that water
irrigates Hamza El Din's musical imagination. Small wonder that, for
many years, his future seemed destined to lay in engineering, his
father, Alaud'in's preference for a 'proper job'. Fortunately his
grandfather, who raised him, introduced him to the poetry of Rumi too
and probably would have been subversively delighted with his grandson's
accompaniment of Coleman Barks' translations entitled Like This: More
Poems of Rumi.
Music played little part in his cultural
background. His Islamic upbringing, he says, was "not really strict,
not really orthodox, it was loose." Musicmaking was frowned upon, as in
many societies. "It was the culture," he reinforces, "not the religion.
It was the culture that was affecting us." When music hit him, it hit
him hard. "When I was a young boy I came to Cairo and I was exposed to
the whole of modern life then. Where I was born we didn't even have a
bike. I discovered this little box down the stairs. Beneath our
building there was a coffee shop. They had this little brown box with a
yellow mouse making funny noises. That was the radio. For the first
time I encountered one. I heard this sound. It was something I'd never
heard before. That was the first time I heard music. I was about five
or six, that first time I went to Egypt with my parents. After that I
became familiar with Egyptian culture, musically speaking."
Thirties' Cairo had the reputation of being one of the great musical
cities and Egypt one of the great musical nations. It was an era in
which a new generation of superstars emerged, musicians of the calibre
of Mohamed Abdulwahab and Oum Kalthoum, musicians who would bestride
Arab popular music for decades, their music exuding a potency beguiling
far beyond Egypt's political borders. "At that time in Egypt," he
quips, "between every coffee shop and the next coffee shop there was a
coffee shop and each coffee shop had a radio. When you walked down the
street you continuously heard music. Especially, say, if there was an
Oum Kalthoum concert that night, the whole country would be playing it.
You walked down the street and the same song would be going along with
you. If you walked for half-an-hour you'd hear the same thing
everywhere. You had to hear it."
Music had entered his life. "When
I was studying electrical engineering at the University of Cairo, there
I discovered the student musical association. I was able to enter that
room and feel and touch those instruments for the first time in my
life. Because in my culture, music is unheard of. It is not Nubian. My
parents would never allow it. That's how I was introduced to the oud."
Several forms of the oud, an anglicization of the Arabic `d, a
short-necked lute (lute is another corruption) exist. Hamza El Din's
instrument has six courses of paired strings, traditionally plucked,
most poetically, with an eagle's feather quill.
The path from
consumer to musician was paved with student politics. "I was studying
engineering, right? And studying engineering, you would be aware of
something like the Aswan High Dam. My people had been affected by
another dam, a smaller one called the Aswan Dam before the High Dam. As
is usual, people lost something psychologically. I was afraid my people
would be affected by the Aswan High Dam which as going to take us
completely away from the land we lived in since recorded history. You
know, young people in the university they are always socially and
politically active, right? I was one of those so I used music to
activate social interest in my people."
After graduating in 1948 he
found work as an engineer on the Egyptian railway. A little later he
began studying music at the Institute of Music in Cairo. "At the same
time I was composing for my people," he recalls. "I don't have a
musical background, neither do my people, so whatever I did, including
tuning, was fun for them. We didn't have a musical background as such,
so when I started my people liked anything I did including tuning!"
Moving to Rome to continue his musical studies, he ran into an
expatriate American. They became firm friends, so much so that Geno
Foreman contemplated moving to Nubia. This plan was abandoned; the
American had a new one. "When we finished school," Hamza recollects,
"he suggested that I should come to the States to do my first recording
before I went back home. He was friends with Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and
so on. He gave them a small tape to introduce me to their record
companies. Joan Baez took it to Vanguard and that's how I came here."
Hamza
El Din's relationship with Vanguard would result in two albums, Music
of Nubia released in 1964 and Al Oud "a year later". However, for many
their introduction to Hamza El Din's music was the anthology, Newport
Folk Festival 1964: Evening Concerts. Asked how he clinched an
appearance at Newport at such a relatively stage in his American
career, he answers, "Well, God is great. I had come here in October '62
and I was in the middle of recording my music. I went with Geno to
Boston. We visited a club. He took me there with my broken oud I came
here with a broken oud. You see, I can't play for people who are
drinking but I had to because of Geno. After I finished playing, a
gentleman came to me and asked, `Would you like to play in the Newport
Festival?' I didn't know what the Newport Festival was! I thought it
was a club like the one I was in. I said, `Yes...if they're not
drinking.'" He laughs long and loud at his naivety and boldness.
"Around the time he was discussing this with me [1964],
it was Human Rights Day in the United Nations in New York. I knew they
used music in that celebration. I introduced myself and they tried to
refuse me because they only played classical music. I asked, `What do
you mean? Who said only western music is classical?' U Thant was the
Secretary-General and it happened that I met him that day and
complained to him that we could not celebrate Human Rights Day. He
said, `Who said that?' I told him the gentleman running the office. He
called him, introduced me, and I played the Human Rights Day. It was
another success which pushed the Newport Folk Festival into accepting
me without hesitation."
Hamza El Din became a fixture within
what he calls the "esoteric music circle". There was a great deal of
interest in his non-western classical music, fed in part by the genuine
interest in Indian classical music. For example, he recalls meeting the
composer Terry Riley in California in 1968. Their encounter led to work
as a teacher and course instructor. In the 1990s the Riley connection
would lead to the Kronos Quartet recording a composition of his. The
circle of like- minded individuals would expand.
Although he had
become known for his oud playing, even on his Vanguard debut - albeit
on a single track, Nubala, with a bongo-bashing Sandy Bull - he also
played the tar. The tar is Nubia's sweet-voiced, single-headed hoop
drum, not be confused with Iran's stringed instrument of the same name.
"Tar is widely used but was not my instrument until I started teaching
music appreciation in Pennsylvania in 1966/67. The oud was my personal
instrument," he clarifies, "even at home."
For Hamza El Din a key
composition, almost a signature tune, is Escalay which means `water
wheel' in Nubian. Escalay became the title of his 1971 release for
Nonesuch Explorer, an album which would include a cover of a piece by
Mohamed Abdulwahab and a tar track. It would put him firmly on the map
for many. (Nonesuch is set to reissue Escalay in 1997 although
naturally their Japanese offshoot has already reissued it.)
Mickey
Hart, who recorded his Eclipse album in January 1978 and had him as a
guest at several Grateful Dead concerts, most memorably at the Pyramids
that September during a total eclipse, recalls his introduction as
phonographical too. He too singles out Escalay. "That was my first
contact with Hamza. Everybody heard those albums. That's what was going
around. He was a favourite listening post. It was really unique. It was
so soft. It was the first soft, gentle percussion that I'd run into. It
was the first desert music. It captivated me. It was the first of that
genre and his voice was so silky but it had a touch of sand in it as
well. And, of course, he's a master of silence, of the spaces between
the notes. Those records just sounded wonderful."
Escalay, which
had made its phonographic debut on Hamza's Nonesuch album, was reprised
in a new context in 1992. It became the oldest and one of the finest
compositions on the Kronos Quartet's 1992 album, Pieces of Africa.
Escalay's central image is the water wheel. In Nubia this is no mere
machine for extracting water. It is a metaphor for life itself. As the
oxen trace the creaking wheel through its repetitive cycle, its
relentless, mesmerizing rhythms release the machine's minder to
daydream and set song and melody to rhythm. People entrain with its
rhythms and, out of that communion, comes each individual's song of the
water wheel.
"1964," he recalls, "was the year my people had to
leave our village to accommodate the waters of the Aswan High Dam. I
returned in 1965 after my first album, Newport and the United Nations'
Human Rights Day. I visited my people in their new places. I realised
how changed they had become. When I came back to the United States I
was sitting in my studio and trying to play the oud. I couldn't do
anything but repeat one phrase, like, `I'm going to have lunch, I'm
going to have lunch, I'm going to have lunch.' Which is the repetition
of Escalay. No other music was coming out of me. Then somebody came
from Los Angeles and suggested I record for his company. With him was a
girlfriend of his. When she saw my paintings she said, `Oh my God! I
have some slides that just look like those paintings.' I asked to see
them and she took me to her house. She put some slides in the projector
of the steamboat trip from Aswan to Wadi Halfa on the border of Sudan.
Nubian villages are not [set out] in a circle. They hug the Nile. So,
every single mountain or shore I see, I know where I am. I was so
excited physically. She gave them to me with the projector. I went
home. I had recorded that water wheel repetition even before I'd
recorded Water Wheel. I played the tape, putting the slides in the
projector and it was as if I was sitting on the water wheel with the
music and seeing the world going around me. The world itself around me
was turning while I was sitting facing one direction. There I realised
the piece could be describing the water wheel."
Eclipse, his album
recorded by Hart, was an attempt to capture the essence of a tradition
trickling into decline. If Nubian tradition is water, Eclipse is like
the shaddouf, the pivoted poles which transfer water into irritation
ditches. "The reason I call it Eclipse," explains Hamza, "is because it
is a style of music that is disappearing. Like Oum Kalthoum's style of
long songs, it doesn't exist anymore. Music is like a sandwich
nowadays. Sandwiches don't make you full. But Oum Kalthoum was filling.
My kind of music and the related hand-clapping is not used no more.
After the Aswan High Dam my people started to get faster. They don't
concentrate on the slow essence in their music. So, I called it Eclipse
because this kind of music was disappearing."
In 1981 he received
an invitation to a Japanese seminar about the oud, lute and biwa. "I
discovered Japan and its culture. I fell in love and decided to stay."
Nowadays he flits between Japan and America but it was Japan which
published his autobiography, Journey: As The Nile Flows (in Japanese).
And it was the Japanese NHK channel which underwrote his Nubiana Suite
(1990) describing "how to activate a water wheel".
Later works
such as Lily of the Nile (1990),
Muwashshah (1995) and
Available Sound - Darius (1996) capture other faces of the man and his
music. Peppering these recordings are allusions to other, earlier
compositions. Snatches of Escalay appear as musical quotations.
Compositions are reprised. But this does not necessarily betoken a
drying-up of inspiration. Returning to older pieces, as he put it to me
for the Pieces of Africa booklet, reminds how "Everyone...will express
himself according to his age..." Songs change over the passage of time
and with greater experience and age, songs once young mature. How a
musician reinterprets a song is a benchmark of maturity and insight. In
that respect no-one compares to Hamza El Din in his tradition but, more
importantly, in the work of Ali Hussan Kuban and Abdel Karim El Kabli
there are the new shoots of a vigorous tradition.
The Lily of the
Nile is supposed to have slightly narcotic qualities. For over 30 years
Hamza El Din has been concocting a heady music, quality guaranteed. In
the process he has provided us with an insight into a culture, largely
of his creation and curatorship. Few musicians have shaped aesthetic
sensibilities so profoundly and few have inspired so many generations.
