Troubadour From Upper Nile Comes Home
JESSE HAMLIN, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, June 7, 1996
Hamza's
back in town. That would be Hamza El Din, the Nubian musician whose
rich marriage of Arabic and Nubian sounds has mesmerized international
audiences for three decades. After 14 years in Japan, the master of
Middle Eastern music has moved back to Baghdad by the Bay.
``I
was homesick for the U.S.,'' says El Din, who lived in the Bay Area for
many years. ``Even if I go to Nubia, San Francisco feels like home.''
A
native of the ancient upper Nile land now divided between Egypt and the
Sudan, El Din performs his hypnotic and quietly passionate music
tonight, Saturday and Sunday at the Palace of Fine Arts for the opening
of the 18th annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. The program,
``Hidden Treasure: Dance and Music Through the Islamic World,'' also
features eight local dance troupes whose art is rooted in Islamic
culture, including the Mevlevi Order of America (Turkish), Diamano
Coura (West African) and Sri Susilowati (Indonesian).
Din is a
virtuoso player of the oud, the six-stringed Arabic precursor of the
lute. He also sings, chantlike, in Arabic and Nubian, and plays the
tar, the ancient drum depicted in hieroglyphics in the temples of the
pharaohs.
He has performed his original compositions --
Eastern sounds shaped in the forms of Western music -- with artists as
varied as the Kronos Quartet and the Grateful Dead, and has scored and
performed several film sound tracks (including Francis Coppola's
``Black Stallion'') and the music for director Peter Sellars' stage
production of Aeschylus' ``The Persians'' at last year's Salzburg
Festival.
At the moment, he's busy making adjustments. ``I've
had difficulty tuning my oud,'' says El Din, sitting in the bright
Oakland apartment he moved into a month ago. ``The environment (here)
has a different hum; the noise pollution is different. In Japan, the
noise pollution is organized -- there are different times for various
motor vehicles. Here it's a free-for- all any time of the day,'' he
says, laughing.
El Din, 65, has been practicing a tune he'll
play tonight. Its title expresses his longtime sense of himself as a
roving troubadour and citizen of the world: ``I Have No Address.''
``What
is my nationality?'' asks El Din, a serenely joyous man whose speech is
sprinkled with proverbs and lyrical phrases that sound like proverbs.
``Nubian-Egypto-Sudanese-Italo-American-Japanese.
I've lived in all those places. I was a Nubian musician playing for my
people; now I'm a Nubian musician playing those same themes for the
whole world.''
Much of his music is based on traditional
Nubian songs and stories, but arranged in a new way for the oud, an
instrument unknown in Nubia until he introduced it. In fact, the
concept of performance itself was also unknown: For thousands of years,
Nubian music meant communal singing and percussion, always serving a
social function. Audiences didn't exist.
``Our music is the
voice, the drum and hand clapping,'' says El Din, who began playing the
oud while studying engineering at the University of Cairo in the late
'50s.
``It's a group effort, singing for every occasion:
births, deaths, weddings, planting, harvesting, circumcision, calling
to someone long-distance down the river. It was unheard of to perform
music. My people could not accept what I was doing.''
But El
Din was on a mission: Learning of the plan to build the Aswan High Dam,
which would flood most of the land the Nubians had farmed for
millennia, he set out to warn his people and preserve their culture
before the land itself vanished. To do so, he created a style of music
that was at once old and new.
``I tried to tell people that
our whole 9,000-year history will disappear,'' El Din says, ``but they
refused to listen. Then one old Nubian guy, a funny-looking man with a
spiritual tic, told me, `Sing it.' ''
El Din quit his
engineering job with the Egyptian national railroad in Cairo and ``took
the oud to Nubia.'' He traveled by donkey from village to village,
collecting songs. His oud playing, still Arabic in style, didn't catch
on until it absorbed the distinctively Nubian rhythm and sound.
``One
day I felt the oud had the Nubian accent,'' El Din says. ``I played for
people in my village and they were mesmerized. I knew I had
something.''
He studied Western music at the Academy of St.
Cecilia in Rome on an Italian government grant, which opened his ear to
harmony and taught him ``how to frame a composition, to give it shape
and structure.''
From Japanese classical musicians El Din learned ``precision and patience. What they can do with one note!''
His
playing, rich in overtones, is more relaxed, subtle and intricate than
that of the typical oud virtuoso. ``The Egyptians say I sound like a
Yemeni,'' El Din says. ``The Yemenis say I sound like a Moroccan, the
Moroccans say I sound like a Syrian. Everybody relates me to something
else. It means my music is me.''
