Iraq-Iran collaboration makes music, not war
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Of all the benefits America could have obtained from fighting a war in Iraq -- oil, democracy, regional stability -- the last thing expected was a new style of jazz. Yet that's what Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir El-Saffar devised with his stunning 2008 debut "Two Rivers."
Mr. El-Saffar meant the album title to stand for the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the twin rivers of human blood and library book ink spilled when Baghdad (a pillar of 13th-century civilization) was sacked by the Mongols. But it also represented two streams of thought merging within his music: Western jazz improvisation and the tradition of Iraqi classical music.
Where: The Warhol Museum, North Side.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
Tickets: $15; 412-237-8300; www.warhol.org
The young Mr. El-Saffar grew up sandwiched between two worlds -- his father a Shiite Muslim physics professor and his mother a U.S.-born Christian.
"A few times a week there'd be Iraqis over and we'd be eating bamia [okra] with Arabic music playing in the background," he recalls. "But my first musical experience was singing in the Lutheran church choir, and my mother was into New Age stuff like astrologers and palm readers. She had three Ph.Ds and was into the feminist movement in the '70s, so she informs my music in having a desire to break boundaries. My childhood was a reconciliation, but not consciously -- sometimes [the cultures] would mix and sometimes they wouldn't."
A formative period for Mr. El-Saffar was playing with iconic avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. "We did a whole week at Iridium, we played in Macedonia once, and a few times at the Knitting Factory. That experience was illuminating in finding out how much freedom you can have in the music while still maintaining structure. You can have a specific concept that doesn't have to be literally rendered."
One year before coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein, Mr. El-Saffar interrupted his career to return to his ancestral homeland and study the origins of Iraqi maqam. In most Arab or Muslim countries, maqam is a system of modal scales upon which musicians improvise (as with Indian ragas or the Delta Blues) but in Iraq, the term stands for a vanishing body of classical art songs, which musicians memorized through oral transmission.
"I spent six months there," he recalls. "I hadn't spoken any Arabic until that trip, yet many aspects of Iraqi culture felt natural to me. Learning the music didn't feel like taking on something new, but discovering something that already existed within me."
First Published April 15, 2010 12:00 am
