Musical genre of Middle East leads trumpet player on journey
When Amir ElSaffar first heard the hypnotic melodies of Middle Eastern maqam music, his ear recognized the complex structures of the Western styles he had studied for years.
“I can relate it to so much of the music I’ve loved in the past,” he said. “Beethoven on a structural level or Muddy Waters on the blues side or John Coltrane and the sound of the instruments. Maqam conjured up elements of other music I had loved in the past.”
Maqam, a traditional Arabic melody style, uses microtonals — notes in between the notes in a scale — to create its haunting sounds.
ElSaffar and his Two Rivers Ensemble will introduce central Ohioans to the musical form Wednesday at the Lincoln Theatre.
The musician, 40, brought the ensemble to the Wexner Center nearly a decade ago, but this time he will return with vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi, who taught him maqam nearly two decades ago.
Al-Saadi is the leading authority on Iraqi maqam music and will spend a year in the United States sharing Who: Amir ElSaffar’s Two Rivers Ensemble Where: Lincoln Theatre, 769 E. Long St. Contact: 614-292-3535, www.wexarts.org Showtime: 8 p.m. Wednesday Tickets: $25.50, or $21.50 for members and $13.50 for students
the art form with ElSaffar and Two Rivers.
After a decade of learning and performing maqam, for the past several years ElSaffar has focused more on composing, collaborating with Indian pop musicians on dance projects and writing several works for symphony orchestras.
His teacher’s willingness to visit ElSaffar’s home country has returned the musician to the genre.
“It brings me back home in a way, reconnecting with this form,” he said. “It feels like an important moment to me to touch (and) to examine maqam once again.”
ElSaffar, born in Chicago to an Iraqi immigrant father and an American mother, first learned to play music on the ukulele at age 9, soon graduating to an acoustic and then electric guitar.
He focused on folk music and the Beatles, then Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.
During his undergraduate career at DePaul University in Chicago, the musician honed in on jazz trumpet.
For the next seven years, he played in jazz clubs in Chicago and New York, until his desire to learn more about his Iraqi heritage took him to Baghdad in 2001.
ElSaffar took voice and Arabic lessons — the better to chant the poetic lyrics of maqam music — and learned the 96-stringed santur for the next five years, finally forming the six-piece Two Rivers Ensemble to introduce the maqam to U.S. audiences.
The elegant structure of maqam is somewhat at odds with his free-form jazz background, but ElSaffar has worked to harmonize the two disparate styles.
“That’s the story of my life somehow, the question of how to combine not only the notes and the musical aesthetics but the way people play,” he said. “In jazz, musicians are very free, even if there are a lot of parameters in place. We can kind of do whatever we want. In maqam, that’s not the case.”
He has taught his fellow band members — Nasheet Waits, Carlo De Rosa, Tareq Abboushi, Zafer Tawil and Ole Mathisen — to find expressive ways to interpret the set mode of maqam.
Videos of the ensemble show each player receiving a solo, standard in jazz music, but instead of upright bass or piano, they perform on stringed lutes such as the oud and tanbur.
His latest release, 2017’s “Rivers of Sound: Not Two,” expands on the ensemble’s ability to perform with his 17-person Rivers of Sound Orchestra.
Iraqi maqam pulls elements from Persian, Kurdish, Turkish and Jewish cultures, forming a rich blend that transcends any one nation.
It also proved to be a great societal equalizer, with citizens from every social strata allowed to participate.
“You could have a minister of culture sitting next to a cobbler,” he said. “In maqam, things like economic background or status in society are removed, and you’re in direct contact with the music.”
Much like a karaoke bar, maqam created a safe place for everyone.
“That’s cosmopolitanism expressed in music,” he said.