Tarab *: Marcel Khalife Concert in Portland + New video

Last night, Marcel Khalife and his ensemble, which included two of his sons, Sami and Bachar Khalife, performed at the Aladdin Theater here in Portland. It was a magnificent show, truly one of the greatest and most moving concert I have ever had the pleasure of attending. While I knew beforehand that Khalife was considered a great innovator of traditional Arabic music, for both the oud (Arab lute) and other instruments, I could not have imagined how experimental the music would be.

At certain points, the pianist launched himself over and into the guts of the piano, plucking and hammering on the strings with his fingers, hand and fist, whose movements the audience was sometimes able to catch glimpses of when reflected in the shiny black veneer of the raised piano top. At a certain point I actually thought he was going to start playing with his knee! This son, Rami, is a graduate of Juliard and is indeed a great virtuoso and very passionate about his music –clearly just like his father.

Indeed, there was a lot of non-verbal communication apparent between the performers and they were very much in tune with one another.

I now have a new-found appreciation for how versatile the double bass can be. With my years in orchestra I always just considered the basses to be mostly there for the foundational drone of any composition. It’s only with jazz that I had considered the bass to be a pretty inspired instrument. But this musician, Peter Herbert, played and plucked and knocked on his bass in so many different ways that it was fascinating to watch and hear what kind of instruments he could coax from its woody body.

And Bachar Khalife, the percussionist is incredible. He has lightning fast hands. And what that kid can do with a tambourine! Incredible!

But truly, Mr. Khalife was the unassuming star of the evening. His fingers flutter like butterflies on the tree branch of his oud, and his performance just looks effortless. He often played with his eyes closed, his soul coming through his instrument.

He often spoke in Arabic, which was poorly interpreted, I must admit**, to the audience before beginning each song. His voice is soft-spoken but has the weight of moral strength behind it. He spoke of being warmly welcomed in every other country in the world except in the United States. He said when they arrived here they were ushered into a separate room and interrogated with deeply personal questions that touch the human soul. He said the immigration officer even asked about his grandfather; he responded that his grandfather was a Lebanese fisherman and would be astonished and pleased that people were asking about him in the United States!

And yet he acknowledged that as a citizen of the world he is with the American people, just against their government. This was thoughtful and giving of him, but I find it abhorrent that customs officials have no clue who Marcel Khalife is, when in the entire rest of the world, he is so well known. I also understand that immigration officers in these situations are just doing their job and that we have a need for that, but speaking as a person who has been in one of those little rooms being asked personal questions, I can tell you that it’s shocking that UNESCO Artist for Peace and international figure has to submit to the same treatment.

Finally, Khalife played one of his most well known compositions, arranged for the prose of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, entitled Oummi (My Mother). This was the only song he soloed and it was deeply moving. He waited for the audience to silence itself and told us that he truly did miss his mother; he missed her bread.

When this came over the translation, I heard some people near me exclaim: “Bread?!?” This is because they hear “I miss my mother’s bread,” they think about the white, styrofoam Wonderbread they grew up with. But a mother’s bread is so much more, and people from “bread cultures,” know this. Indeed, in Islam, bread is sacred. Bread, made by your mother’s hand, from the grains grown in your region's land, ground by the local mill, is what sustains and nourishes you. It's different from every other type of bread in the world. It’s delicious and cooked in the family or neighborhood home. It is a physical manifestation of the love and nourishment given by the women of a family to the community. It means a great deal and at the end both my husband and I had tears in our eyes.

With that I leave you with the words of Darwish’s poem Oummi and a video set to the music of this song...If you'll just get past the first few in utero images, i think you'll enjoy both it and more particularly the music. If someone has a non-pirated video of this song please let me know, I'd like to use it in place of this one, since I think it's important to see an artists movements and interaction during the performance...

MY MOTHER
Mahmoud Darwish

I long for my mother’s bread
my mother’s coffee
my mother’s touch…
and childhood grows in me
one day on another day’s chest
and I adore my life because
if I die
my mother’s tears would shame me.

Take me, if I return one day,
as a veil for your lashes
and cover my bones with grass
the purity of your heels baptized,
and tighten my bind…
with a lock of your hair,
with a thread waving from the hem of your dress,
I might become a god then,
a god, I might…
if I touch the deep floor of your heart.

Place me, if I return,
like wood for your brick oven…
and hang me on the roof like your laundry line
because I can no longer stand
without the prayer of your days…
I have aged, mother, so bring back the childhood stars
and I will join the little birds
on the path of return
to the nest of your waiting.



*What is "Tarab"? Here's a definition from an Afropop Worldwide article: "tarab, the almost untranslatable Arab word for the ecstatic, enraptured feeling a powerfully emotional performance can generate in an audience". -Yvonne Mitton

**Luckily much of the audience spoke Arabic and my husband and others were able to translate for those who didn’t.