Omar Souleyman – Haflat Gharbia - The Western Concerts (Sublime Frequencies 2011)

I wanted to listen to this for some days now but i kept saying i'll do it some other time...

So at 3 in the morning, smoking like a maniac i overcame my fears and ambitions believing that Omar Souleyman will be great only if he is performing in a traditional wedding in Syria  and that he is not suitable for the western culture, i said i should give it a go.

I still don't get the clear sound of the recording and i miss the "fly in the shit" C60 mire...

My final conclusion is that the "flies" died from the prolonged keyboard solos and the bigger versions of the tracks.

 It works just fine for me, but i miss the money tossing in the air, the golden watches, the bodyguards and the local Syrian television after midnight... 

The Western Concerts

Omar Souleyman - Jazeera Nights (2010)

A few muttered words in Arabic, shrouded in echo. And then it erupts. A day-glo cloudburst of warpspeed Bontempi rhythms and snaking microtonal melodies. Psychedelic invocation to some lascivious simultaneist idol. Urgent glossolalia of electronic thunder and lightning. Amphetamine-powered merengué of dysmorphic frequencies. Notes from between the notes. Beats like the jerry-rigged machine gun fire of exurban guerrila fighters. Cosmopolitan party music from the end times. The death rattle of globalisation, echoing across the scarred plains of bomb-ravaged dreamscapes.

The style of music is called dabke, a Syrian genre popular at weddings and usually accompanied by a sort of fraternal, arms-around-the-shoulders-knees-in-the-air type line dance, but listening to traditional dabke stars like Nasri Shamseddine or Zaki Nassif and then listening to Omar Souleyman is like switching from Max Bygraves and the New Seekers to Public Enemy and Ruff Sqwad. As the name of his previous collection on Sublime Frequencies, Dabke 2020, suggests, Souleyman's dabke is from (at least) ten years into the future, buzzing through time and boldly heralding the new.

Souleyman was born in the late 60s in the midst of an ill-fated experiment in Syrian radical socialism, shortly before a bloodless coup established the thirty year presidency of Hafez al-Assad (father of current president Bashar al-Assad). Growing up in Tal Tamr, a small rural village in the north-east of Syria close to the borders of Turkey and Iraq, left the young Souleyman exposed to the influence of a wide number of different middle eastern musics throughout his childhood. Living at the interstices of the Arab world, he absorbed a panoply of sounds and styles whilst making time in a series of dead-end jobs. But it was not until the mid-90s that he began performing professionally at weddings and parties, quickly amassing over 500 cassette releases, mostly live recordings, that now dominate every tape stand in Syria.

Onstage, the strutting, gesticulating Souleyman, dressed in trademark shades and keffiyah, is joined by long-term collaborators, Rizan Sa'id and Hassan Hamadi. The latter's role being largely to stand chainsmoking, occasionally whispering poetry into Souleyman's ears to be incorporated into the music, according to the age-old ataba tradition. And what poetry, ranging from the visceral heartbreak of "My liver has rotted from waiting for you" (from the track 'Eih Min Elemkon') to a political broadside such as "The poor live in bitterness and the rich live as they want" ('Kell Il Banat Inkhatban') *The Quietus

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Omar Khorshid - Guitar El Chark (Guitar of the Orient) (Sublime Frequencies 2010)

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The late Omar Khorshid remains an iconic legend of the Arab world, though he’s received criminally little international acclaim. Born in Cairo in 1945, the glittering age of Egypt's cultural reinvention, Khorshid was soon to become one of its luminaries and most well-known, if short-lived, voices. He is regarded as the greatest guitarist the Arab world has ever known. By the mid 60s Khorshid was established with his group Le Petit Chats, an Egyptian beat group modeled after the prevailing influence of Elvis and the Beatles. It was at this time that one of the reigning figures of contemporary Arabic music, Abdel Halim Hafez, asked Omar Khorshid to join his orchestra. With Baligh Hamdi composing, Hafez with Khorshid in place would create some of the most innovative modern sounds in the Arabic musical canon.

Time with the Hafez orchestra offered Khorshid instant fame, and it wasn’t long before he was asked to play with the queen of Arab music, the voice of Egypt herself -Oum Kalthoum. Over the next few years Khorshid became a well-established and integral part of the Arab musical landscape. He was featured heavily in live concerts, national TV and radio and studio recordings, playing for the leading artists of the day. The guitar had now become an essential ingredient in the Oriental orchestra.

Khorshid began recording albums under his own name for the prestigious Lebanese record labels Voice Of The Orient and Voice Of Lebanon. Working with visionary engineer Nabil Moumtaz at Polysound studios in Beirut, Khorshid would take his music into some of the most progressive musical terrain of its time. The tracks included here in this retrospective are from the prolific span of Khorshid’s career in Beirut from 1973 to 1977. The venerable Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish best encapsulated this time in Lebanon: “unfortunately, it was paradise”.

Khorshid’s prolific instrumental music enjoyed recognition that transcended class and status during the brief period he shone. It’s a testament to his immense talent and some of the finest guitar music the world has ever heard.

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