What do a southern Italian folk music band, a New York-based Malian jaliya ensemble, and an Indian-Canadian vocalist have in common?
All of these artists — Newpoli, Abdoulaye Diabate and Super Mande, and Kiran Ahluwalia — performed at the Fifth Annual Maqam Fest on 15 January, at Manhattan’s Alwan for the Arts cultural center. Their styles, though quite different from each other, all demonstrate some connection to the tradition of maqam, a centuries-old, complex system of Arab musical modes whose influence has been felt not only in the Arab Muslim world but also in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, West Africa, and South Asia, and as far as western China.
Maqam Fest is part of the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference, an event that brings thousands of music industry figures — presenters, agents, managers, and artists — from around the world to New York City each January. In a city with an abundance of smartly conceived and adventurous music events, Maqam Fest stands out for its unique vision and its broad and expanding constituency.
Six ensembles perform on two floors that Alwan occupies in an office building near Wall Street, with the timing of each set slightly staggered so attendees can get a taste of everything. (I, however, couldn’t tear myself away from the sixth floor, where Newpoli, Diabate, and Ahluwalia performed. Down on the fourth floor were Doulnay, a Brooklyn-based band that specializes in the Turkish music of the southern Balkan region of the former Ottoman empire; Tareq Abboushi’s Arab/Afro-Cuban/jazz band Shusmo, and the New York Crimean Tatar Ensemble.)
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The audience, like the programing, is remarkably diverse, comprising varied ethnicities, ages, and sexualities. There are young Arabs and Indians; white hipsters; gay couples; young women in hijabs; musicians and music industry professionals.
Maqam Fest reminds me of the New York loft jazz scene of the ’70s; innovative, exploratory music, presented in intimate settings (long, narrow rooms without stages or stage lighting) that put artists and audiences in close proximity, breaking down the usual separation between them. The musicians stick around to catch each other’s sets, and mingle with fans during the breaks between sets.
Newpoli
Newpoli kicks off the evening, performing traditional southern Italian music (pizzica, tarantella, tammuriata, villanella) and original material inspired by tradition. Led by two Italian-born singers, the blonde Angela Rossi and Carmen Marsico, a diminutive redhead, the octet concentrates on songs from their latest album, Nun te vutà (Don’t Look Back). Their melodies, microtonal vocals, and instrumentation frequently evoke the Middle East and North Africa. Introducing a song from the Basilicata region, Daniel Meyers makes the connection explicit when he explaines that the horn he is about to play, the ciaramella, is similar to North African double-reed instruments.
Founded in Boston by alumni of Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, Newpoli offers solid musicianship and a serious and respectful approach to southern Italian folk traditions. Perhaps too respectful. I find myself wishing the band would amp up the energy level and the wildness, to bring some rock ‘n’ roll to their pizzica and tarantella. (Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, the great Italian band that has become the international standard bearers for southern Italian folk-based music, shows how it can be done.)
Newpoli’s biggest asset is the frontline vocal duo of Marsico and Rossi, visual and musical cynosures with their contrasting looks and twining vocal lines. Their band needs to sound and look less like a bunch of scholars. After all, the music they play emerges mainly from the southern Italian peasantry and working class, not the conservatory.
Abdoulaye Diabate and his band Super Mande, on the other hand, practically levitate the room with a set that is by turns explosive and hypnotic. Diabate, a guitarist and singer whose admirers have dubbed him “the African troubadour”, is a master of Malian jaliya music. (A jali, also known as a griot, is a culture bearer whose art combines music, dance, and storytelling.) His New York-based ensemble Super Mande features Yacouba Sissoko on kora; the burly, formidable percussionist Aboubacar Diabate; flutist Sylvain Leroux (the only non-African, Leroux observed that the band members “all are griots, except me”); and Abdoulaye’s 13-year-old American-born son Toumani on balafon. The leader, resplendent in white robes, abandones his guitar early in the set, moving gracefully among his musicians while singing long, fluid melodic lines punctuated by thunderous percussion.
Kiran Ahluwalia
Diabate’s set ran a bit long, cutting into Kiran Ahluwalia’s time. The Indian-born, Canada-raised vocalist also has technical problems that take the sound engineer a while to sort out. But Ahluwalia overcomes those setbacks to deliver the evening’s final, and best performance. Backed by a quartet that features her husband, the first-rate jazz guitarist Rez Abbasi, Nitin Mitta on tablas, bassist Chris Tarry, and accordionist Will Holshouser, Ahluwalia performes selections from her most recent album, Sanata: Stillness, as well as her terrific cover of “Mustt Mustt”, by the late Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Ahluwalia draws on classical Indian and Pakistani music, ghazal (a song form based in Urdu poetry), the guitar-driven Saharan “desert blues” of the Tuareg band Tinariwen, and jazz. A thrilling singer with a supple voice and no lack of improvisatory daring, she weaves those threads into a seamless and entrancing whole.
The first Maqam Fest was held in 2010, at Drom, an East Village world music venue. The following year Amir ElSaffar, an Iraq-American musician who directs the music programing at Alwan for the Arts, became the event’s curator.
“Each year Maqam Fest has gotten more eclectic and diverse,” ElSaffar tells me. “This year was the most far-reaching into the outer strata of where maqam traditions can be felt. From Morocco to western China there’s some kind of maqam tradition. And Balkan music — they don’t use the term ‘maqam’ but the modes are the same and the treatment of the melodies is very similar. Only recently was I made aware of the Southern Italian musical styles that have also taken on some of the modal principles of maqam, in the context of a different spoken language and a different musical language. With Newpoli, I heard a lot of microtones, which are characteristic of maqam traditions. I’ve been listening to archival recordings [of Southern Italian music] and to me, it’s North African music but in Italian. It’s really interesting to me. I’m always trying to find these threads, these points of commonality.”
“We don’t have a budget to fly in groups from other parts of the country or overseas,” ElSaffar says. “We’re funded exclusively by ticket sales. So we’re restricted to who’s in New York. Geographically, I have limitations but every year I’ve managed to find really interesting groups. We find each other. Groups find us, we find groups. I do seek out what’s happening, but a lot of things just seem to fall into place in a natural way and the themes of the festival emerge from the content, the styles of music each group plays. Also, I’m a performing musician, so I’m constantly meeting and working with people and making connections that way.”
(ElSaffar’s involvement with Alwan is a side project; he’s primarily a jazz trumpeter, as well as a composer and bandleader, who plays in an Arab-based style he developed. He also sings Iraqi maqam, which he studied in Iraq, and plays the santur, a hammered dulcimer of Persian origins. Last year he formed a 17-piece orchestra that uses eastern and western instruments, the latter “re-tuned to fit the microtonal properties of maqam music.”)
As a musician and music programmer, ElSaffar champions tradition and modernity, cultural preservation and experimentation.
“Our audiences at Alwan are a mix,” he says, “and that plays a role in what I program. Maqam Fest draws the most diverse crowd, because the artists represent different musical cultures and bring their constituencies.”
“When I came to Alwan as a curator in 2008, it primarily was a communal gathering place for Arabs, Turks, Iranians, South Asians, that was the flavor of it. Since then it’s grown – it could be my programing, or the way things are moving culturally, a lot of boundaries are dissipating. The venue serves as a place for people from the Middle East to hear the music of their homelands, to give these traditions a place to live and thrive in America, in New York.”
“But the more important thing, with Maqam Fest and with Alwan programming in general, is to give these traditions a place to develop and continue to evolve. There’s a mistaken idea that tradition is repetition, or holding on to something from the past and doing it exactly the same way, but when you get inside any tradition, you see there’s constant evolution, constant change.”
“Traditions only stay alive when there is that element of evolving, or questioning of the rules and the norms, and innovation. So I’m trying to provide that kind of environment at Alwan. We do present old songs done the old ways and that’s a nice aspect. But we’re living in New York and it’s a different environment.” That environment, says ElSaffar, affects the ways these cultural practices are performed.
ElSaffar sums up his, and Alwan’s mission as having three key aspects: “To educate the broader public, to provide a place for people from within the [Middle Eastern/Arabic/Islamic] culture to enjoy what they’re familiar with, and to foster innovation and growth of these traditions.”