Amjad Parkar Saudi Gazette JEDDAH — When I first met enigmatic music producer Zuhair Bas, aka Zeo Bas, he was animatedly recording the efforts of two aspiring musicians in his professional studio, painstakingly created over the last few years in his own home in Jeddah. Zeo, as he made abundantly clear by his account of his life and the way he interacts with his young protégés, lives for playing and making music. Born in Jeddah in 1949, Zeo spent the majority of his early years abroad, taking in places like Paris and Beirut. His late father was a diplomat, so he was mostly moving from one country to another. However, it was at an English school in Cairo where he first fell in love with music, aged 16. “I made my first guitar from wood. I went to the carpenter; I couldn't afford a guitar. I sprayed it with gold metallic paint and it was horrible to play.” Thanks to his new found love his studies suffered, persuading his parents to send him to Switzerland when he was 19 to help his education. “My report in Switzerland said (I wasn't) interested in anything, and didn't absorb anything except music, so (I needed) to find a way to promote (my) music because school wise it was just hopeless. He described the Swiss school he went to as a “bum school”, because it was attended by movie stars' children and also because it “was more like fun than school”. He lasted around a year in Switzerland before he returned to Jeddah in the late 1960s and formed a band called The New Arrangement, which he claimed was the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia. “I did have the first band in Saudi Arabia, the very first. I remember when we played here at the Al-Attas Hotel, it was the first time the locals even saw what a band looked like. And it was a bit scary, because we almost got attacked by the audience.” He said the band played at venues all over Jeddah including the Italian Cultural Club, Indonesian Embassy, American Marines House and Saudia City compound, to name just a few. Zeo was the only Saudi in the band, while the rest of the members were Indonesian. He gave a special mention to his drummer “who sang like Nat King Cole” Mohammed Bawazir, and said he was still trying to get in touch with him. He said he never had to work while he was playing with the band, because he made “fantastic money” for those days. Zeo eventually got “bored” of performing and fell in love with an American woman in Jeddah. He followed her all the way back to the US, where he lived for seven years during the 1970s. Zeo said he sustained himself by working as a waiter because the “money was good”. His first marriage, in Houston, Texas, lasted just over two years and he married his second wife shortly after in Los Angeles, California. After a couple of aborted attempts to study hairdressing and computer programming in Houston and LA respectively, the latter failing spectacularly because instead of studying he would play music in the park, Zeo returned to Jeddah after his mother found out where he was. “I didn't write her for six years. As soon as she found out where I was, she came and got me from the States. I said, ‘Mum, I'm married' and she said, ‘Never mind, you come home with me now'.” He did return to the Kingdom with his second wife, who could not settle in the Saudi Arabia and went back home shortly after. It was back in Jeddah that he met his third wife, who was a British flight attendant with Saudi Arabian Airlines. The couple already had two daughters by the time his wife decided to go back to England in the early 1980s. Zeo, naturally, went with her to the UK, where they had two more daughters. Perhaps justifying his spontaneous life choices, he said: “As a musician, we don't go by the rules, we just do what our heart tells us. “I've always been spontaneous, I've never put a restriction on what I feel. You know, if I feel like doing something, I just get up and do it. I never felt restricted. “But I obeyed the rules as well. I didn't smoke or drink.” During his time in the UK, which lasted around 17 years, he worked in a bank and for UK-based Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, but also carried on with his music career, meeting members of popular British bands such as Level 42 and UB40. On his return to the Kingdom in 1998, Zeo worked for a Saudi called Bassam Halwani, who ran a famous audio and video store, and it was through this job where he met most of his contacts in the music business. Through a combination of self-learning and meeting the right people, Zeo was able to learn his craft as a music producer. He credited his thirst for knowledge and daily reading for being able to “stay on top of the game”, and said this knowledge made it easy to build three professional music studios, one in the UK and two in Saudi Arabia. Describing the quality of his studio, he said: “I mustn't say this as a joke; I mean, for me it's amusing. “You know, you hear all these engineers bragging about what they do and how they do it. “And then you don't say anything, you just bring them over and they just look around and suddenly they've all gone quiet. “And I think that's fantastic, you don't have to tell anybody what you do because basically they know what's going on in this room. “In here, we're talking about equipment that is capable of doing a Titanic film.” When asked why he continues to focus on music in a highly conservative society, he replied: “It's in my blood. I love music. I think if I didn't have music I would be dead a long time ago.” Zeo claimed that music producers in Saudi Arabia do not get the credit they deserve. “The customer is very spoilt. (When musicians come to record) I'm not supposed to put any artistic input in (the composition) because they're coming to record. “(The musicians) don't understand what the meaning of the word ‘record' is. “Record means, you play, you bring your instruments, I record you, I make it sound nice but you do all the work.” He cited the example of an American Jeddah-based guitar player he helped, where he went beyond his job description and provided the drums, bass, keyboards and backing vocals, among others. He said he also decided the direction of this particular musician's compositions. The musician agreed to do five albums, 60 songs in total, for SR2,000 a song. Zeo said he offered this deal at a discount price, but the musician backed off after the first album and said he was getting married. This, said Zeo, angered him because not only was this a breach of their agreement but also dented him financially for a while. He mentioned other examples of musicians who he has worked with, featuring in famous shows such as Arab Idol and the Arab edition of The Voice. However, he claims to have never gotten the credit he deserved for developing them. When asked why he continues to work in a business that he clearly feels has ill-treated him, Zeo said: “For exposure. Somebody will mention you eventually because they can't recreate what you've done for them on their own, so you get your exposure that way. “Jeddah is such a small place and everyone knows who does what…so you win in the end. “You get students, you teach them basics, you do that, and then the next day they'll probably open house right next to you, undercutting you big time and you'll only see them again when they get stuck and come crawling back to you for help.” Zeo said other goals include getting his songs out while he is still fit and also staying ahead of the competition by identifying and working with hot young talents in Jeddah, because “you can't be in one area and the new generation in another. You stay in there with them and a few steps ahead of them, so they respect you for your knowledge and pace.” And it is that sense of conviction that makes you believe he will continue to lead the music production business for many more years to come.
