FOR the fourth year running, the last days of Ramadan and the approach of Eid Al-Fitr were celebrated in London through the Ramadan Nights season of concerts organized by the Barbican Center. Far from being a fringe event, the hugely popular series of concerts brought to Europe's largest arts and conference center some of the leading names in music from the Muslim world. The opening concert was given at LSO St Luke's by the London-based Palestinian singer and musician Reem Kelani and her band. The event paid tribute to two great Arab artists who happen to share a surname: the Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish (1892-1923), and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who died on August 9. The concert began in stunning style with Kelani's unaccompanied rendering of Sayyid Darwish's “Birth of the Chosen Prophet”. Her pure voice, subtly ornamented, took wing with this devotional song and soared in the spacious yet intimate hall of the 18th century former church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Then came the rousing traditional Palestinian wedding song “Hawwilouna”, from the coastal city of Akka. The audience joined with gusto in the syncopated clapping of Kelani and her musicians. There was laughter when Kelani observed that the song “tells the family of the groom if you treat our daughter nicely in marriage we'll make you ruler of all the Arab tribes, but if you don't you'll be cleaning after our animals and sheep.” Kelani dedicated the concert to Mahmoud Darwish, and she performed her setting of his 1967 poem “Mawwaal – Variations on Loss”. The opening lines read: “I lost a beautiful dream / I lost the lilies' sting / My night has been long / stretched over the garden walls / But I have not lost the way.” The song began with drummer Patrick Illingworth setting a somber beat before the Anglo-Bengali pianist Zoe Rahman came in with a captivating hymn-like succession of chords. Saxophone playing by Ian East and by Zoe's brother Idris Rahman lent the Mawwaal a soulful sound. Kelani's powerfully moving rendering of the song was concluded by a skilful tabla solo from the Iranian percussionist Fariborz Kiani. “Mawwaal – Variations on Loss” and several other numbers performed during the concert came from Kelani's 2006 debut CD “Sprinting Gazelle: Palestinian songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora”. She is now working on her second CD, devoted to the music of Sayyid Darwish, “considered to be the godfather of contemporary Arab music”. Half the 12 songs performed during the concert were Kelani's arrangements of compositions by Sayyid Darwish to lyrics by various authors. She described Darwish as a “working class hero”, who wrote anthems for professions such as water sellers, sailors, fortune tellers and builders. “The Porters' Anthem”, with lyrics by Badi' Khairi (1893-1966), says, “Buckle up your belt and carry the heavy load because as an Egyptian you're proud enough to work hard instead of stretching your hand asking for money.” It incorporates the porters' cries of “hina hina” that Darwish heard in the markets of Alexandria. Kelani's performances always include the unexpected, even for those who know her music well, and one surprise in this concert was her first-ever public performance on the tanbour lyre. She accompanied herself as she sang a Sayyid Darwish song about Nubians, which she has entitled “Ode to the Downtrodden”. Kelani was born in the northern English city of Manchester, to a medical doctor father from the village of Ya'bad near Jenin and a mother from Nazareth, and grew up in Kuwait. It was in Kuwait that she first heard Sudanese music and got to know the music of the famous Nubian Sudanese singer, songwriter and tanbour player Mohammed Wardi. The concert was the first public airing of “Ode to the Downtrodden” (originally entitled “Ashinger Damolina”), which has a distinctly African feel, and it went down well with the audience. Kelani gave the audience an idea of the stereotyped way in which Nubians have tended to be viewed in Egypt. She worked with a Nubian linguistics professor visiting Britain to try to ensure that her translations of Nubian words were correct and that she was not treading on sensitivities. She dedicated the song to the Nubian villages that were submerged as a result of the Aswan dam's construction. Kelani performed several songs from her Palestinian repertoire. The lyrics of the traditional “Galilean Lullaby”, to which she has composed her own music, were collected by the Palestinian poet Tawfiq Zayyad. She learned a song she calls “A Baker's Dozen” from a group of women in the Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The original Arabic title is “Habl el-Ghiwa” or “The Pull of Seduction”. The song has a 13-beat cycle, and when she was recording “Sprinting Gazelle” her production engineer Steve Lowe, who is from Bolton in northern England, suggested the new title “A Baker's Dozen”. The striking introduction to the song was played on the double bass by Pete Billington with Arab inflections giving an effect reminiscent of the oud. Kelani said the song expresses both the tragedy and love of life, and got the audience to come in with cries of “Awf!” when appropriate. The effect of her vocal improvisations interwoven with the excellent tight playing of her band was very jazzy, and yet at the same time utterly Arab. As an encore Kelani and the band performed Sayyid Darwish's “I am Egyptian”, segueing into one of his most famous songs “Zourouni!” (“Visit Me!”). At the end of the concert the audience was invited to partake of Ramadan dates and almonds. Kelani's concert was an exhilarating opening to the Ramadan Nights season, which consisted of four main concerts and several smaller Freestage and Clubstage events. In the second main concert the Azeri singer and daf player Alim Qasimov and his daughter Fargana and ensemble shared the bill with the Kronos Quartet. In the first half of the concert the Kronos Quartet, and Qasimov and his group, played separately as a prelude to their joint performance in the second half. The pieces performed by Kronos included an Iraqi song, an Iranian lullaby and a specially-commissioned piece from the Palestinian collective Ramallah Underground. Alim and Fargana Qasimov and their ensemble performed a seven-part meditation on unrequited love from the thrilling classical Azeri mugham repertoire of which he is a leading exponent. Critics were enthralled, with the Daily Telegraph's Ivan Hewett writing: “The ecstatic, impassioned music of Central Asia could be the next big thing in world music.” The next concert was a particular treat for the Iranian, Turkish and Kurdish communities in London as it brought together the Kamkar family of Iranian Kurds, who make up the famous group the Kamkars, and the Turkish ney player Kudsi Erguner. The Kamkars play both classical Persian repertoire and Kurdish folk music. Erguner's ensemble included two vocalists and six musicians on Turkish and Western instruments. He performed from his CD “Islam Blues”. The final concert showcased music from Mali. Bassekou Kouyate, Mali's leading performer of the small desert lute known as the ngoni, performed with his electrified ngoni quartet Ngoni Ba. Kouyate and Ngoni Ba are regarded as new superstars, having won two BBC World Music awards in the past year. They were best African act, and Kouyate's debut album “Segu Blue” was critics' album of the year. Sharing the bill was Ensemble Tartit, a group of mostly female Tuareg drummers and singers who first came together in a refugee camp during the early 1990s. Their hypnotic drumming, clapping and chants have gained them a substantial following over the years. There is a lot of talk in Britain these days about the need for cultural interchange, but all too often well-meaning words are not translated into action. The Ramadan Nights concerts are a striking, but rare, example of Muslim and non-Muslim audiences in London coming together in a joint appreciation of Muslim art forms. __
