Habib Yammine: Thurayya Pleiades

Habib Yammine is a Lebanese percussionist, composer, ethnomusicologist and teacher whose doctoral dissertation was on the popular music of Yemen and this album, released on the French Le Chant du Monde label in 2008, is a masterful display of Arabic percussion.  Yammine plays the riqq, a small frame drum with cymbals held in the hands, the daff, a larger frame drum, and the darbouka, which has a goblet shape.  

Yammine is joined by his wife Aicha Redouane, who also plays the daff as well as chants, while Oussama Chraibi, a native of Morocco, plays the bongo, the double drum often associated with Cuban music, though Yammine noted in a very helpful interview in the liners that 1940s music in Egypt fused Cuban with native sounds.

Naturally, a listener of this album has to really like percussion, especially those of the Arabic world played by the hands, because there is well over an hour with the eleven pieces, but for those who do get a chance to hear this or other recordings of Middle Eastern percussion (including amazing Persian music, for example), the rewards are many.

The precision, varied rhythms based on several beat patterns, and the chants, along with the crystalline production is quite hypnotic and entrancing and it is not only great to read Yammine's interview with ethnomusicologist Gilles Delebarre, but Redouane's essay gives a poetic interpretation of her husband's art.  For example, she writes of the alchemy in his work that "is quite simply love, a love recounted . . . in flashes of light as he tells of the seasons and their passing, of succeeding generations of human beings, rolled out by his drums across the way of Time."

It is telling when Yammine, is replying to a question from Delebarre about the first piece having an unusual 19-beat rhythmic pattern, tells him that "you don't go to the sea to count the waves, you go to be lulled by it, to be carried aloft on the crest of the waves."  This is a reminder of the best advice this blogger has heard about how to listen to music:  try to follow the sounds, not the notes.  As adherents of the mystical Sufi form of Islam, the musicians compose and play in such a way, as Redouane noted, that it is "a nver-ending source of joy [that] fills the present moment with fruitfulness."

Madjid Khaladj: Iran, The Art of the Tombak

The tombak, also known as the zarb, is the centerpiece of Iranian classical music percussion and the drum, made of mulberry wood or walnut and covered with goat skin, is often to the music what the tabla is for Indian classical music.

One of the more amazing elements of playing the instrument is the variety of sounds and ways of playing involved, as the use of all the fingers and palms at the edges and centers of the drum head provides an astonishing range of dynamics.

This recording from the venerable French label Musique du Monde presents the talents of Madjid Khaladj, who moved to Paris to work as a teacher and performer in Iranian classical percussion.  The album presents a range of pieces demonstrating his mastery of the tombak.  Much of the brilliance of the musical form and the particular use of percussion is the improvisational techniques utilized (again, much as with Indian music).

The pieces on the album are from a variety of rhythms, including 6/8, 7/16, 12/8 and 12/16 types, as well as those based on the number of beats, ranging from 2,4, 5 or 6, with these performances usually accompanying such traditional Iranian pieces as sung poems, music for classical dances and others.

Madjid Khaladj began studying the tombak at age 7 and learned another traditional instruments, as well.  In his early twenties, during the mid-1980s, he went to Paris to teach and remains in that city, though he also instructs in Switzerland and remains a very active performer and teacher, having worked with Lisa Gerrard (formerly of Dead Can Dance) and Ry Cooder.

Again, this album might not be of great interest to those who aren't into percussion, because of its total focus on the tombak, but for those who are, it can be a fascinating excursion into an art of longstanding in a part of the world that often has negative associations because of religion and politics.