Hamdulillah: Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, Volume II

The 2015 edition of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music in Fes, Morocco is going on right now, having started last Friday the 22nd and ending this Saturday the 30th.  Established in 1994 by Association Fes Saiss, which is concerned with "artistic preservation, international cooperation, and other humanitarian causes," the festival presents a wide array of music from around the world.  This year's lineup, for example, includes musicians from sub-Saharan Africa, Scotland, Iraq, Portugal, India, China, Azerbaijan, Spain and even the current lineup of The Temptations!

This recording consists of two discs sampling some of the amazing music from the 1997 and 1998 Fes festivals.  Musics included in the set provide a fascinating array of performers.    On disc one, featured performers include The Ahmed Piro Ensemble, representing Arab-Andalusian (medieval Arab Spanish origins) music, was joined by the impressive Amina Alaoui on vocals.  The ensemble Taqtouqa Al Jabaliyya performs Taqtouga music from the Rif Mountains region of Morocco.  Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar brings classical Indian vocals from the Hindustani region.  The remarkable Children of Abraham is a consortium of choirs featuring Christian, Jewish and Muslim youth.  The great Alim Oassimov, from Azerbaijan, demonstrated his remarkable vocalizations from Sufi-inspired chants.  The gorgeous voice of Francoise Atlan, of France, emphasizes Jewish Sephardic song traditions.  Albert Bouhadanna is joined by the Arab-Andalusian Orchestra of Mohammed Briouel for a performancebased on the piyyout, a Jewish music from Morocco.

The second disc includes Central Asian sufi music as performed by Monajat Yulcheva of Uzbekistan; the Iraqi maqam tradition of mystical texts and poetry performed by Hussayn Al Azami and the Al Kindi Ensemble.  The breathtaking sound of Javanese gamelan is represented by the Wacana Budaya Gamelan group.  The amazing vocalist Sharam Nazeri of Iranian Kurdistan (a people who have been much oppressed in Iran, Iraq and Turkey) is backed by the excellent Dastan Ensemble.  Finally, there is the monumental 39-minute rendering of the phenomenon of The Whirling Dervishes of Konya representing the fantastic traditions of the Sufi mystic and poet, Jallaluddin Rumi--a stunning end to a fantastic sampling of music from the two festivals.

The Sounds True label, much like the Ellipsis Arts label, has released a great deal of spiritual material of all kinds, much of which has New Age connotations.  Whatever one makes of some of this, there are some excellent recordings of spiritual musics from around the world released by the label, including a fine album by the late, great Sudanese oud master  Hamza el-Din, as well as some excellent compilations, including this one.

The quality of sound from these live productions is very good and is clear and crisp.  Notably, the hauntingly beautiful Children of Abraham performance was engineered by Steve Van Zandt, presumably the guitarist best known for his work with Bruce Springsteen, while the rest was done by another engineer.  A handsomely-produced booklet details each track with photos and information on the performers.

There is a companion volume, the first, called Bismillah: Highlights from the Fes Festival, sampling from earlier editions of the festival. Hopefully, a copy can be located and highlighted here sometime.  Meantime, anyone interested in music from the Middle East, northern Africa and central Asia would benefit greatly from picking up a copy of this stunning album.

Dastan Ensemble with Shahram Nazeri: Homage to Molavi (Rumi)

This wasn't chosen based on what came before (Van Morrison's mystical Astral Weeks), but it is a nice unintentional pairing.  Through Eternity is a fantastic rendering of the mystical and spiritual music of the Sufi branch of Islam and devoted to the great Persian poet, jurist and theologian Jalalaldin Muhammad Balkhi Molvai, or Rumi, recorded by the Dastan Ensemble of Persian musicians accompanied by the superb vocalist Shahram Nazeri at a concert in Washington, D.C. in 1997.

Rumi was born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan within the Persian empire and died in Turkey at age 66.  Theology was a family occupation, but Molavi added work as a judge and mystical poet to his life's work, the latter coming to the fore when Rumi was in his late thirties and met Shams Tabrizi, a figure of some mystery who is said to have mentored the younger man in the mysteries of Sufism.

Afterwards, Molavi became a prolific poet, composing some 2,500 ghazals, a poetic form usually between 5 and 15 couplets, dedicated the Shams Tabrizi, another 25,000 rhyming couplets known as the Masnavi, and 1,600 quatrains called the Rubaiyat (not the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a Persian poet, astronomer and mathematician who lived a century or so prior to Rumi.)

Rumi's poetry speaks often of "love," but this is code for the relationship between the believer and the Creator, not between people and there are many other similarly "coded" metaphors, including the drinking of wine and the resulting drunkenness that symbolizes the ecstasy of mystical love.  The beautiful flow and smooth structures of his poetry, even rendered into English from Farsi, is also remarkable and YHB had the pleasure of reading Rumi's works some twenty years ago.

This gorgeous tribute to Molavi by the Dastan Ensemble is framed around the incredible vocal work of Shahram Nazeri, known as a preeminent singer of both Sufi and Persian classical music.  His clear and strong voice is highlighted by the demanding staccato (if it can be called that) embellishments that are a centerpiece of Persian vocalizing. 

Nazeri is backed by the excellent ensemble of Hamid Motebassem on the lute-like tar, the backbone of Persian classical music and setar, the latter being the sitar of north Indian classical music; Hossein Behroozi-Nia on the barbat, another lute-like instrument known as the oud in Arabic-speaking countries; Kayham Kalhor on the setar and the kamancheh, the latter being the original fiddle that is the great ancestor of those instruments found later in Asia and Europe; and Pejman Hadadi, on the tombak, a drum in the shape of a goblet, and the daf, a Sufi ceremonial instrument that is a large frame drum with rows of metal rings on the inside to make a distinctive ringing percussive sound.

This concert focuses on two types of Persian modal structures: the Bayat-e-Esfahan and the Mahur, with five pieces performed in the first and a longer single work from the second.  The first track "Dar Asheghee Peeceede'am" (Intertwined in Love) uses twenty-one couplets from Rumi.  The last piece, ""Del Meeravad Ze Dastam" (My Heart is Slipping from My Grasp) takes a much shorter sampling from the work of another masterful Persian poet, Hafez, who lived in the century following Rumi, but who had similar thematic concerns.

Persian music is among the most majestic of any in the world and this a performance by true masters of the Sufi devotional form, rendering sound in a fashion that does great justice to the spirit of the Sufi poetic paragons of Rumi and Hafez.