Re Shulman's NY Times Article about Amir Assafar's NY Concert
Dear Robin:
I cannot tell you how your
article's content was so typical and how much of a cliché coverage it had!
By the way, I had boycotted the NY Times years ago; that is boycotting to buy, read and write in it. Now, you have given me another reason for making my boycott comprehensive, never to give permission to a journalist from the NY Times to interview me again, as your interview with me last week was the third disappointing in a row. Here is why:
1. Why did you need to introduce
Amir's father as an Iraqi Shiite Muslim? Since when American or Latin American
musicians are introduced or categorized by their religion? You even did worse
than introducing religion, you mentioned his sect "Shiite" in your
coverage of an unrelated article about music. Even if Jewish or Christian
religions are being mentioned about artists of the industrial west, it never
describes them as Orthodox or moderate Jews or as Catholics and Protestants. So
why this kind of categorization is necessary with Moslems?!
2. I was very disturbed reading this
paragraph in your article:
"He said that a man in Baghdad
had said to him: "Why did you come here? Are you crazy? Why don't you just
go to London? The only maqam singer left who knows the entire repertory is in
London. Find him." He did. For the next three years he traveled through
Europe pursuing three great musicians of the maqam tradition."
Why is this quote important to
publish? Why you in particular felt that it should be documented? Just to give
the reader the impression that there is nobody left in IRAQ to perform the
maqam? And that only the industrial west AGAIN is the place to find everything
even the Iraqi maqam? How sad of Amir to actually mention this quote in the
interview, never mind how untrue it is!!! The current guru of maqam singing
does not live in London. Neither the crazy guy, who told Amir that he was crazy
for visiting IRAQ nor Amir were correct in this matter. The guru of maqam
singing at the present time is Hussein Al-Athamy who still proudly resides in
Baghdad, despite the American occupation and bombs, and who is highly active.
He constantly performs in and outside of IRAQ and he just published a book
about Iraqi women singers performing the maqam. Our Institute brought Al-Athamy
to perform in Massachusetts and DC in 2000. We have a video tape of this concert.
Perhaps you should watch it or buy some of his CDs. Your article was a typical
American-style journalism to write on a subject about which you don't know enough! So
before contacting artists in Tel Aviv as the article mentions about what Amir
has done, Baghdad with Al-Athamy in it and other talented singers and musicians
who have knowledge of maqam should have been paid attention to first and more!
Neither you nor the newly exploring Amir Assafar have knowledge about other
Iraqi maqam singers and musicians who live in Arab countries such as the UAE,
Jordan and Egypt. Therefore you basically have misinformed tens of thousands of
readers!
I remember vividly mentioning
Hussein Al-Athamy's name to you when you interviewed me and wasted my time for
over an hour. I even spelled his name for you letter by letter. Why didn't you
bother mention this in your article?
3. Your entire article failed to use
the terms Arabic maqam or Arabic music, very typical indeed in western
journalism these days and precisely after the current war and occupation on
IRAQ, which is to silence and/or discredit the Arab MAJORITY and their
contributions. Every time Iraqis are introduced in western media, they are
Sunnis and Shiites (not Moslems anymore) and they are Kurds and Christians
neglecting completely the terms Arab or Arabic! But in western societies, they
are Christians and Jews (with no sect significance.)!! Iraqi maqam despite
using some Persian and Kurdish names is mostly Arabic and had influenced the
music of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia and Europe.
4. You wrote, "Today, the
mosque is the safest repository for maqam music in Iraq, and variations of it
are part of the recitation of the Koran - by both Sunnis and Shiites -
including the call to prayer, mourning rituals, and celebrations of the birth
of the Prophet Muhammad."
This is a terrible paragraph indeed.
The vast majority of readers, who know little to nothing about mosques, Islam
and Iraqi maqam will come to the conclusion that maqam performances (in the
definition of a singer accompanied by music) are being performed in mosques,
which is completely untrue. A religious person would be very irritated by this
piece of misinformation. The paragraph included AGAIN the pathetic sectarian
mention of Sunnis and Shiites. Do you write about your synagogues having both
orthodox and moderates or churches having Catholics and Protestants? Absolutely
not. So PLEASE enough of this cheap sectarianism!!
I was very disappointed reading your
article. I will save myself future disappointment and frustration and never
deal with anyone from the NY Times again.
Cordially,
Wafaa'
Institute of Near Eastern &
African Studies (INEAS)
Robin Shulman shulman@nytimes.com
wrote:
hi Wafaa,
Here's the link to the article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/27/arts/music/27song.html?
Thanks again for your help.
Best, Robin
-------------------------------------
The NY Times Article
An Iraqi-American Helps to Keep
Soulful Music From Baghdad Alive
By ROBIN SHULMAN
Published in the NY Times: July 27,
2005
When Amir ElSaffar sang his sad,
lamenting music at an Arab-American arts center in Lower Manhattan earlier this
month, people closed their eyes and mouthed the words. When he stopped, they
crowded around and said how he had moved them.
Amir ElSaffar, a jazz and classical
trumpeter, singing maqam and playing the santur, a type of dulcimer, at the
Alwan for the Arts center.
The audience at an Arab-American
arts center in Lower Manhattan listening to maqam, a genre that has been played
for centuries in Baghdad. "I smell the Tigris," one woman at the
Alwan for the Arts center said. Others said the music made them smell Iraqi fish,
feel Iraqi heat and miss Iraqi family. While his songs took the audience of
Iraqi-Americans back to a Baghdad that no longer exists, Mr. ElSaffar is
fighting to help make sure that the music does.
The Iraqi maqam - maqam (pronounced
ma-KAHM) is the name for a musical genre and also the specific pieces in it -
has been played for centuries in Baghdad coffeehouses, homes and mosques. It
consists of a repertory of melodies, performed by a singer with an instrumental
ensemble, that can be used in improvisations according to specific rules.
But since the 1930's Egyptian and
Lebanese radio and later television have weaned Iraqis from homegrown
traditions. And during the last 60 years of frequent political turmoil and war,
some of the greatest maqam masters, along with other artists, have fled the
country. Since the American invasion in March 2003, the fear of violence has
kept many remaining musicians from performing and teaching. Today, only one
person alive is known to have mastered the full repertory of 56 maqam melodies,
Yeheskel Kojaman, an Iraqi musicologist, said in a telephone interview from
London. Unesco has identified the Iraqi maqam as an "intangible heritage
of humanity" and plans to encourage performances and training.
So when Mr. ElSaffar, an Iraqi-American
jazz and classical trumpeter who lives in New York, went to Baghdad in 2002 to
learn his ancestral musical tradition, he had trouble finding a maestro who
would take him on. For the last two and a half years he has been traveling in
Europe, studying with exiled Iraqi masters. Back in New York since May, he has
formed an ensemble to perform maqam music and has taught others to play it with
him.
Mr. ElSaffar, 27, does not seem like
a natural crusader for Iraqi culture. He was raised in Oak Park, Ill., by an
American Christian mother, a professor of Spanish literature, and an Iraqi
Shiite Muslim father, a physics professor. Mr. ElSaffar, who says he does not
subscribe to any particular religion, learned only a smattering of Arabic and
while growing up visited Iraq just once, with his father, in 1993.
But when he won a $10,000 prize for
jazz trumpet in an international competition, he said, he decided to use the
money to go to Iraq and learn its music. He added that only when he began to
weep at the Baghdad airport did he realize he had been starved to connect with
his father's country. In Mr. ElSaffar's first weeks in Baghdad in March 2002,
as he listened to a maqam and heard the pain in the singer's voice, he felt
something break open inside him, he said. "It sounded like crying to
me," he said, a sobbing that became singing and drew him in. He said that
he had also felt an intellectual fascination for the improvisation. He learned
to play a maqam on his trumpet, and soon found a teacher of joza, a fiddle made
from a coconut shell and the heart tissue of a water buffalo. The other
instruments in a maqam ensemble are usually the santur, a kind of dulcimer; an
Arabic tabla, a goblet-shaped drum; and a riqq, a tambourine.
By June 2002, when Mr. ElSaffar
returned to New York to play trumpet with Cecil Taylor, maqam music was
influencing his jazz performance and he said he knew he had become obsessed.
That fall, he went back to Iraq to continue studying the maqam, and stayed
until the end of the year.
He said that a man in Baghdad had
said to him: "Why did you come here? Are you crazy? Why don't you just go
to London? The only maqam singer left who knows the entire repertory is in
London. Find him." He did. For the next three years he traveled through Europe
pursuing three great musicians of the maqam tradition. He took the train with a
suitcase packed with a dozen maqam books, some 50 tapes, perhaps 75 CD's.
To make money, he got out his
trumpet for occasional jazz gigs, and also tapped an inheritance from his
mother, who had died. In Munich he went to Baher al-Regeb, among the first to
notate the Iraqi maqam, and the son of the maqam musician Hajj Hashem al-Regeb.
In a small city in the Netherlands he studied with a maqam singer known by her
first name, Farida. But in London he found his maestro in Hamid al-Saadi, the
man said to be the only one to know the entire repertory.
The teaching of the maqam is an oral
tradition passed from master to student. Systems for transliterating the music
in Western musical notation are just as approximate as transliterating Arabic
words in English letters. Mr. ElSaffar would record his lesson with Mr.
al-Saadi and then rehearse for hours from the recording, singing and playing
santur on his own.
Brilliant maqam composers last
established new pieces in the repertory in the 1920's, Mr. ElSaffar said. At
that time, Jews were the main instrumentalists for maqam music. When most Jews
left Iraq in the early 1950's, the government forced two Jewish musicians to
stay behind and train two Muslims in their art, Baher al-Ragab said in a
telephone interview from Munich. He said his father was one of the Muslims.
In his own search for musical
greats, Mr. ElSaffar contacted musicians in Tel Aviv only to find that the old
generation of Iraqi performers had died and no new one had risen in their
place.
Today, the mosque is the safest
repository for maqam music in Iraq, and variations of it are part of the
recitation of the Koran - by both Sunnis and Shiites - including the call to
prayer, mourning rituals, and celebrations of the birth of the Prophet
Muhammad. But Mr. ElSaffar said he hoped that by performing, teaching and
researching the maqam he can help the secular tradition of the music to thrive.
