Songs of Wounded Kinship, a Review of the Town Hall, New York City, ASWAT concert of March 7, 2009

By David Shasha

Poet and scholar Ammiel Alcalay once appropriated the apt phrase "wounded kinship's last resort" in describing the role that music has played in maintaining what little connection is left between Arab Jews and their Middle Eastern compatriots. The place of the master musician Simon Shaheen in this complicated and contested relationship cannot be underestimated. Not only has Shaheen recorded many albums of classic Arabic music, as well as contemporary readings of the tradition, but he has also participated in many of the musical events that have over the years taken place in the Brooklyn Sephardic community. In private homes and synagogues, we have become familiar with the magical art of Simon Shaheen's mastery of this brilliant musical tradition.

Early this spring in New York City, at a concert devoted to the most beloved songs of the twentieth-century Arabic musical tradition, Shaheen brought back the hallowed tones of the great composers, singers, and musicians of the Middle Eastern world. Organizing the program after a request from the Kennedy Center in Washington for its current series on Arab culture, Shaheen developed the "Aswat" concert concept in order to restore the grandeur of the great musical past that was shared by all members of Middle Eastern society, regardless of religious affiliation.

This music enriched the classical palette of Arabic music by incorporating Western motifs and styles into the tradition. Early twentieth-century figures like Sayyid Darwish and Da'oud Husni were the progenitors and the inspiration for the acknowledged giant of twentieth-century Arabic song, Muhammad Abdel Wahhab. Abdel Wahhab's collaboration with the Egyptian diva Um Kulthum electrified the Arab world, where Abdel Wahhab's place as a songwriter was akin to Gershwin, Berlin, and Porter, and where Kulthum was the Sinatra, Presley, and Ella Fitzgerald of her age. The monthly concerts of Um Kulthum, broadcast on the radio all over the Arab world, quite literally became required listening, with millions of people stopping what they were doing to sit by their radios and hear the performances.

Read the complete review.