Sami Abu Shumays

Well, in a few hours i'll be getting on a plane to San Francisco for a week of rehearsals, workshops and a concert with Aswat, a Bay-Area-based Arabic choir and orchestra--at which I'll be one of several guest artists, including a wonderful vocalist from Tunisia, Noureddine Kallel.  For any of you in the Bay Area, the concert will be this coming Saturday, Dec. 1st in San Mateo.  details can be found at Aswat's website, www.zawaya.org

I'll be giving a few maqam masterclasses on thursday evening and sunday afternoon, details at www.maqamlessons.com

I'm very much looking forward to seeing a lot of friends and students from Lark camp--I have to say, I really like the world music scene out there in northern california.  Unlike here in New York, it seems like a lot of musicians from a lot of different traditions know each other; they get together and explore each other's music quite a bit.  Here in New York, I know almost all of the Arab musicians & musicians who play for Middle Eastern Dance; but I know only a few Indian Musicians, and almost no musicians from other traditions... But I know they're out there!  (I'LL FIND YOU!!!)

But of course I'll miss my wife for a week.  We just had a lovely little vacation together in the Hudson Valley, at a place called Greenwood Lake, near Warwick, NY.  (we stayed at a wonderful inn called Anton's on the Lake www.antonsonthelake.com that I highly recommend).  We visited a spa, a winery, and a lovely art and craft town called Sugar Loaf, NY.  It was a nice little vacation; we went there last year, too, for some apple picking (you can see a sickeningly cute picture of us posing our faces in a cut-out painting of a lamb and a pig in front of an apple tree--from our trip last year--in my gallery).

So I'm off!

Before you listen, please take a minute and vote for us (Zikrayat) for the
2008 Independent Music Awards--we need your votes to win!
vote here: www.musiciansatlas.com
see the post below for more details.

This is our most recent performance from Alwan www.alwanforthearts.org
last Saturday night.  We had a great crowd and I think it was our best show yet!  The lineup was:

myself, on violin, vocals, rababa
Bridget Robbins, Nay
Tareq Abboushi, Buzuq, vocals
Dimitri Mikelis, Oud
Johnny Farraj, Riqq, vocals
Nikolai Ruskin, Tabla, vocals
     with
Salah Ragab on vocals
Gaida on vocals
     and
Dances by Dameshe, Leela, Nahara, and Yowalka

This is the first set of the show, and it featured Salah singing with us for the first time--he sang three songs beautifully; "Gameel Gamal," the second of the three, was really amazing. . . so full of soul and tarab; it's hard to believe he's performing for the first time--he's only 19, and has never sang publicly before this event!

Here's the set:
1.  Doulab Zanjaran   --(composed by myself)
2.  Pickles --(composed by Tareq Abboushi
3.  "Naima veil"--a dance number we found on an old film of Naima Akif called "Ahibbak Ya Hassan"; Dameshe did a solo to this number.
4.  "Ya-msahar eini" --a song for the pop singer Rami Ayash, featuring Salah Ragab
5.  "Gameel Gamal"--a song by Farid el-Atrash, featuring Salah; Nahara did a Shamadan solo (flaming candles on her head) to this number.
6.  "Yana Yana"--a song for Sabah, featuring Salah
7.  "Mafeesh Filoos"--a song for Lebanese singer Nasri Shams id-Din; with myself on vocals;  Dameshe, Leela, and Yowalka performed a group choreography to this number.

Enjoy!

Dear Friends, Listeners, Fans,

First, our Album "Zikrayat: Live at Lotus" has been named a Finalist in the 2008 Independent Music Awards!  I'm very excited, but I need your help: fan's votes will determine the final winner, and if we win they will make substantial promotional efforts for us in 2008, including selling our music in Border's Books.

So please take a minute to visit: the IMA jukebox at:
IMA Jukebox
and vote for us now.  If that link doesn't work, go to:
http://www.musiciansatlas.com/pages/IMAFinalist
click on "Album Finalists" and go to the category "Live Performances"
If you'd like to hear samples of other tracks from the album not included on the jukebox, please visit:
http://zikrayatmusic.com

The other news is, you can see for yourself, that i've updated and re-coded my website so that it and this blog page would be one entity rather than two.  I've been learning HTML and CSS coding over the last few months (in order to supplement my income a bit), and even though the website doesn't look that different--you can see the old site at
http://samimusicworld.com/archive/originalsite/index.html
I've entirely re-coded it into CSS to make it standards compliant.  The design is the original one by my wife; the new design doesn't change much visually, except changing most of the text into html rather than photoshop images.  you can view the source code if you like.

So, I know I keep saying i'm going to resume putting up regular podcasts (as well as the maqamlessons), and i will--thanks to all of you from all over the world who have written asking about them!--but it was suggested to me that i should actually start blogging, to keep fans and friends informed--and i realized that i haven't been taking full advantage of this page--i can put up blog posts in addition to podcast mp3s.  So this marks the start of that: i'll be putting up blog entries about what's going on with myself and zikrayat, in addition to podcast mp3s. 

Thanks for listening and writing!

Yours,
Sami

Amir ElSaffar, Iraqi-American Jazz Trumpet player, Singer and Santur player, discusses his newly released CD Two Rivers. He talks about the different ways he has combined Iraqi Music (of the Baghdad Maqam tradition) with Jazz in these pieces, and talks a little about his history with both kinds of music.

The CD is available now on Pi Recordings and at amazon.com

for more information on Amir and the album, please visit the Two Rivers myspace page and Amir's Website: www.amirelsaffar.com

CD release party at Joe's pub, Monday Oct. 22nd, 9:30pm

Anne Elise and I chat about The global youth village
http://globalyouthvillage.org/,
where we were teaching in July; and the Jefferson Center
http://jeffcenter.org/
in Roanoke, VA, where she is the educational programs coordinator

The young students at the Global Youth Village play 3 pieces (doulab bayati, doulab sikah, doulab hijaz) they learned by ear in their first week, and talk about how learning arabic music is different than the kinds of music they do. For more information on Global Youth Village, please visit: www.globalyouthvillage.org

This is the last podcast from last year's lark camp... as I depart for this year's camp...  The incomparable Brian Steeger, one of the true characters from lark camp, plays some music, makes us laugh, and gives his philosophical reflections on music.

Recorded after Lark Camp last year.  Mark and Ling Shien are a husband and wife musician team based in Marin County, CA, in the Bay area.  They've just released their latest CD "Spice Box" and updated their website:

www.helmmusic.com

In this podcast we highlight their musical diversity and chat about their history together.

Bridget Robbins plays nay and flute; we play a turkish piece, a baroque flute duet, she plays an armenian piece, and we play some Arabic tunes... and some nice conversation...

In honor of the release of our new CD, "Zikrayat: Live at Lotus,"
I have made a podcast featuring many of the pieces from the original performances that I had decided not to include on the CD.  My wife robin and I talk about the ensemble, the CD, and some of what we've done over the last year.

You can purchase the CD online at CDBaby and Amazon.  To those who do: thanks for supporting our dream!

If you haven't seen our website yet, please visit www.zikrayatmusic.com

The podcast is in two parts, see part B below.

In the second half of the podcast, robin and I talk a little about our theatrical ambitions, our way of working together, and I talk about how I mastered the CD, with six 1-minute excerpts of "Yamma-l-amar" illustrating the steps I took.

This is a lecture/demo on microtones.

I demonstrate the wide variety of microtones in use in Arabic music (by my count, at least 12 within a half step);

I explain:
1. the problems with describing the microtones used in arabic maqams as "quarter-tones"--since they are not exactly a quarter of anything.
2. the problems with the Comma system (the system of 54 divisions of the octave)
3. the problem with seeking too systematic an explanation of the microtones.

And I offer a different approach to understanding and learning intonation in arabic music: through relationships with other notes, and in particular through melodies and melodic phrases.

For those of you interested in a more thorough, academic treatment of the subject, I am working on a paper to flesh out some of the details, which I will link to this page.  This podcast is intended for a general audience.

At the end, Johnny Farraj, of maqamworld fame, joins me for a few pieces.

This is half of a rehearsal for our showcase next week at the national convention of APAP (the Association of Performing Artist Presenters) here in New York City.  

It is a free concert, open to the public.  Jan 21, at 6:15 pm.  The show is 20 minutes long.  For more details, please see our website:
www.zikrayatmusic.com

Tareq, a longtime musical friend of mine, plays buzuq (a long-necked, fretted lute he refers to as "the banjo of the middle east"), and talks about his musical interests, from classical (he started playing piano at around age 5; his mother is a piano teacher at the Edward Said national music conservatory in Ramallah, Palestine) to jazz (he attended William Patterson University in New Jersey, getting a degree in Jazz Piano) to Arabic, to his own project, "Shusmo"--meaning "What's it's name?" in Arabic.  He plays one of the tunes from Shusmo's first album, as well as one of the tunes he's currently working on.  We finish with a duet improvisation in Maqam Hijaz.

To find out more about Tareq, and to listen to and purchase Shusmo's first CD (appropriately titled "One"), please visit www.shusmo.com and
myspace.com/shusmo1

I will add, by way of recommendation, that this CD is my favorite so-called "fusion" Album out there--actually one of the only ones I can stand!