A Trip to Nouri Brothers

Discs plucked from the shelves of Paterson, New Jersey's greatest self-proclaimed"shopping center": Nouri Brothers, where new stock butts heads with decades-old, dust-covered gems we didn't even know were available on this continent.

This three-hour tribute features Morocco's Grande Voix d'el Aita, Syria's King of the Oud, some long out-of-print Oum Kalsoum, mid-period Nass El Gihwane and Jil Jilala, nascent raï, jaw-droppingly rare Fayza Ahmed, and much, much more.

Listen to the show in the archives

Aleppo to Benghazi

On Wednesday, October 5, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio will take a three-hour road-trip from Syria to Libya, with stops in Aleppo, Damascus, Amman, Cairo, and Benghazi. On the way we'll hear some of the region's most gripping avant-garde, black metal, collage, hip-hop, punk, synth-pop, and more. 

Bookmark the page and see you Wednesday night!

Revolution Rap: Arabic Hip-Hop | Bodega Pop 12

 
Listen to "Ramallah Underground" 

 
Listen to "Beit" 

 
Listen to "I'm Not Your Prisoner"

 
Listen to "As Salam 3alikum"

 
Listen to "Talakat" 

Just reupped the 24-track album here.

Hyperbolic as it may sound, Arabic rap and hip-hop has had a significant place in the series of uprisings that have swept across North Africa and the Middle East since December 2010. Considering that what we in the west sometimes like to call the "Arab Spring" is predominantly a youth movement, it makes sense. 

Despite the not-coincidentally alliterative title of this mix, not every track I've chosen to include has a relationship to the "revolution," as it were. (Lebanese rapper Rayess Bek's "3al 2anoune 3al2anine," for instance, was recorded a decade ago.) But all of the tracks are, in some way, shape or form "revolutionary" -- for their content, their sound, their innovation. Nearly half of the tracks feature a female artist. 

Here's the moment where I'm tempted to make reference to my country's seemingly inexorable movement toward war in Syria, relating that to this music (and, by association, the people who made it) ... but there really is no real relationship and, frankly, I don't know, exactly, what to say. We tend -- as a culture, a country, a political player on the world's stage -- to speak too often for others. We need to learn how to listen.

Asmahan | Legend of the Druze Princess

Just reupped this revelatory 27-track collection here.

Asmahan (born Amal al-Atrash, 1917, reputedly on the Mediterranean en route from Izmir, Turkey, to Beirut, Lebanon) was, simply put, one of the 20th century's greatest singers and the only Middle Eastern diva generally considered to have given Egypt's Oum Kalsoum a serious run for her money.

Asmahan strikes an interesting contrast to Kalsoum. Whereas Kalsoum was one of the most powerful Egyptians in history, in great part due to her brilliant management of her own career and image, Asmahan's brief, stop-and-go trajectory, which ended in her death at age 26 by suspicious car accident, was shrouded in rumor and intrigue, despite her family's suffocating control of her life and, subsequently, her memory.




The song above, "Ya Habibi Ta 'al al-Haqni," was my first sonic experience of this legendary singer's small but significant body of work; it was, oddly enough, also Sherifa Zuhur's. Zuhur, who wrote Asmahan's Secrets: Woman, War, and Song, first heard the tune on a cassette in the early 1970s that she picked up in a small music store on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles -- Silwani's Imports.

Zuhur's description of the place sounds remarkably like the places frequented by the present narrator. "Cramped, lively and filled with audio cassettes, key chains and souvenirs," she writes, "men from the Arab-American community dropped in and drank tea and coffee with the owner. I used to visit and browse, adding to my small collection of Arabic records and tapes."

Zuhur didn't listen to the tape that Silwani's owner, Mustafa, had suggested to her until she was on a trip to Cairo, by way of Sweden. In the early morning she popped the tape into her recorder:

"Percussion instruments and violins plucked a la pizzicato began with a tango. The singer's clear tones descended and rose, emphasizing the rhythm. Suddenly, the Eastern character of the song became more pronounced, as she began her improvisation (the mawwal) and modulated to another musical mode (maqam). The singer's diction was precise, and she effortlessly executed the wider sliding, trills and tonal patters performed by Arab singers. The song was 'Ya Habibi Ta 'al al-Haqni,' composed by Madhat Assim. 'It sounds so ... so old-fashioned. A cartoon tango but sophisticated,' I told my friend." [The song, Zuhur notes later in the book, had been previously sung by the Egyptian cinema pioneer Mary Kwini.]

I made my own discovery of Asmahan a quarter century later, at Daff and Raff Books & Music ("A Gateway to Another Culture") in the heart of Cambridge, Mass. (52-B JFK Street, currently occupied by Raven Used Books.) I don't know how my friends and I stumbled on to this store -- my memory suggests it was a random accident -- but I do recall immediately plucking this 1988 Baidaphon Beirut CD from the shelf. My own response to "Ya Habibi Ta 'al al-Haqni," the first track on the album, was much less sophisticated than Zuhur's had been to the same song: I began to tear up, felt a dull ache in my chest and watched as the skin on my arms filled with goosebumps. 

Over the last 15-16 years since I first heard Asmahan's voice, I've managed to find maybe half a dozen CDs of her music, mostly in Arabic media stores like long-since closed Princess Music in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (the neighborhood where much of Saturday Night Fever took place). For this collection, I've excised all duplicate songs, as well as those featuring Asmahan's brother, Farid, rather than Asmahan herself. Not quite random, the order was determined largely by choosing my favorite five or six songs first and then following those with whatever seemed to best click. While most of these tracks run somewhere in the 5:00 - 10:00 minute range, there are two longer pieces, of nearly half an hour each. I placed one in the mid-section of the collection; the other I placed last. 

ROGUE STATES | Bodega Pop on WFMU

This Wednesday, March 19

Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio 
presents:

Rogue States

Music from Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria + Zimbabwe

Pop, funk, folk, rap, disco and "Dear God, what was that?!?" from the Axis of Evil, Beyond the Axis of Evil and the Outposts of Tyranny.

Bookmark the show now!

Brooklyn Bodega, Syrian Soul

Roads and Kingdoms commissioned me to write a piece for them. I focused on the Syrian bodega on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn where I first began to seriously collect this music, with tangents on Syrians in New York, a bodega-related conceptual art project, and more. (Read it here.) Bonus ten-track "Best of" playlist, here.

Asala Nasri | A Night at the Opera

Listen to Asala's thrilling performance of "Khalleek Hena" 

Stay for the whole concert.

This blog just passed the half-a-million page views threshold. In gratitude, here is one of the most incredible recent live recordings I have on CD, by Syrian superstar Asala Nasri. I just wrote a whole piece about the little Syrian bodega on Fifth Avenue in South Slope Brooklyn where I first discovered her music--I'll let you know when it posts. (It was commissioned by another site.)

Meanwhile, thanks again, everyone; and, really, don't miss this album.

Asala Yousef | 2008 CD

Listen to the mind-blowing last track

Reupped by reader request in 320 HFS-level KBPS, here.

[Originally posted in May 2010.] On July 4 of 2009, my [now ex-]wife and I spent the day wandering around Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn, a tad southish of downtown, an area we almost never get to in the normal course of our daily lives.

At one point, we stopped in at an Arabic-run phone card and doo-dad store on Court Street, a couple of doors down from Rashid Music, which is perhaps the oldest, and certainly one of the greatest Arabic music stores in the country. I'm pretty sure that this especially unflattering photograph of me:



was taken in this very phone card and doo-dad shop. Note the hookahs to my right. But, far more importantly, note all of the CDs in glass cases and cassettes against the wall. You're seeing less than 1/3rd of the bounty this place held. Rashid may have the reputation--and the staying power--but the doo-dad place sure did have an impressive heap o' steamin' mess o' music on your choice of polyester film with magnetic coating or polycarbonate plastic.

As I've claimed a number of times on this blog, there are really two kinds of store keeps: (a) those who are puzzled but absolutely thrilled to see people beyond their usual customers interested in "their" music; and (b) those who view such intruders as though they were Vikings, there to do what Vikings are generally known, and not terribly much adored, for doing.

The woman in the back of the phone card and doo-dad place was, happily, one of the friendliest shop keeps I've ever met. She wanted to know what we were doing for Independence Day--not, mind you, July 4, but the next day, July 5, Algerian Independence Day. She, as an Algerian immigrant, had a number of ideas of how we might want to spend AI Day in America, all of them involving cutting out coupons for discounted "whole lamb" from the Arabic newspaper she brought forth and proceeded to spread out on the glass casing housing the CDs. She thought it was nothing short of crucial for us to buy a lamb--"they are so cheap for you if you buy the whole thing at one time"--and invite all of our friends out to whatever park we, as White People, clearly lived within walking distance of. (Prospect Park, duh.) Where, presumably, we'd find a grill big enough to accommodate a whole, dead, skinned lamb.

Our conversation, like a fat summer fly, hovered around lambs and elaborate Independence Day picnics for a solid fifteen minutes, and then I started getting--I'll just fess up to it--a bit impatient, frankly. I mean, we were lying, Nada and I; we were not actually going to celebrate Algerian Independence Day, just as we had not actually celebrated U.S. Independence Day. And, even if we were, it was pretty to super doubtful that we would do so in a way that might involve the purchase of a whole, mid-sized mammal--however cheap.

I tried to steer the conversation over into the realm of music. We had just seen a film starring Abdel Halim Hafez, and one scene in particular, with Hafez in a boat on the Nile with some friends, singing to the object of Hafez's romantic obsession, had been much on our mind. The song was terrific and haunting. We could almost hum it for her. Did she know this movie or song and whether or not the song might be on CD somewhere in the shop?

No, she was Algerian, she reminded us, BUT she had a friend who was Egyptian who knew everything about the movies. Everything! She called her. Within 6 minutes she had our film and song titles (both of which I've since forgotten) and, after flipping through a series of CDs, determined they didn't have the song anywhere in the store.

Did we want the coupon for the lamb?

I asked her to recommend a more-or-less recent CD that she really, really, really loved. She stared at me blankly for a few moments, then suddenly smiled. "Aha!" she said, disappearing beneath the horizon line of the CD case for a bit, then reappearing with the CD you see above.

"Have you heard Asala Yousef?" she asked. I flitted through my memory banks. Asalah Nasri, yes. Yousef? No. "Who is she?" I asked.

And here, things get a bit hazy. I'm almost positive that she said that Asala Yousef was from her home country, Algeria. Like, 89% so. But I'm probably totally wrong about that, as I've found nothing online to suggest this is the case.

There's almost nothing about Asala Yousef online--just links to MP3s and YouTube videos. In one list of famous Druze singers, she's included as a Syrian. In the comments of several YouTube videos, people are claiming she's either Palestinian or Israeli--mostly Israeli. There is at least one YouTube video of her where the person who uploaded it is writing in Hebrew as opposed to Arabic. And, really, that's extremely rare. So it's possible she is Israeli--though she's obviously singing in Arabic. Which is less rare, but still not super common.


Asala Yousef vid, uploaded by Hebrew speaker


Asala Yousef vid, uploaded by Arabic speaker

So, I'm at a loss. Who is Asala Yousef and where does she come from? The music sounds Lebanese to me. Anyone out there know? [Update: Someone out there did know and left the answer in the comments.]

Meanwhile, she's got an incredibly powerful voice and you really should be downloading this shit, since it's free & all and double-since the phone card and doo-dad place where I bought this?

Not there anymore.

Asmahan | Yalli Hawak

Listen to " Emta Ha Ta'raf"


Get it all here.


I will not open the Lester Bangs book to a random page and build another entire post on a creative misreading of one of his sentences. I will not open the Lester Bangs book to a random page and build another entire post on a creative misreading of one of his sentences. I will not--


Oh, hey; how you doing? I didn't hear you come in. Heh. Happy Bastille Day! Sit, sit. Have some tea and help yourself to a bit of the baklava; I'll be right with you ...

So! While you were away, I received a couple of very sweet, appreciative emails from folks who recently wandered into the Bodega. In addition to making me feel warm and fuzzy, they also reminded me of why I started this blog in the first place: the fact that there has been, historically, so little attention paid in our culture to music from around the world. If, by "attention" we mean "reviews, essays and books," then this is still very much the case, although music blogs like the dozens of examples I've linked to in the right-hand aisle are one medium or platform or whatever where music from all over the world is finally getting some of the international exposure that so much of it deserves.

The great Druze superstar and pop innovator Asmahan was one of the first non-western voices your Bodega proprietor ever heard; it was back in the 1990s when I discovered this CD in the stacks of the since-closed Daff and Raff Arabic Bookstore in Boston. I remember it as though it was just yesterday ... but worry not, I shan't bore you with that particular memory. Suffice to say that it was a purely random find and that, along with a handful of other random finds, also in the 1990s, completely changed my musical horizons forever.

The present CD--would you like some more tea?--was a more recent find, mid-2000s maybe, most likely at (the since-closed) Princess Music on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge. I had, by that time, read Sherifa Zuhur's Asmahan's Secrets: Woman, War, and Song, one of the few (like, three? four?) books on Arabic music in English, so I had some context for her, or at least knew something about her life and influence as well as about her mysterious death, on this very day in 1944, an event that has given rise to a thousand conspiracy theories--everything from Asmahan being a Nazi spy to Oum Kalsoum having her rubbed out so she, Oum, could take over as the First Lady of Arabic Song.

Before you leave with your precious download, I should say that--and I'm being completely honest here, I swear--I had no idea that Asmahan died on July 14 when I pulled her CD down off the shelf tonight to post it and, yes, when I glanced at the Wikipedia page I linked to above and saw that date, I got a body-wide case of goosebumps. So, I don't care what your religion is, things do happen for a reason and, despite my use of the word a paragraph or two above, there is probably no such thing as "random." 

Faiza Ahmed | Faiza Ahmed

Listen to "Set El Habayeb"

Get it all here.

A longtime favorite CD, most likely found at Princess Music in Bay Ridge. 

Faiza Ahmed was born in 1934 in Lebanon. Her mother was Lebanese; her father, Syrian. She was raised in Damascus, Syria, and began singing as a child, imitating Leila Mourad and Asmahan. She sang her first song professionally when she was 13. 

She eventually moved to Cairo, where she recorded albums and acted in six films. She died in 1983 at the age of 50.

Asala Nasri | Al Mushtaka

Listen to "Al Mushtaka"

Get it all here.

Born in Damascus to the famous Syrian composer Mostafa Nasri in 1969, Asala began her recording career in 1991 at the age of 21. She moved to Egypt, where she subsequently became a superstar all over the Arabic world. In my opinion, only Najwa Karam's voice rivals Asala's.

It's likely that I found this at Rashid's in Brooklyn.

Watch Asala sing live: