Khaliji Radio Hour
Dear Friends,
Every friend who I’ve spoken to in the last weeks has been swallowed by January. Dangling over the recess of winter’s pit, my salvation was a little tambourine, called the riq, fish skin over its face, and five sets of metal jangles around its edges. A student came back from Israel with a gift for me, a marketplace instrument not quite professional, that I thought I would make no use of. But a strange passion stole me into the wormhole of Khaliji music, two moons of midnight hours following Youtube trails through the heavy grooved sea desert sounds of the Arabian Gulf states, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, this little drum carving the rhythms into my digits.
The splitting of the sea, the culmination of the Exodus myth is an image of freedom, of passage through. The sea, an impermeable object, opens. All the waters of the world, in cisterns, pitchers and rivers, split, freedom universal. That feeling explodes into song. The women had gone out with drums, with riqs, because they carried faith that a reason for song would come. And the song was so beautiful, it contained all the songs of the world to come. What did it sound like? It sounded like the Youtube trail I’ve followed the last month – Khaliji Radio Hour.
As a composer, I don’t recall when, I learned that the best melodies arrive as containers for a flood of the heart that longs for something to hold its suffering or awe. One composed at the full moon after our matriarchal Yom Kippur, one after the death of a young boy, another with my daughter at the playground, the blind joy of children a balm for the worst sorrows. The melody by the sea then that Miriam called out, the sound of four hundred years of slavery, the sound of plagues, blood and death, mixing with the sounds of water, mothers picking pomegranates out of the sea, the thirsty taste of juice, a gift of unbounded joy when it is least expected.
The drum was a miracle because I could play it anywhere at any hour of the day. Late at night beside the woodstove, the oud and violin far too loud to play with sleepers above, but little finger movements over the skin were akin to the nearly inaudible sounds of mice and my musical prowess could bloom in silence. I took the marketplace instrument with me on the long drives to school and to the city, and there were exercises to accomplish, the playlist bumping, one hand on the steering wheel, the other practicing. When my family got overwhelmed by the tapping, I could play even more quietly, fingers rolling in rhythm over the skin of my knee.
Every time I came across a song that really grabbed me, I’d send it along to my friend Zahra, who knows these languages and rhythms as mother tongue. At first she was happy to be in musical collaboration, but by the end of the pilgrimage, she was aghast at the white Jewish American who had unearthed the songs of her youth, the songs of her mother’s youth, the classics that everyone knows, and the sounds at the outskirts reserved for sincere aficionados. Why these songs, she asks me? Something about melody and groove, beauty in melody, simplicity in groove, and the exchange between them. I don’t know what ineffable feelings the composers were wrapping their melodies around, but their suffering and joy comes through, beyond language and time.
I made you a playlist of the hits, Khaliji Radio Hour, but really these are the sounds of the sea. Though my ancestry goes through Eastern Europe and the melodies of my youth were the minor dirges brought over from the shtetls of Poland, something more ancient in me recalls these other sounds. The Red Sea they crossed moves to the rhythms of the local sound traditions of Sanaa, Jeddah and Basra, the songs of the pearl divers and the desert sufis. Impermeable objects open. Sometimes the song enacts the magic, other times she is the only response to wonder.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman