Dear Readers,
This month I’d like to take you as far from Culver City as we can go without leaving the Earth: to the stage of the Royal Opera House in Muscat, Oman, almost exactly halfway around the world.
A few years ago, someone I met through local politics learned that I also work part-time as a bassist and asked who is the most famous person I have played with. I had not been asked a question like that for a while, and it took me an awkwardly long time to answer.
I have played with some artists who are big deals within their genres, such as Shlomo Mintz, Glenn Branca, John Raitt, and Anthony Braxton, but none of them is a household name. Eventually I said “Mohammad Assaf.”
That did not land. Mohammad Assaf is also a niche artist, but his niche is the people of the Middle East, which is a much larger group than fans of classic Broadway, experimental electric guitar orchestras, free jazz, etc.
In 2004, I joined MESTO: the Multi-Ethnic Star Orchestra, a group created and conducted by Nabil Azzam. While he was a Culver City resident when I met him, Azzam grew up in the Middle East and studied and performed with many of its leading musicians. These experiences were the core of his UCLA ethnomusicology dissertation.
Azzam found the members of MESTO through word of mouth. He wanted a large group that played arrangements, not a traditional Arabic ensemble, so he needed musicians accustomed to reading scores and following a conductor, but the players also needed to adapt to the alternate pitch system used in Arabic music. The group he put together mirrored the diversity of Los Angeles, with a majority of the band classically-trained players who freelance in multiple styles and a small core of Arabic music specialists, from various backgrounds, on oud, qanun, and percussion.
Since I joined, we have performed all over Southern California, in Detroit, which has the largest Arab-American community, and in Jordan, Egypt, Abu Dhabi, and Oman. Every show has featured guest singers but, since few of them speak much English, which is my only language, and soloists usually only interact with the music director even in orchestras which share a language, I have not gotten to know them. Their talents were obvious; their stature was not.
Moroccan diva Karima Skali was accompanied by a documentary TV crew when she joined us in Detroit which, combined with the nearly half-a-million views some of our videos with her have received, gives some idea of her status. Palestinian singer Dalal Abu Amneh was doing graduate work in neuroscience when she performed with the band and had only her husband as her entourage, but she has since both completed her PhD and established a full-time music career.
The first sign that Mohammad Assaf was on another level from these excellent performers was when we got on our flight to Oman in 2016 and there was a movie about him on the in-flight entertainment system. The Idol dramatizes Assaf’s childhood in a Gaza refugee camp and his development as a musician, climaxing with him illicitly crossing the border to Egypt to perform on the Arab Idol TV show. Like Baz Luhrman’s Elvis and many other biopics, the dramatization cuts in its final scenes from the lead actor to actual footage of the subject himself, in this case winning the program’s second season competition. Some scenes in The Idol were shot on location in Gaza, the first movie to film there in decades. Palestine submitted it for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar but it was not among the five nominees.
More surprises were ahead. We rehearsed a set of music with Assaf, combining several of his songs with some classic Arabic material, and we learned that both nights at the 1,100-seat Royal Opera House were completely sold out.
Each night, when Assaf sang “Ali el Kuffiyeh” (Raise the Kuffiyeh), his song from the final round of Arab Idol, the audience leapt from their seats, dancing in the aisles and pumping the checked Palestinian scarf in the air, while the dozen ushers ran around like extras in A Hard Day’s Night, trying in vain to get them to sit down.
When MESTO started performing in the Middle East, people here asked the members, especially the Jewish members, if we were afraid. Our first trip was to Jordan, and I was a little apprehensive. I hadn’t traveled outside North America and Europe, and I hadn’t been to a country that wasn’t some sort of a democracy. It quickly became apparent that the Jordanians we met were too busy living their lives to worry too much about their lack of representative government and that they either kept their feelings about Jews well hidden or did not confuse the Jewish Americans in the band with Israelis.
In one conversation with locals, one of the LA musicians asked if they felt safe, thinking of all the images of Mideast violence we had seen. One Jordanian replied laughing that we were from LA. Don’t people shoot at each other from their cars on the freeway? What about the Bloods and the Crips? They get Snoop and Dre records in Jordan too. Point taken.
Arabic music has different relationships to tradition and nationalism than any American popular music. Assaf has sung classic Arabic songs alongside originals and English-language pop covers from the start of his career. He is celebrated for his vocal resemblance to Egyptian star Abdel Halim Hafez, whose career ran from the 1950s-1970s, and regularly performs his material, including in his shows with MESTO. While Assaf’s records use all the technology of contemporary pop, when MESTO plays his songs and those of other current Arabic stars such as Mohammad Abdu using the acoustic instrumentation of Hafez’s era, the continuity is seamless, without the novelty that accompanies most “unplugged” versions of hip hop or hard rock songs.
More significant is the relation to nationalism. Assaf has been known as “the Voice of Gaza” throughout his career. “Ali el Kuffiyeh” was a call for unity at a moment of conflict between Hamas, who dominated the elections in Gaza, and Fatah, who did the same in the West Bank. Assaf follows in the footsteps of Umm Kulthum, the queen of Arabic music. Virginia Danilesson’s book “The Voice of Egypt” and documentary A Voice Like Egypt recount how Kulthum, through her performances and persona, helped create a modern Egyptian national identity parallel to the successful movement for independence from British colonial rule led by her friend Gamal Nassar. It is difficult to think of a similar collaboration between a nation’s greatest performing artist and the leader of its liberation movement. There are, of course, many links between music and social movements since the 1960s, but the closest parallel is probably Bob Marley’s role in Jamaican politics. In 1978 Marley famously brought the heads of Jamaica’s political parties together to join hands on stage during a concert, a gesture which significantly calmed the nation’s internal political violence.
In May 2023, Assaf’s 2015 song “Ana Dammi Falastini” (My Blood is Palestinian) was removed from streaming services, including Spotify, Amazon, and Apple, apparently at the request of his label, the Saudi-owned Platinum Records. Platinum had reacted to an online petition calling for the removal of “anti-Israel” content, then reversed its decision within a few days because of the outcry, which initially accused the platforms of censorship.
It is unfortunately easy to understand why this song landed on the would-be blacklist, even though its lyrics never mention Israel. Even I winced when I first heard its title, because it evokes the two roles in which Palestinians most frequently appear in our news media: terrorists and victims, but blood is one of the most common metaphors for ancestry and identity. If it suggests violence in this context, that’s cause for the listener to reflect.
Two months earlier the most extreme government in Israel’s history had taken power. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had declared “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language” while standing next to a map showing the West Bank and Gaza fully annexed to Israel. If the Israeli government’s position is the erasure of Palestine, then any assertion of Palestinian existence, let alone pride, is opposition. Simply recognizing the humanity of Palestinians delegitimizes Smotrich and the history and ideas he represents. The elimination of a people is the definition of genocide.
After the Hamas-led attacks on Israel last October 7, Salon published an article recommending the “Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza” episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, recorded in 2013, as one of the best ways for readers to learn about Israel and Palestine. The article describes a scene where Bourdain and a Palestinian man look at a wall of photos of political and military leaders. Bourdain asks if the children have anyone else to look up to, and the man replies that they all admire Mohammad Assaf, who they know from Arab Idol. Bourdain seems to flinch, as if he had been told that the youth of America were looking to Justin Bieber for liberation. He has no idea that “Ali el Kuffiyeh” belongs next to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Get Up, Stand Up,” and “Zombie”
Also immediately after the October 7 attacks, Dalal Abu Amneh’s publicist asked her for a statement to share with her over one million social media followers. She said “Wala ghaliba illa Allah,” (“And there is no victor except Allah”), a phrase heavily weighted with Islamic history. It is usually understood to mean that human struggle is ultimately futile, that God will always have the last word, but her social media team added a Palestinian flag to her post, which made it appear she was claiming the October 7 attacks as a victory for Allah and Palestine. Abu Amneh is an outspoken pacifist and a follower of Sufism—Sufi songs were a special feature of her performances with MESTO.
The repercussions to the post were swift and severe. She and her husband, an ophthalmologist and hospital administrator who had appeared with Netanyahu in a video promoting COVID vaccinations, live in a mixed Jewish/Muslim community in Israel. They received death threats and, when they complained to police, were jailed for three days. She was charged with promoting violence, charges eventually dropped. There are daily protests at her home, led by the Mayor, who had been elected on a platform of preventing Palestinians from moving to the town and driving out the ones already there. Is this segregation, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing? Other politicians have joined in the harassment, as did police when they were called to remove protestors from Abu Amenh’s property. The protests are amplified through a massive PA and lights have been set up that shine into her home all night long. Her City Council voted to rename the street where she lives “IDF Street,” for the Israeli Defense Forces. There’s more, but she has not backed down.
A friend played in the Hollywood Bowl orchestra for years, amassing the most amazing resume I have ever seen, having backed up everyone from Barbara Streisand to Kiss to Justin Timberlake to Luciano Pavarotti at the Bowl. It would certainly be easier if I could drop one or two of those names at a party, but I am proud to have Nabil Azzam, Mohammad Assaf, and Dalal Abu Amneh among my credits.