You can hear the global village coming closer. The hybridized styles of "world beat" music, that loosely international fusion of rhythms or melodies from here with instruments or vocal styles from there, is audible everywhere. The resulting mixes are an ever-expanding aural banquet of unfamiliar ingredients, rich flavors and unexpected spices, and they are landing on western hit charts with more and more regularity.
Since the mid-1980’s, world beat has gone from an exotic, marginal business to the big bucks of
mainstream niche marketing. The recording industry added it as a Grammy Awards category in 1992, and music store bins and web pages now fairly burst with new releases from all over, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Throughout the West, world-beat programs have become staples of public radio stations. "Afropop Worldwide," one of the shows with the largest audience, airs weekly on 120 stations in the United States and 15 in Europe.
Richard Gehr of New York’s Village Voice is one of the critics who think that within the world-beat genre—if it can be called that—Arab music is notably up-and-coming. In that sense, Arab music is the latest link in a chain of musical trends that since the 1950’s have crossed borders and oceans to increasingly enthusiastic receptions among western listeners. It began with the jazzy 
cross-beats of Latin music brought to New York clubs largely by Puerto Ricans, who gave the post-World War II generation its first lesson in the modern sounds of the less-industrialized world. Latin music fed interest in the purer polyrhythms of Afro-Brazilian styles, especially bossa nova, which in turn stimulated attention, by the late 1960’s, in West Africa. And many of the non-pentatonic chord changes of West Africa originated in the scales and pitch slides that came there in the Middle Ages with the Arabs.
That the West has largely neglected Arab popular music is not very surprising. Immigrant-based audiences have been small, in marketing terms, and there have been few producers interested in trying to bridge the cultural gap. It was simple, really: traditional Arab meters and modes can be difficult to grasp, even for well-trained western musicians. Today, however, listeners are more sophisticated and diverse, and the music itself is changing as well. In the United States, mainstream pop audiences have enthusiastically followed the lead of world-beat explorers such as Paul Simon (Graceland, 1986 and Rhythm of the Saints, 1990) and David Byrne (Rei Momo, 1989), and of collaborationists such as Ry Cooder.
Stanley Rashid, owner of Rashid Sales Co., a Brooklyn Arab-music distributorship founded by his father in 1934, says he sees steadily increasing demand from non-Arab listeners for pop music from the Arab world. "I’m constantly getting calls from night clubs all over the country asking for the latest Amr Diab album," he says, referring to the hot Egyptian singer. "Americans are at last realizing they can dance to this stuff."
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"Within the world-beat genre—if it can be called that—Arab music is notably up-and-coming" |
But Brian Cullman, a critic and producer who has worked on more than a dozen diverse world-beat albums, thinks Arab music is not about to hit the mainstream. "Hollywood seems to really like Middle Eastern music," he says. "Big-budget movies like The Sheltering Sky [19901 and The Black Stallion [1979] have used Arab-influenced sound tracks with great success, but it hasn’t caught on with most listeners yet."
To explore Arab sounds in the world-beat scene, sampling can be simplified by keeping in mind four informal—but often blurred—categories: "Pop" is where often youth-oriented styles from throughout the Arab world blend traditional sounds with elements of tastes first established in the West; what might be called "crossover" is a fusion most commonly involving Arab musicians and western recording producers; "folk" is often a more localized sound, well-rooted in tradition, usually less heavily produced and made for listening rather than dancing, and finally one might call "arabesque" the inventions of western musicians who appropriate and reinterpret Arab styles and musicianship.
-From Aramco World, March/April 2000
Louis Werner is a film maker who lives in New York. His favorite Arab pop style is almost extinct: the nightclub orchestras that once enlivened Cairo's Tawfiqiyya district. A taste of that sound was preserved in 1991 on "The Music of Mohamed Abdel Wahab" by Simon Shaheen on the Axiom Label.
This article will be continued in the coming months. Click here to visit our music pages.
