Raised by Iraqi-American parents in Chicago, Dena El Saffar—co-founder of Middle Eastern ensemble Salaam—had always wanted to visit her family’s homeland. With cousins all around, El Saffar was immersed in Arab music and culture at regular “Iraqi parties.” Yet she didn’t really appreciate her Arab heritage fully until later.

“I knew I was different,” she recalls. “Our names were uncommon; we ate foods that none of my friends had ever heard of. But it was just normal for me.” Once she made this realization, she became more interested in her heritage. When she saw any music recordings “that looked remotely Arab,” she bought them blindly. And, finally, when El Saffar was seventeen she visited Baghdad for the first time.

“At that age I was already a serious classical musician,” explains El Saffar, “so I brought my viola, because I couldn’t imagine not practicing for three weeks. But my family and new friends in Iraq were not excited by Bach.” Yet music was a large part of her experience.

“Every car I climbed into was blasting Arab music!” El Saffar remembers. “Everyone was very proud of the music and they would ask me to play it. This was my first attempt at microtones, and if I got even the smallest riff down, everyone would burst into applause. You could hear calls to prayer coming from dozens of different mosques. Everybody there took the sounds for granted, but I loved it. I was there during Ramadan—when everyone fasts during daylight—and each morning someone would roam the streets before sunrise banging out a special rhythm on an old plastic bleach bottle to wake everyone to eat before sunrise.”

After three weeks, El Saffar returned to America in March 1990, and she was ready to go back the following winter. But in August, Kuwait was invaded and the Gulf War started soon after. “It was heartbreaking!” El Saffar explains. “I had finally made it there to connect with my family whom I had never met. I was so interested and ready to go back. But all this political stuff came in the middle of it. We couldn’t contact them for so long after the six-week bombing campaign. All you would see on TV were bombs reigning over the whole place. It really polarized me as a musician.  My cousins were hiding in their basements from bombs being dropped by my government and here I was going to classes. I needed to do something for Iraq.”

At the same time—though unknown to El Saffar—future Salaam co-founder Ron Kadish was in Israel. Eighteen months before the Gulf War started, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra recruited Kadish. “Right after music school, I went to the Aspen Music Festival, a renowned festival for budding classical musicians,” Kadish recalls. “I met the director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and he was unhappy with his recent bass auditions. So he had me audition on the spot in his apartment there. I played everything I knew and he questioned me about everything down to my fingerings!”

Kadish got the job, and had to rush-order a passport to get to Israel one week before the Orchestra’s season began. “My experience in Salaam is a direct result of my experience in Israel,” says Kadish. “It was a real eye-opener. Growing up Jewish in New Jersey, all I heard about was how the Arabs were the bad guys. The older generation had forgiven the Germans, but hated the Arabs. Yet when I was in Israel, the lifestyle and culture looked and felt Arabic. Many Israelis try to portray their culture as European, but it’s really very Middle Eastern and Arabic.”

“I was shocked by the amount of racism towards the Arabs in Israel,” continues Kadish. “Millions of Arabs chose to stay and be a part of Israel. But there continue to be so many stereotypes and so much fear. The Orchestra’s first oboist in Jerusalem lived in an Arabic neighborhood, and carried 9 millimeter Beretta everywhere, including on stage!”

It’s ironic that though one of the first things Kadish did in Israel was enroll in a Hebrew class two Palestinian Arabs in the class soon befriended him. He began doing homework with them and spending time at a sweets shop that one of their friends ran.

“There was always this oud player—sometimes accompanied by a drummer—just playing his oud and singing on the street,” Kadish remembers. “My introduction to Arabic music took place in Israel. Nobody there was singing Klezmer songs.’”

Kadish left when Scud missiles started flying. He returned to America and found himself in graduate school in Indiana. “After a couple of years of playing in almost every orchestra in the state,” Kadish says, “I slowly started realizing that playing in an orchestra was really boring. That’s around the time I met Dena and we started Salaam. As a Jew playing in Salaam, my overt political contribution is saying, ‘Hey, it’s OK, we don’t all have to be fighting each other.’”

Additional Info
From the Homeland to the Heartland:Headspinning Middle Eastern ...
The Origins of Middle East/Mid-West Ensemble Salaam
Collaborations, Past Performances, and Quotes

Top of Press Release