The Bloomington Middle Eastern music band Salaam was giving an educational presentation and performance at a school in Illinois last week when the junior high students who made up the audience began to boo them.

The kids weren’t hard-hearted music critics.  Instead, they were objecting to the portion of the show about America’s ubiquitous bombing target, Iraq.

“We have a slide show and we go to seven countries and tell them the cultural information and when we said, ‘Now we’re going to Iraq,’ and they all booed,” explained Salaam’s viola player Dena El Saffar.

El Saffar, who is half Iraqi on her father’s side, said that’s an “extreme reaction.”  But the band does also encounter other subtler forms of anti-Arab sentiment.

“I try really hard not to get emotional or passionate.  I don’t want to alienate people,” she said.

Instead, El Saffar and the other members of Salaam try to teach.

It was in part to educate American audiences that the band changed its focus from a band that fused Middle Eastern and Western sounds to a band that concentrates solely on traditional Middle Eastern music.

“You look at the media and you don’t see anything about the people of the culture,” El Saffar said. “…Babylon and Mesopotamia are all in modern-day Iraq.  There is a lot of culture there.”

Salaam has taken its educational shows to the Chicago Children’s Museum, Ethnic Expo in Columbus, Turkish Independence Day at Purdue and the Ohio River Arts Festival in Evansville.

The band will release its second CD, Raqsat Salaam (Dance of Peace) at Borders tonight.

They’ll also host a Middle Eastern Gala with Guest musicians, dance by Katya Faris, Sufi poetry and all kinds of Middle Eastern food March ii at the Waldron Arts Center.

The Borders show is free.  Advance tickets for the Middle Eastern Gala, which are $4, are on sale at Bloomingfoods and Athena.

First formed in 1993, Salaam concentrated on Middle Eastern inspired music for its first CD in 1995.  They were cited in a 1996 Billboard article as on of the bands that make the Bloomington music scene unique.

Salaam’s repertoire knows few boundaries.  They play music of Egypt, Iraq, Israeli, Syria, Oman and even peripheral Middle Eastern countries such as Nubia in North Eastern Africa.

When it came time to think about a second CD, in 1997, the band’s focus had changed to pure Middle Eastern music, without the Western influence.

Part of that was due to personnel changes.  Salaam’s violinist Megan Weeder is studying for a graduate degree in ethnomusicology in London and a former Salaam flutist, Amy Cyr, left the band to play in a larger Middle Eastern music scene in San Francisco.

Paradoxically, in addition to playing pure Middle Eastern music to educate those with stereotypical images of the Middle East, Salaam also found there was a growing audience of people knowledgeable and eager for the traditional stuff.

“Especially the people of Arabic descent.  They want to hear songs they know, not some Western musicians take on it,” said Salaam bassist Ron Kadish.

Kadish said with a laugh that the band’s early efforts were a result of “us not knowing what we were doing.”

Going strictly traditional was scary at first tough, Kadish said.

“It’s a whole different music theory,” El Saffar said.

Kaddish added, “In some Turkish music, what we consider a whole note is divided into seven different parts.”

Salaam members have learned a lot from El Saffar’s father’s collection of Middle Eastern music.

“The way I see what we were doing before was fusion,” El Saffar said of the band’s previous focus.  “Now, I am making a sincere effort to get in touch with my Middle Eastern roots.”

Even band members who don’t have Middle Eastern blood find the music resonates strongly with them.

“There are definite Middle Eastern rhythms,” said Tim Moore, Salaam’s percussionist.  “This is not arbitrary.  This really touches your soul in the same kind of way a Bo Diddley beat does.”