Wizard of Oud: Marcel Khalifé

David Prince – For The New Mexican

            America’s burgeoning interest in music from far-flung foreign ports made it inevitable that the lutelike oud, from the Middle East and North Africa, would eventually have its day of glory in this country.  Here in New Mexico, the instrument is taking on cult status, thanks in no small part to both Stefan dill, the guitarist who recently embraced Islam and accordingly took up the oud, and Rahim AlHaj, an Iraqi refugee and longtime oud player who has adopted Albuquerque as his new home.

            Sunday night, Oct. 24, New Mexico listeners will be able to add the name Marcel Khalifé to the current pantheon of oud masters when the native of Lebanon (and current Paris resident) holds a concert at the Lensic Performing Arts center as part of a 12-city U.S. tour that began in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Oct. 16 and wraps up in Chicago on Nov. 4.

            “I feel I have always been a rebel,” Khalifé said recently, speaking through an interpreter.  “I wanted, from the first, to free myself from all traditional – inherited – constraints.  My goal has been to defy the expectations of formulaic labeling and categorization.”

            All this and more is clearly evident in each of the nine individual cuts that make up Caress, Khalifé’s just-released CD that’s available on the Nagam Records label.  Accompanied by Piano, upright bass, vibraphone (as well as other percussion), and violin, the music Khalifé and his al Mayadine Ensemble make talks the language of modern jazz as fluently as it does the more formal demands of the Middle East folkloric material they cover.

            And Khalifé’s interest in varied musical forms doesn’t end there.  The last 30 years have seen him compose scores for dance companies, the soundtracks to a number of films, even works intended for symphonic orchestra, including Suite for Oud and Orchestra, and his classical scores have been performed in locales as diverse as San Francisco, France, Tunisia, and Russia.  “This work, Caress,” Khalifé explained, “is the result of a desire to depict the everyday life I see around me.  In it, I have tried to represent the Arab musical heritage through new harmonies, rhythms, and maqams,” which are the types of complex musical scales that make up the Arabic musical dialect.

            Born in 1950 in Amchit, a coastal town on the flanks of Mount Lebanon, Khalifé (pronounced ka-LEE-fay) took up the oud at an early age, eventually earning a degree at Beirut’s National Conservatory of Music.  In 1972, after a period spent teaching others the art of oud playing, Khalifé returned to his hometown and formed an ensemble devoted to reviving interest in Lebanon’s traditional-music heritage.  By 1976, his aim was to take those same traditional tunes, harmonies, and beats and superimpose them onto the structure of other countries’ musical traditions.  The Al Mayadine Ensemble, which he still fronts, was formed to accomplish this task.

            “Many of these musical forms arrived in Europe from Spain through the troubadours,” Khalifé pointed out.  The muwashah,” an Arabic song form, “was eventually transformed into the German lied.  Likewise, the structure of the Arabic dowr resembles that of the sonata, and the Andalusian nouba became an instrumental suite, then later, a ballet suite.”

            In the 1980s, Khalifé took up his pen and began writing a series of books on musical subjects, texts that point out both his grounding in the ancient music of Lebanon and his current cosmopolitan outlook.  Above all, however, Khalifé is a humanitarian.  “More than ever,” he said, “we need to strive for peace.  You cannot force peace upon anyone by using political power.  Peace can only be realized through mutual respect and an effort to accept the cultures of others as being valid and valuable.  This is done by rejecting fear and hatred and engaging instead in open and honest dialogue with others.”

            When he appears in Santa Fe, Khalifé’s al Mayadine Ensemble – a play on words that alternately means “village square” or “battlefield” – will feature, beside the leader’s oud, a pair of female vocalists, a piano, a bass, and a selection of percussion instruments that include bongos, congas, the tabla, and vibraphone.  “There is no one way in which I should be viewed,’ he concluded.  “My music is made for the sake of all humankind.  Labeling someone’s music as this or that only serves to blind us to the vastness and complexity of human experience.”

details

·        Marcel Khalifé & Al Mayadine Ensemble

·        8 p. m. Sunday, Oct. 24

·        Lensic Performing Arts Center                                        

211 W. San Francisco St.

·        $24-$50, 988-1234