An Official Artist of Peace Gets Roughed Up by Politics
By George Varga

Concerts marked by international intrigue and controversy are rare here, although graying punks may recall that a number of San Diegans were arrested (for no apparent reason) outside the Dead Kennedys' otherwise peaceful 1985 gig at Tijuana's Casa de la Cultura.

Apart from that, there haven't been too many problems I can recall, aside from the increased difficulties – post-9/11 – encountered by foreign musicians seeking to obtain U.S. visas for their concert tours.

Enter expatriate Lebanese oud master and singer Marcel Khalifé, who in 2005 was named an official Artist for Peace by the United Nations. He and his Al Mayadine Ensemble perform here Sunday at the Birch North Park Theatre. The concert was moved there after he was apparently “disinvited” from appearing at the Joan B. Kroc Theatre at the Salvation Army's Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center.

Khalifé, 55, rose to prominence in the 1970s for fusing Maronite Christianhymns and Muslim recitations, which he often performed in bombed-out concert halls and on the streets of war-torn Lebanon. Hailed as both the Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger of the Middle East, he has since performed at London's Royal Festival Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Classically trained, Khalifé has composed for orchestras and scored films. He also specializes in creating songs based on the unabashedly political poems of Palestine's Mahmoud Darwish. One of them, “Father, I Am Joseph,” led to charges being filed against Khalifé in a Lebanese court in 1999, when he was accused of blasphemy for having paraphrased a verse from the Koran. He was acquitted.

To hear the Kroc Center – which otherwise ranks as a local gem – tell it, their objections were less to Khalifé's music than to the pro-Palestinian independence agenda of Al Awda, the Carlsbad-based organization sponsoring his concert here. (For a more detailed account, see the Khalifé interview in today's Night&Day.)

Happily, the focus of Sunday's concert should be on music, not controversy. It will open with a 60-minute, all-instrumental performance of “Taqasim,” Khalifé's superb 2006 album. The three-part opus ingeniously combines various Arabic traditions with flamenco, jazz and more.

With contrabass dynamo Mark Helias now in his touring band, “Taqasim,” which was inspired by Darwish's poems, should sound even more inspired live than on record. The concert's second half will showcase Khalifé's sonorous singing, as well as his dazzling playing on the lute-like oud.