MUSIC IN SUDAN
See also:
"Does Allah like Music?" by the editor of Sudan Update
in Index on Censorship "Smashed Hits" December 1998.
This draft for the Rough Guide to World Music (1999 edition) was
the basis for a talk at the 1st World Conference on Music and
Censorship, in Copenhagen, Denmark, 20-22 November 1998 - PV.
Can't dance / won't dance?
In the 1980s I was running a mobile disco in the shanty areas
of Khartoum, playing rai, reggae and rhumba - some kids so keen
they'd be up and jiving to the soundcheck - until '89, when the
security police of the National Islamic Front came and took it
away. Around the same time police burst into a women's traditional
Zar ceremony, armed with Kalashnikovs, and carted everyone away
to the lock-up, confiscating the drums that powered the ritual
and calling them "pagan".
Musicians such as Abu-Araki al-Bakheit,
Mohammed el Amin, Saif al-Jami'a,
Yousif al-Mousli and the band Igd el Djilad were prevented from
performing in
public and banned from the airwaves.
A new dictatorship was under way: one that can't dance and won't let anyone else.
In Sudan there's an added dimension to the ages-old argument over the legitimacy of music and dance under Islam: one third of the people affected by it are not even Muslim. And whatever their religion, Sudan's people - 300 ethnic groups - embody such a collision of Arab and African cultures that it's often impossible to tell where one culture ends and the other begins.
Arab tribes arrived in the 14th and 15th centuries from across the Red Sea and the northern fringe of Africa; in the 16th century West Africans began journeying through northern Sudan on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Both settled and intermarried with the indigenous people. Southern Sudan, largely cut off until the mid-19th century by the vast swamps of the White Nile, was treated as a source of slaves, ivory, ostrich feathers and gold. No wonder the continent's largest country has an identity problem alongside a deep-rooted civil war.
Scenes from modern history
Scene 1: Gedaref, Eastern Sudan, 1977
Using home-built electric guitars, the three Abbas brothers (Eastern
Breeze), play their sister's wedding - a real street party. It's
the first party in this agricultural merchant town to have MIXED
DANCING among the Muslim guests, and things are bubbling. It's
the year of punk. Self-taught, Afro-haired, DIY guitarist Mohamed
is blazing primitive Arab-soul riffs after Hendrix and Santana,
with his 13-year-old brother extracting every ounce of funk from
a goat-skinned drumkit.
Scene 2: Itang refugee camp,
near Asosa, Southwest Ethiopia, 1990
Nubian superstar Mohammed Wardi gets even the lame dancing, at
a concert for Southern Sudanese displaced by a horrific civil
war. Land-mine victims on crutches and able-bodied alike respond
enthusiastically to a singer who transcends the murderous hostilities
between north and south Sudan. Unity and harmony momentarily seem
to be more than just cliches. The rebel Sudan People's Liberation
Army videos this extraordinarily moving occasion, but fails to
exploit it.
Scene 3: Khartoum, mid-1994
The government-controlled media gives extensive air-time to hardline
Islamist mosque leaders campaigning to outlaw secular music altogether.
Scene 4: Abri, Wadi Halfa province,
Nubia, Northern Sudan, September 1994
75 wedding-guests are arrested when police with tear-gas, batons
and live ammunition break up defiant party-goers protesting at
a ruling that wedding parties - formerly an all-night affair -
must end before sunset prayers and be supervised by sheikhs and
police. Conflict is sparked when guests, including children, arrive
after dusk. Demonstrations continue for several days until the
army moves in.
Scene 5: Omdurman, Sudan, October
1994
Travelling home at night, a professional violinist is stopped,
taken to the edge of Omdurman and severely beaten by security
police who smash his instrument. Told he should stop playing music
and follow Islam, he turns round and quotes eloquently from the
Quran in his defence. His tormentors are left speechless.
Scene 6:
Omdurman, by the Nile, November 1994
Khogali Osman, a well-loved singer in his early forties, is killed
by a "fanatic" - a religious primary school teacher
- who talks his way into the Musicians' Club and stabs several
people in the belief that secular music is an abomination. "Merdoum
King" and international recording artist Abdel Gadir Salim
and a violinist are wounded.
The government denies any role in the assault, but buries the
singer in great haste to avoid public protest. Security police
threaten other musicians not to talk about the killing.
Meanwhile the regime increases its efforts to appear tolerant on the international stage, supporting "cultural festivals" in London and Paris.
Scene 7:
Khartoum, Sudan, 1998
The National Islamic Front (NIF) government enacts a new law banning
women from dancing with men or in their presence during folklore
celebrations or wedding parties.
It also segregates the sexes on public transport.
So
long as the NIF is in power, you'll have to go to the rebel-held
territory of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (most of Southern
Sudan) to join in "legal" mixed dancing - no such hang-ups
there. Drinking marissa (sorghum beer) and dancing to the drum
go on wherever there's enough grain to ferment.
South Sudan
In 1992 the controllers of Radio Juba wiped its unique tapes of
the celebrated Southern Sudanese singer Yousif Fataki. It's an
apt demonstration of the government's attitude to the south, to
erase a cultural artefact to make way for its own propaganda.
And although South Sudan, like the Nuba Mountains, creates plenty
of music, there are fewer opportunities to hear it now than in
recent decades.
Back in the 1960s, a Southern Sudanese musician and folklorist - Dr William Remzy - was working at the University of Khartoum. In the 1970s and 80s, while there was peace, the southern capital Juba had nightlife: groups like the Skylarks and Rejaf Jazz, and venues like DeeDee's Disco, taking their inspiration from Kampala and Nairobi. All are long gone, dispersed by war, although a couple of Skylarks were sighted gigging in Uganda in 1998.
Nowadays the best chance to hear Southern Sudanese music may be in church, possibly in the refugee camps in northern Uganda, or among the rebel soldiers. Sometimes the participants are the same: I met a priest, a dead ringer for Spike Lee, training a chapel choir consisting of both SPLA fighters and seminarians in Eastern Equatoria.
The Dinka tribe used to hymn their
fabulous long-horned cattle, and pogo like the born basketball
players they are. Zande folk music is as playful as their folk
tales, which feature a trickster like the Jamaicans' Anansie or
Brer Rabbit of the US Deep South.
Nowadays the peoples of south Sudan have an ever-growing repertoire
of new songs about war and liberation, some of which were captured
on a 1997 recording that sounds worlds away from the sleek orchestras
of Khartoum.
Nuba Mountains
The Nuba are caught on the dividing line between the warring cultures
of north and south Sudan, but are fighting back against a government
programme of "ethnocide" with their own reawakening
identity. Under the squeeze of the government's crude "Islamisation"
campaign, the diverse, multi-religious Nuba communities are uniting
in resistance, defending their own culture as much as their land.
The Kambala, or harvest festival, is still celebrated, and there
is a proliferation of new songs and artists. The vibrant Black
Stars are part of a special "cultural advocacy and performance"
unit of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the
Nuba Mountains. Their most famous vocalist is Ismael Koinyi, an
accomplished guitar player who sings in Arabic and in several
Nuba languages. Other vocalists include Tahir Jezar, Jelle and
Jamus.
When journalists were flown in to the Nuba Mountains for an anniversary celebration in 1998 by the charismatic Nuba SPLA leader Yousif Kuwa, they were treated to an amplified concert in the remote mountain retreat courtesy of solar power. Electricity is a rare luxury, however, so with stringed rababas, a clay-pot bass drum, tin bongos and shakers, Nuba bands usually play their form of "Je-luo" - a catch-all term for Kenyan or Congolese guitar styles - unplugged.
The lyrics of Nuba bands like the Black Stars dwell on the battles - military and psychological - through which the Nuba continue to struggle, and the dancing often goes on till daybreak.
Don't confuse the Nuba of south-west Sudan with the Nubians, like Wardi and Hamza al-Din, who are from Nubia in the far north of the country - between Dongola and the Egyptian border at Wadi Halfa (and beyond). Both groups are indigenous Sudanese, rather than of "Arab" origin, but any link is ancient history.
Northern Sudan - a crisis of identity
The rest of the country is more divided - to the point of split
personality, sometimes. Few Northern Sudanese wholeheartedly support
the government's obsessive division of the sexes, lots are repressed
dancers, and many older ones look back nostalgically to the era
before 1983 and Sharia law. That was when President Nimeiri, with
NIF support, closed the bars in Khartoum and chucked the alcohol
in the Nile. Two years later, the Sudanese people chucked Nimeiri
out. (I remember a soldier of the Presidential Guard breakdancing
on our veranda, overjoyed at being out of a job.) But in 1989,
the NIF came back, seizing total power in a military coup. The
drinking, and the dancing, still go on behind closed doors. But
in a totalitarian, informer society, who dares admit to such sins?
Attitudes towards music within
Islamic societies are certainly problematic.
Of course, the Quran does not itself clearly prohibit music, and
music has always been
very important in Arab culture. It's just that some Quranic verses
have been interpreted as approving, others as condemning it. Choosing
only the latter, the "fundamentalist" stance is that
music is linked with illicit sex and drinking, dangerous diversions
from religious duty. Dancing is likewise equated with immorality.
Not much difference from "fundamentalist" Christianity,
in other words. (And a small proportion of today's missionaries
in South Sudan enforce equally daunting views.)
The Sufi teachers who brought Islam to Sudan were by no means "fundamentalists", however, and happily made use of music and dance. Quranic recitation, which is sung, is not regarded by Muslims as music, but the influence of this technique on the secular art is unmistakable - and the devotional chanting of the Sufi Zikr must be somewhere between the two.
Early days
Modern urban music in Northern Sudan began taking shape between
the 1920s and 1940s. Regarded by some as the father of contemporary
Sudanese music, singer Khalil Farah was also prominent in the
independence movement. Ibrahim al-Abadi (1894-1980) found new
ways of wedding poetry to music, regarded as unorthodox at the
time. Other early singer-songwriters included Mohammed Ahmed Surur,
Al-Amin Burhan, and Abdallah Abdel Karim, better known as Karoma,
who was the most prolific, writing over 400 songs.
The Sudanese Graduates' Congress used a song entitled "Sahi
ya Kanaru" ("Wake Up, Canary") to spread resistance
to British rule. Since then, many others have used the image of
a beautiful creature, woman, or lover to refer obliquely to their
country, and have stirred feelings sufficiently powerful to get
the author jailed, sometimes. Translations, of course, rarely
capture these allusions.
All that jazz
Urban musicians introduced violins, accordions and horns - and
the odd flute and mandolin - after World War II, electric guitars
in the 1960s and electronic keyboards in the 1980s.
These were used by Sudanese to beef up their traditional styles.
Those from the traditions of northern, western and central Sudan
took styles such as haqiiba - a chant with chorus and minimal
percussion - infused them with Egyptian-Arab or European elements,
and developed al-aghani' al-hadith (modern songs). As early as
the 1920s Egyptian producers brought Sudanese singers to record
in Cairo, and instruments of the orchestra began to replace the
call-and-response of the chorus.
Southerners, Nuba and other non-Arab communities were well represented
in the forces across the country. For impoverished young conscripts
in post-independence Sudan, the police and army "jazz-bands"
offered the best access to equipment, and what started out as
British military brass band styles often metamorphosed in the
1960s and 70s to become "jazz" in the East African sense.
This imitates the intersecting guitars of Kenya's Shirati Jazz
and the myriad Luo language bands around Lake Victoria - although
any soukous, rhumba or benga gets called "Je-luo" in
Sudan. (By the time their music reached as far north as Khartoum,
even African stars like Franco and Tabu Ley were anonymized in
this way. Few knew their names, they just recognised the style).
Foreign artists
During the 1960s, Ray Charles ("Hit the Road, Jack")
and Harry Belafonte made a big impression on urban Sudanese musicians
such as Osman Alamu and Ibrahim Awad, who became the first Sudanese
singer to dance on stage. (Fast forward to 1985: Sherhabeel Ahmed,
a quietly progressive musician and illustrator whose wife used
to play bass guitar, sings "Kingston Town" at a famine
concert echoing Live Aid. Harry Belafonte is in the audience,
representing the charity USA for Africa, and is openly moved to
tears.)
In the 1970s it was the turn of James Brown and Jimmy Cliff (who is still a frequent, low-profile visitor to Sudan, although not to perform). The ebullient Kamal Kayla modelled his funk-shout style on the hugely popular JB, although he was in retirement last I heard, raising exotic pigeons.
The 1980s made Bob Marley and Michael Jackson household names in the most unexpected places. Marley was recognised by some as the spiritual kinsman of Sudan's own Sufi dervishes, and an inspiration to thousands of ghetto children. As for Michael, well, he shared the Sudanese problem with skin colour (skin bleaching is still in vogue) and showed the nimbler ones the possibilities of moonwalking.
There was loveable trash, too.
A trip to the cinema for the street-kids wasn't complete until
they played Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting" in the
auditorium, vaguely in honour of Bruce Lee.
Quirks of fashion turned a short-lived Welsh disco queen, Tina
Charles ("I love to love", "Dance little lady,
Dance"), into an idol: buxom and heavily made-up, looking
like the cover of an Egyptian magazine. They liked her even more
than Diana Ross, who was a bit skinny for their tastes.
Dance and trance
The Sufi Muslim dervishes, or darawiish, brought the first wave
of Islamic influence to Sudan several hundred years ago. Their
often wild and colourful appearance, some with dreadlocks and
elaborate patchwork clothes, and the spectacular manner of their
religious devotions, made a lasting impression on the British
rulers of the "Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" in the late nineteenth
century.
But the Victorian caricature of the "whirling dervish" misses the point. Within the religious tradition of zikr - "remembrance" - the dervishes use music and dance to work themselves into a mystical trance. Undulating lines of male Sufi dancers bop their way to ecstasy with a physical grace that confounds ageism. Their tolerant spirit has profoundly influenced the easy-going approach that characterized Sudan until relatively recently.
The most spirited rhythms - in every sense - are mainly for women, in the psychotherapeutic zar cult. Zar sessions combine mesmeric drumming with incense, massage and a licence to release deep frustration. Under the guidance of the sheikha az-zar, gatherings last either four or seven days, drumming from dawn to dusk for different spirits that plague people and have to be brought out and pacified.
These are occasions outside the bounds of life's ordinary rules, when women can smoke and drink and act out rebellious fantasies without having their religious piety or social respectability called into question. The zar cult is older than Islam and works around and through it rather than compete against it. But like everything else that challenges the ruling National Islamic Front's social programme, zar is suffering a government clampdown under the pretext that it is anti-Islamic.
The lute and the lyre
The lyric songs of northern Sudan were originally played on the
tambour, or lyre, using pentatonic scales, and are quite distinct
from the Arabian maqam structures. When the far more sophisticated
oud or lute was introduced from across the Red Sea, Sudanese players
developed a style of plucking and striking the strings of the
oud from the technique they had used on the lyre.
Some of the more basic lyre-players scrub jerkily across the splayed
strings, a sort of acoustic grunge to western ears, while others
extract a plaintive quality.
The lyre is also common in south Sudan, where these days the instrument
is just as likely to be made from a hub-cap or a land-mine casing
as from the gourds of old.
Plenty of horns
Odd and tantalising styles of horn playing crop up in unexpected
places - traditional Nigerian Fellata and Blue Nile Berta, post-imperial
quasi-military, James Brown funky, smooth makossa . Some resemble
wounded cows, and take a while to get used to; some are just badly
rehearsed. Others are immediately uplifting. A generation ago
it was Juma'a Jabir, who once taught in the Army Music Section
and later became a valued session player, who pioneered the contemporary
use of horns. These days the best-known - at least among outside
collectors - is Hamid Osman.
The Players
Many of the best international touring musicians reappear in different
guises. To give just one example, both Abdel Gadir Salim's Merdoum
Kings and the Abdel Aziz el Mubarak Orchestra feature violinist
Mohammed Abdallah Mohammediya, bass-player Nasir Gad Karim, accordionist
AbdelBagi Hamoda and sax player Hamid Osman. They and other familiar
names have turned up backing Balabil, Hussein Shendi and Kabli.
Mohammed el Amin is a Sudanese
folk-hero for his majestic voice and superb oud playing, and the
near-blind, reclusive old revolutionary is also a brilliant composer
and arranger. Never a prolific writer, his work is concentrated
and even his rearrangements of old songs sound fresh. I forgot
the irritating half-assed reggae of lesser bands the night Mohammed
el Amin conjured up a playful dub fade-out of one epic song with
just a violinist (Mohamediya), bass player and tablas.
Born in Wad Medani, central Sudan, in 1943, he began learning
the oud at the age of 11, taught by the well-known professor Mohammed
Fadl. He wrote his first compositions aged 20, and went on to
become honorary president of the Sudanese Artists' and Composers'
Society. Frequently in trouble for provoking one military dictatorship
- he was jailed by Nimeiri's regime in the 1970s - he moved to
Cairo after 1989 to avoid similar run-ins with the National Islamic
Front, but returned to Khartoum in 1994 and kept a low profile.
Mohammed Wardi
"Art is like water: you can't seal off its source. It will
trickle inexorably through the rock to emerge in a new spring
somewhere else."
- Mohammed Wardi, exiled leader of the Musician's Union, speaking in London at the Memorial Concert for Khojali Osman, the singer who was murdered at the Musician's Club, Omdurman, November 1994.
The soaring voice of "golden throat" Mohammed Wardi has won acclaim right across the African Sahel and the Arab world. Although this singer from Nubia is now in exile, his music always stirs emotion for many Sudanese, sometimes with directly political allusion - to the October 1964 popular uprising, for example - and sometimes more obliquely, but always with powerful resonance. He was born in 1932 near old Wadi Halfa. Schooled across the border in Egypt, he returned as an elementary school teacher, then moved to Khartoum in 1957 and became a professional singer two years later. Four decades and 300 songs later, he can stand on a stage, hand in pocket, the epitome of relaxation, leaving the audience to complete the lines of a song - and make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. He's had spells in jail which only confirmed his popularity; at a human rights demonstration outside the Sudan Embassy, his unaccompanied voice galvanised the spirit of an otherwise sombre gathering. But the most compelling occasion of all must be his 1990 concert at Itang, temporary home to 250,000 war-displaced southern Sudanese in Ethiopia, performing from a makeshift wooden platform in the dusty wastes of a refugee camp. The healing power of music was never more convincingly displayed, and for a while the prospect of reconciliation in this torn country seemed a little less forlorn.
The contemporary poet and teacher Mahjoub Sherif often writes in colloquial Arabic, mixing observations on everyday life and politics with love songs and poems for children. He has also been detained for long periods under Sudan's military dictators. Even in the remote western desert prison at Shalla he continued writing lyrics that became songs of resistance. Many have been set to music by Mohammed Wardi.
Abu Araki al-Bakheit
The songs of Abu Araki al-Bakheit, like Wardi, were banned from
the airwaves by
the NIF. In the early 1990s he was arrested and told by the authorities
not to sing his political songs at public gatherings. He responded
by saying he would prefer silence, and would no longer play. The
public outcry at this news eventually prompted him to sing again,
in defiance of the authorities, but at the cost of repeated harassment
and threats. His friends say he is walking a tightrope, and his
popularity is his only protection.
Igd el Djilad
The multi-vocalist band Igd el Djilad was formed in the mid-1980s
by a dozen young music students with progressive aims. Their song
lyrics reflect these concerns, and their music strives to be both
forward-looking and reflective of the country's roots, using rhythms
and chants from right across the country. To an outsider this
seems innocuous enough, but it's an approach that takes guts.
Members of Iqd al-Jalad have been arrested on several occasions,
questioned by security police and threatened. Rather than being
stopped from playing altogether they were forced to give written
assurances that they would not provoke the authorities with songs
about poverty and famine. The name, by the way, refers to a circlet
of musky perfumed hide traditionally worn by a bride at her wedding.
Kafka by the Nile
The fact that you can still find plenty of music in northern Sudan
might give the impression of freedom, but it's a system that Kafka
would recognise for its arbitrariness, in which repression can
descend at any moment. It is still possible to find, for example,
cassettes of Mohammed Wardi on open sale despite the probability
that the singer himself would be imprisoned if he returned because
of his outspoken role in opposition to the National Islamic Front.
In this schizoid atmosphere, nothing is straightforward.
Cab drivers can be punished for playing unacceptable music, too. But since they thrash their car stereos until everything sounds like comb-and-paper or kazoo, how can anyone tell?
The NIF both fears and seeks to manipulate music and musicians. Any references to past freedoms in Sudan prior to the 1989 coup are unacceptable. Periods of repression are alternated with periods of coercion; officials differ in their interpretation and application of the 1990 Public Order Acts which regulate performances.
Hostile to art that it cannot control, the NIF has introduced an "Islamisation of Art" programme in an attempt to dictate the terms of the discourse. All performers and works of theatre, cinema and music are supposed to be approved by religious jurists. Songs in praise of the para-military Popular Defence Force and jihad are broadcast all the time. Sporadic prohibition is enforced on "low grade" Western music. More important, the diverse range of folk music and dance within Sudan itself often fails to meet the criteria, or is relegated to condescending "ethnological" broadcasts.
Attacks on Artists
In 1996 the Cairo-based Sudanese media workers association reported
to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Sudan, Dr Gaspar
Biro, on harassment of musicians in Sudan by the NIF.
The Morality Monitoring Unit of the shadow "police force"
known as the
General Administration of Public Order extends its remit to musical
performances at wedding parties - the most frequent venue for
music. Weddings are regular targets for raids on the grounds of
Public Order Act offences, mixed dancing, or "unapproved"
songs or singers. Seven singers were arrested in one week at the
beginning of 1993.
Broadcasting editor Salma al-Sheikh was interrogated for hours after allowing a student at the Institute of Music and Drama to use a radio tape of Sudanese songs banned by the regime. She played music by Mohammed Wardi, Mohammed al-Amin, Abu-Araki, Mustafa SidAhmed and Yousif al-Mousli on her daily radio programme "Good Morning My Country" until it was taken off the air in 1992.
In the early 1980s, song lyrics
referring to women's bodies were among
those banned. The official decree remained on the books after
Nimeiri's
overthrow, but was ignored by broadcasters. The NIF coup in 1989
was followed
by a decree in which the Director-General of Radio Omdurman
prohibited the broadcast of any song other than those glorifying
religion or
the jihad of the National Islamic Front.
Video and music cassettes of songs
mentioning kisses or wine, or with
political allusions, have been erased and pro-NIF speeches and
religious
sermons recorded over them. Large amounts of irreplaceable studio
archive
material have been lost in this way.
In 1995 singer Sayyid Khalifa declared that all songs in the archives of the national radio station, Radio Omdurman, were being reviewed and revised. New "moral" versions would be made, excising all unacceptable references.
Staying out of the political arena and thus reasonably free of persecution are two major musicians - Abdel Gadir Salim and Abdel Aziz el Mubarak - who made their impact on the international world music scene at the end of the 1980s, and a third, the equally important Abdel Karim el Kabli. Kabli, now in his sixties, is one of those walking cultural memory banks, a folklorist who can talk in depth about the background of any number of Sudanese songs, and who plays oud in a variety of styles with deceptive ease.
The differences between the styles of Abdel Gadir Salim and Abdel Aziz el Mubarak become apparent in the lyrics. While Abdel Gadir sings of a farm girl tired of waiting for her man to come and wipe the sweat off his face, Abdel Aziz is more likely to proclaim his admiration for a woman's high heels.
Abdel Gadir Salim was born in Dilling, in the Nuba Mountains, the same village as Hamid Osman Abdalla, the inspired saxophonist who features in his All-Stars. He studied European and Arabic music at the Institute of Music and Drama, and became a primary school headmaster in Chad somewhere along the way. After his studies, he shifted in 1971 from composing "Khartoum city songs" to folk songs, and had a hit with "Umri Ma Bansa" (I'll never forget you), which is still part of his set. His home area of Kordofan and Darfur has its own unique rhythms and beautiful songs, with which he has flavoured his own music.
Abdel Aziz el Mubarak, from Wad Medani, was the first Sudanese artist to play WOMAD, at Glastonbury in 1988, with a dozen musicians romantically resplendent in long white jellabiyas. Next day they appeared at London's Jubilee Gardens wearing tuxedos. His love songs are songs of the city.
Every pleasure in the absence
of your eyes
Is incomplete and does not touch me.
Every road that does not take me to you
Is a dark road that doesn't deserve the walk.
Darling, all through my life
I have been longing for your smile.
(Abdel Aziz el
Mubarak, from "Ya A'asaal" on Straight from the Heart.
Tr: Moawia Yassin)
The Institute of Music and Drama
When Sudan's Institute of Music and Drama was begun by the civilian
government in
1969, dedicated teachers like El-Mahi Ismail, its first director,
helped provide college-level practical instruction and research
in music, drama and folklore for the first time in Sudan. Despite
funding and status wrangles, the Institute survived until 1989,
when the National Islamic Front regime took power and it became
a target for political demolition. A new director began "Islamization"
of the Institute: new, ideologically-approved lecturers were brought
in, and the talent test for admission was replaced with an interview
on religious attitudes.
Song and Dance
No matter how severe the social stresses, however, the songs themselves
endure - the poetic ones and the vulgar ones - circulating in
a culture where nearly any group of people can reproduce them
by drumming or singing or clapping.
Lyrics come first in the Sudanese appreciation of music, whether they are made up on the spot or relate an epic poem. The lyricists and poets are as celebrated as the singers themselves. Spontaneous songs of praise for the bride and groom are common at weddings. Along the Nile in the northern region, semi-settled nomads display their machismo by baring their backs for the groom to beat them with a camel-whip, working up a massive adrenaline buzz to the sound of massed women's drumming, then cooling off as the local bard strings together extended doggerel about the qualities of the newly-weds. Young unmarried women then take turns to strut past the line of men, holding the worn-down whip handle aloft in a triumphant - not to say suggestive - manner.
Of course, modern urban weddings are not as raw as this, but they remain probably the best place to hear musicians and witness the dove-like bridal dance or kashif, which can be powerfully erotic.
Words, in the strictest sense,
are not always necessary. The Nubian hm bee, a regular wordless
chant, is used to add weight to stamping and clapping behind the
singer. In western Sudan, too, animal and bird sounds are mimicked
in the backing chants that flesh out complex, interweaving hand-clap
rhythms. One bewitching example sounds at first like sampled sheep
and goat noises with a belching chant of "Rambo" pulsing
through it. Meanwhile the singer is urging his girlfriend to fetch
him a packet of Gold Leaf cigarettes (ilbat Bahari) and asking
if he can go to her house to refresh himself with cold water.
(This is clearly a man who knows what he wants, and doesn't bother
with the simpering odes to a woman's eyes, forehead or other anatomy
above the neck that characterize the less direct Arabic love songs.)
This acapella form is often called al-tanbour. A less consistently
rhythmical, more improvised form of story-telling in song, again
without instruments, is known as dobait.
Women Singers
Half a century ago, urban women singers such as Mihera bint Abboud
and Um el Hassan el Shaygiya began carving individual styles from
the rich oral heritage of traditional women's songs. The most
famous woman from this era was the accomplished Aisha el Fellatiya,
who made her name as a singer during the Second World War when
she toured the camps of the Sudan Defence Force across North Africa
to boost the troops' morale.
Demurely echoing the rise of the 1960s girl groups in the west, a few female duos rose to local popularity including Sunai Kordofani, Sunai el Nagam and Sunai el Samar. In the early 1980s three gifted teenage Nubian sisters with a supportive father formed the group Balabil. Trained by oud player and songwriter Bashir Abbas, who also found lyricists and musicians for them, they found an avid audience around the Horn of Africa. In the uncertain climate of Sudan's "sharia" law, however, their yearning undertones were sometimes sufficiently sensuous to get them banned from television.
Balabil got back together for
the first time in ten years to play in Eritrea in 1997 - and made
a recording for Rags Music - and Hadia Talsam, the ablest sister,
has made
a solo album in Cairo entitled Kul' al-Nujum ("All the Stars"),
on the Hassad label.
The fortunes of women singers mirror the social trends of recent years. Consider an extreme case, Hanan Bulu-bulu, the poutingly provocative Madonna (or Marie Lloyd) of 1980s Sudanese pop. After the popular uprising that overthrew President Nimeiri and ended his despised version of Islamic sharia law, Hanan Bulu-bulu reflected a new mood as she warbled and wiggled her way to fame at the 1986 Khartoum International Fair. Her notoriety arose from her stage act, captured on video, which borrowed the sensuous bridal "dove-dance" of Sudanese weddings and orchestrated the often saucy songs of the urban women's daloka or tom-tom tradition.
But the backlash came soon after, as Islamist hardliners banned her concerts and beat her up for immoral behaviour. They insulted her "half-Ethiopian" background, which for them was a euphemism for sexual licence. She was by no means the best singer - her mewing little girl's voice and coarse repertoire never rivalled the poetic and emotional impact of other, more soulful female artists - but her naughtiness was a welcome antidote to the hollow pieties of the fundamentalists. Apparently she's still performing, somehow, somewhere.
More credit should go to women such as Gisma and Nasra, from whom Hanan Bulu-bulu stole much of her act. In the 1970s and 1980s they pioneered a performance version of the erotic kashif wedding display, coupled with torrential drumming and facetious, worldly-wise lyrics. They were popular at private gatherings and were frequently arrested for the irreverent and revealing nature of their songs. Despised by the political elites of left and right, they were regarded as a much-needed source of dirty realism by the lower classes. Home truths such as "Hey Commissioner, we know your Toyota's the pick-up for the groceries, and your Mercedes is the pick-up for the girls," and "This sharia is driving us to drink" were never likely to endear them to the authorities. Most Sudanese women can drum and sing, and the less genteel urbanites delighted in reproducing Nasra and Gisma's salty treatment of the traditional daloka style.
The closest you can get to this on disc is Tariq Sudan, a recording by Setona, a renowned henna artist from Kordofan, western Sudan. Currently resident in Cairo, but playing well-received gigs in Europe and America, Setona gives lusty voice to a generous handful of well-known women's songs, fleshed out by a largely male band. The Artist formerly known as Prince is reported to have sought out Setona for a henna tattoo job. Pity he didn't publicize her music.
At the more polite end of the market is the blind singer Hanan an-Nil , who in 1992 released "al-Farah al-Muhajir" in Cairo. She accompanies her delicate, wistful songs on an electronic keyboard, managing to avoid the deadening effect the "curse of the Casio" seemed to have in most Sudanese hands. The subtlety and power of local rhythms were often trampled in the cheap electronic invasion of the late 1980s, which continues to hobble the musical sensibilities of a generation. Too many recordings - especially those made in studios in Egypt - suffer from an overdose of saccharine synthesizers.
Keeping the flame of authenticity and perhaps the most promising new artist in international terms, is Rasha, a young woman of seemingly impeccable taste and assured talent, loyal to her roots and possessing a breadth of repertoire to rival any of the men.
Discography
Relatively few Sudanese musicians have access to modern recording
studios, although a couple more have recently been built in Khartoum.
A growing number of Sudanese CDs has been released on the international
market, but few people in Sudan have CD players and many classic
performances are still on tape only - if you can find them at
all.
A good selection of cassettes is available from Natari
in the UK and Africassette in the US. For information on
field recordings, including Zar and women's music, contact Sudan
Update, PO Box 10, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire HX7 6UX, England
(Tel/Fax +44 1422 845827; e-mail sudanupdate@gn.apc.org).
*Joint Number One Recommendation
MOHAMMED WARDI
He began singing at the age of five; his first hit was in 1960,
and he still has the most extraordinary effect on a Sudanese audience,
having come to embody the collective memories and aspirations
of an entire nation. Mohammed Wardi sings not only in Arabic but
also in his native Nubian - a quite different sound from Ali Hassan
Kuban - drawing on 7,000 years of culture.
CD Live in Addis Ababa 1994 (Rags Music, UK)
The wrinkled old Nubian effortlessly enraptures an entire stadium,
with his band sailing along like a felucca on the Nile; swaying
strings, tumbling tom-toms, musing saxophones and choppy guitars
create a majestic waltz over which he unfurls his impassioned,
weary choirboy voice.
*Joint Number One Recommendation
CASSETTE - NEW SUDAN SINGS (Counterpoint, UK, 1997) A essential
dose of reality - songs from the war zone. Sudan's imbalance of
power is highlighted by the fact that these stirring and poignant
field recordings by Maggie Hamilton are about the only musical
material from Southern Sudan available at present. Up to now it's
on cassette only, but DON'T let that put you off. Among the group
chants and hymns - Dinka, Zande, Nuer, Didinga and other languages
- are some extraordinarily beautiful unaccompanied women's songs.
There's a shiver of emotion on hearing words like "[peace]
agreement" and "Killington [Clinton]" stand out
in an otherwise obscure tongue.
Compilations / Various Artists
CD Musiques et chants du Soudan - l'Ile de Touti (Institute du
Monde Arabe / Blue Silver, France)
From Tuti Island, where the Blue Nile meets the White Nile at
Khartoum, comes this tremendously evocative recording by some
of Sudan's best musicians. Lie back in Tuti Island's lemon groves,
shaded from the scorching sun, and breathe in citrus flute essence
on drifting breezes of violins, as the Nile water gently beats
against the shore. Blissful.
Further CDs planned by Institute du Monde Arabe for 1998-99 include music from the Beja of Eastern Sudan, the Berta of Blue Nile province, the Nuba Mountains and Nubia, as well as artists Abdel Karim el Kabli and Mohammed Ali Gubara.
CD Balabil, Hussein Shendi, Abdel Aziz el Mubarak - Live in Eritrea (Rags, UK) First chance to hear three-woman group Balabil, specially re-united for this tour of Eritrea with two of Sudan's top male artists and a fine backing band.
CD Sudan: Music of the Blue Nile
Province (Auvidis/UNESCO, France 1996)
The Ingessana and Berta people of Blue Nile, bordering Ethiopia,
are under pressure from war and commercial agriculture and mining,
and their way of life is changing fast. This is a rare chance
to hear their traditional music, including horns, lyres and balafons,
recorded by Robert Gottlieb in the mid-1980s.
CD Rain in the Hills - Beja Ballads
of Port Sudan (Original Music, USA)
Staking out the distinctive identity of the people of the Red
Sea Hills with vigour and wit, these 1995 field recordings by
John Low feature gritty oud players and a lusty fishermen's band.
CD Sounds of Sudan (World Circuit,
UK).
Solo acoustic recordings of Abdel Gadir Salim and Abdel Aziz el-Mubarak
playing oud, and the Shaygi tambour player Mohamed Gubara, who
wrote Mohammed el Amin's hit Habibi. Highly informative background
notes by Moawia Yassin.
CD The Rough Guide to the Music
of North Africa (World Music Network, UK) As well as two characteristic
tracks from Abdel Aziz el Mubarak and Abdel Karim el Kabli's albums,
this useful sampler also includes the Nubian Hamza el Din's delicate
Ashranda.
Rasha
A gentle-voiced newcomer in her mid-20s, northern Sudanese singer
Rasha has an accomplished and thoughtful grasp of traditional
and contemporary styles, varying the type and texture of her songs
to hold the attention.
CD Sudaniyat (Nubenegra, Germany)
Rasha's first disc convincingly shows off her range, from Sufi
meditations to big band wedding songs, and is eminently listenable.
Backed by a variety of musicians from Sudan and from Spain - her
current home - who innovate but don't intrude, she sings with
a soulful sensitivity. A damn fine starting point.
Setona
When the Princess of Henna, Kordofan-born Setona, let rip on her
1998 tour of Europe and North America, western audiences got their
first proper taste of the earthier side of Sudanese women's culture.
CD Tariq Sudan - African Crossroads (Blue Flame, Germany) is urban
women's daloka music, tarted up a bit but still authentic. Setona's
voice is swampy, hoarse and gritty, and only a little inhibited
by the studio. It's forgiveable that the recording doesn't match
the headlong intensity of the live drum-only versions of these
songs, because you'd need the Pogues as a backing band to do that.
The opening track, Kumsur, still has an uninhibited rush. The
dance re-mix at the end is a bit clumpy, but a potential floor-filler
nonetheless.
Mohammed el Amin
The sonorous Mohammed el Amin, now in his mid-50s, has long been
one of Sudan's best-loved singers and composers, and an artistic
hero of the political left. He played legendary concerts in London,
Manchester and Moscow in the 1980s, which spawned thousands of
pirate tapes - but when will someone put his best group recordings
onto the world market?
CD The Voice of Sudan (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany)
This is an intimate solo acoustic set recorded by Mohammed el
Amin in Berlin in 1991. It captures his smokily majestic voice
and nimble oud playing - the latter sometimes got lost in his
earlier big band outings - in glorious epics such as Habibi, where
the roller-coaster riffing of the 1980s electric version gets
altogether subtler treatment.
Abdel Aziz el-Mubarak
With his apparent fondness for spangled jackets and polished love
songs for the ladies, Abdel Aziz el-Mubarak sometimes comes across
as the Bryan Ferry of Sudanese music, albeit with a better voice.
One of Sudan's great international stars - and unlike others,
a shrewd businessman - Abdel Aziz comes from a family of musicians
and was trained at Khartoum's famous Institute of Music and Drama
in the early 1970s. After successes on the radio and television
as early as 1975 he went on to become one of the country's best
known bandleaders.
CD Abdel Aziz el Mubarak (GlobeStyle, UK) and Straight from the
Heart (World Circuit, UK).
Mr Tuxedo does his Arab nightclub stuff to great effect on both
these CDs, showcasing the lush and ornamented sound of a Khartoum
big band. The live album Straight from the Heart features the
Ethiopian hit Na-Nu Na-Nu, always a crowd-pleaser.
Hamza el-Din
Hamza el-Din, Nubian ethnomusicologist, composer and virtuoso
oud player, has spent most of his life outside his birthplace.
With his Zen-like complexity-in-simplicity, he may be bigger in
Japan than on the streets of Sudan, but the echoes of home remain
strong.
CD Lily of the Nile (Water Lily Acoustics, USA) has an austere
elegance like a night journey under a starry desert sky. After
the hypnotic melancholy of four epic oud songs comes a compelling
tour de force on the deceptively simple bodhran-like hand-drum
called the tar.
CD Songs of the Nile (JVC, Japan). Rhythmically interesting set
of songs for voices, oud and percussion, if a little stark, recorded
in 1982.
Abdel Gadir Salim
Abdel Gadir Salim's rich powerful voice and dynamic arrangements
make music which is less fussy and more hard-driving than many
of his urban counterparts. His concerts and record releases abroad
have made him one of the most familiar Sudanese singers for western
listeners. The content of his songs strives to be closer to countryside
directness, while the arrangements reflect his studies of both
Sudanese and western music.
CD Nujum al-Lail/Stars of the Night (GlobeStyle, UK)
Recorded during a London show in 1989, refreshingly faithful to
the live sound of his prestigious big band.
CD The Merdoum Kings Play Songs of Love (World Circuit, UK)
An enduring favourite album: Merdoum is one of the vocal and drum
styles of Kordofan, Abdel Gadir's homeland in western Sudan, and
the professionalism of the all-star band notwithstanding, this
recording has fire and precision, polish and funk.
Abdel Karim el Kabli
The avuncular poet, composer and folklorist Abdel Karim el Kabli,
now in his mid-sixties, has become a walking encyclopaedia of
the musical heritage of north, east and central Sudan. Kabli embraces
both colloquial and classical styles, and is equally beloved by
academics and ordinary Sudanese.
Limaza (Rags, UK)
An album full of musical sparkle, and his best recording to date,
with some stunning interplay between Kabli's oud and the violins,
flute and bongos. Abdel Karim el Kabli wrote Sukkar, Sukkar (Sugar,
Sugar) in 1962, a gently lilting take on the Twist, the dance
craze he had just encountered in England, and which he claimed
could be traced back to the Zar ritual in Sudan. His restrained
style is a million miles from spirit possession, but he comes
across as an amiable old toad.
Kamal Tarbas
Kamal Tarbas, now 50, is referred to by admirers as the King of
Sudanese Folk Music. He founded the Dar Karoma centre for music
in Omdurman in 1985 in honour of Karoma, who pioneered Sudanese
popular song from the 1920s to the 1950s. Perhaps because of his
earthy populism Kamal Tarbas is dismissed as a vulgarian by those
who like their lyrics more elevated in tone. Beyond dispute is
his immediately recognisable laid-back voice against revolving
tom-tom rhythms and swaying accordion, derived from the hibaaq
style and fleshed out in later recordings with strings. At his
best when sounding rough-hewn, Tarbas makes one of the classic
- if rather static - sounds of modern northern Sudanese music.
CD Ya Rait and Ayam Safana (EthioSound,
USA)
Two Kamal Tarbas albums issued earlier on cassette were remastered
onto CD in 1997. Every home should have one - although one's probably
enough.
Igd el Djilad
Young vocal group - half a dozen harmonising voices and half a
dozen players, revolutionary (for Sudan) in their readiness to
use material from the whole country - north and south, African
and Arab. Their best moments recall early Steeleye Span.
CD Madaris (pam jaf, Germany 1995)
So bright-eyed and bushy-tailed you might mistake some of the
songs for TV jingles. Sometimes the earnestness is too palpable
in this production, like songs to make children behave well. Why
then do the Nuba and Southern Sudanese songs covered so delicately
by Igd el Djilad still provoke a tear? Probably for the same reason
they get the band into trouble. The Juba Arabic of "Mama"
- a song about poverty - is beautiful, sad and sweet despite the
upbeat tempo. It would make an amazing single in aid of peace
in Sudan.
Tariq Abubakar
After playing in Ali Hassan (Walk like a Nubian) Kuban's band
in Egypt for two years, Sudanese saxophonist-singer Tariq Abubakar
settled in Toronto, Canada, in the 1990s. He became one of that
country's best-known African musicians, and a video at the end
of 1997 put him on all the music TV channels. His band, the Afro-Nubians,
threw influences from Zaire/Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia and Ghana into
a bubbling blend that had mass appeal as dance music in the West,
while referring across the African continent to the sounds of
Hugh Masekela, Thomas Mapfumo and Tabu Ley Rochereau. Tariq would
set Arabic lyrics to soukous melodies, dissolving Sudan's north-south
cultural divide, and ventured to sing earnestly of peace and unity
in his rumbling English. During a brief return to Sudan in January
1998, Tariq was killed in a car accident on his way to Khartoum
airport. He was 32.
CDs Tour to Africa (Stern's, UK),
Great Africans, and Hobey Laik (Socan, Canada)
Released between 1994 and 1997, Tariq Abubakar's three albums
venture much further into African musical territory than other
Sudanese artists. Often bold, sunny and bouncing with energy,
he also appeals wistfully for tolerance and diversity. Once you
get used to his growly-bear voice, his fusions have a special
charm. Once a pointer to a peaceful future, now he'll be painfully
missed.
Ahmed M. Osman (Satoor)
Satoor is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who has toured
internationally with singers including Wardi, Abdel Aziz el Mubarak
and Abdel Karim el Kabli. He joined forces with Arizona-based
Mohamed elOmrabi, DJ, producer and reggae promoter, to showcase
his abilities without a vocalist, starting with
CD Rhythms of Sudan, Volume 1 (Blue Nile, USA)
Multi-tracked, air-conditioned instrumentals of familiar-sounding
songs, more catchy riffs than rhythms, skillfull but a little
antiseptic. Hints of Philly Soul strings and jolly oud make it
pretty painless - until the synthesized handclaps on the remix.
Ideal for an aspiring Sudanese restaurant, or the lobby of the
Khartoum Hilton.