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ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Welcome to This Being Human…I’m your host Abdul Rehman-Malik. On this podcast from the Aga Khan Museum, I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world whose life, ideas and art are shaped by Muslim culture.

NADIR NAHDI:

There’s a new generation that has a very unique perspective to how they see themselves as young Muslims in the modern world.

TANYA MUNEERA WILLIAMS:

I am this wide-eyed girl. I’m like, I want it all, I want to experience it all.

GINELLA MASSA:

Everyone has a story. Sometimes you just have to find out what it is.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Like the poem that inspires this podcast, The Guest House, by Sufi poet Jallaludin Rumi, we’re talking to people who seek meaning and joy in work and life…regardless of what the day brings. Today, East African retro-pop musician Alsarah.

ALSARAH:

If you believe in what you’re doing and you know how to talk about it, you can teach people to almost like anything. You just got to believe that it’s really worth liking and not be intimidated by people being confused at first.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Alsarah takes the music of her homeland and blends it with a modern sensibility. She was born in Sudan before fleeing with her family to Yemen as a child and then later to the United States. But she carried the music of her past with her. She eventually settled in Brooklyn and became both a scholar and a performer of East African music, most notably a style called Nubian Music, which has its roots on the borderlands of modern-day Egypt and Sudan. She has toured around the world and worked on a number of projects, including releasing two albums with her spectacular band Alsarah and The Nubatones. Alsarah and The Nubatones is the kind of band you have to experience live. They are exuberance and life personified. Alsarah joined me to speak about finding her sound and why we carry music with us. And as we’re talking about sounds, you will hear some of the sounds of New York in the background of this interview.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

Alsarah, you know, sound and music surrounds you. And I’m wondering when you arrived to the United States at 12 years old, how did the country that you arrived in sound to you?

ALSARAH:

You know, it sounded very alien because, you know, with music, a lot of times we think of music as just like the recording or the track or the product, but when you’re listening to music, you’re often consuming it in the environment it’s also in. So, your music has the background of the cars, of the adhan, of the beeping, of the this, of the kind of sounds of the place. So, when we first landed in the States, we landed in Boston for about three or four months, and the sounds of Boston were so alien to me. The sounds of the wind sounded different, the smell of the air. The way I experienced sounds is very deeply tied to sight and sent for me. And so, they all kind of become an amalgamation together of one experience. And so, for me, the smell of the wet, salty air and the way dampened, the way sat the way sound would try to reflect off of the cement was so different than the kind of buildings I was around that were made from more from mud or made more from brick, and so the way they even reflected the sound back at you was different. So, everything was really intense, and the language was different. And it was interesting because it felt like because everything was so alien it became like a cacophony of sound around me and smells. And it actually really isolated me into a very small — like I isolated myself out of it into in my own world, you know, to just take breaks from the foreignness. And then a couple of months after that, we moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, which is a really small, small college town in western Massachusetts, which was the most provincial place I’ve ever lived. Because I was a city girl. I came from a huge city, and so I was just like, Why are there cows here? So, I had…I had to really…I had to learn nature. Which is good.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

You describe the sounds that you heard arriving into the United States so evocatively and you speak about having grown up in a bustling metropolis of a city. So, I’m wondering what kind of musical landscape and soundscape did you grow up around? What did home sound like?

ALSARAH: 

As time passes, your recollection of things shifts and changes with the new knowledges that you acquire. So now looking back as I am today, I realize my home environment was extremely musical. I grew up listening, you know, all day there is the sound of the adhan punctuating your day. And every mosque has a different adhan so I grew up listening to different kinds of sounds. And in Sudan, the adhan is very different than it is in Cairo, very different than it is in Yemen. So, I grew up surrounded by mosques and listening to that all day, and then my mom loved music, so…and she loved a diverse array of sounds. So, I grew up listening to everything from Bollywood to Fairuz to Sudanese local musicians like Mostafa Sid Ahmed, who are part of like a very leftist movement. I was also really blessed to have extremely politically conscious and active immediate family, and there was a lot of books and music and poetry in the house. And it was expected that we become fluent in a lot of it, just in casual conversation, not even like “Sit down and study.” It was just like, “Oh, you should know this because it’s fun knowledge.” There was long periods of time in Sudan where it was really hard to acquire music outside of the household in my generation’s time. And so, already before that, we already came from households that were singing — call and response songs are very normal. It’s part of the pop sounds and so hanging out with your girls and singing was great. And weddings are clubs. Like we have a wedding season, so we prepare for the wedding season. And you end up by default just kind of picking up a lot of music, and musical knowledge becomes a part of the general education. And one of the big unfortunate things about the institutionalization of education through this capitalistic perspective is that it alienated a lot of different ways of passing knowledge on. Being educated does not mean you need to be in an institution. You can be an extremely educated person with a lot of knowledge and never have finished high school. And I grew up around that. So, for me, music was always in there, but the idea of becoming a musician was never an acceptable thing in my household in the sense of like, why? You only do that if you’re not smart, even though you really can’t. You can’t be stupid and be a musician. You really can’t. But they don’t know that.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

Alsarah, you, you had to leave the Sudan at some point, and it began you on this kind of incredible journey to Yemen. And as you said, eventually to the United States. I kind of wonder what were the songs and the sounds that Alsarah carried with her through this journey, which at times I know you’ve described elsewhere as harrowing. You were displaced. You were looking for a place to land. What accompanies you when you’re on that journey?

ALSARAH:

What accompanied me was a box of tapes. And a little box of tapes that I brought because I had a big collection when we lived in Yemen, but the way we left, we left very suddenly. And so, we had just kind of like one bag between the four of us. And then we had some people send us stuff from the house. I didn’t get all my tapes that I had collected, but I got a couple of them that were really my favorite. I had West El Dayra which and the version that Mohamed Mounir had, the whole album. We had Yutulsum. West El Dayra was originally by Mohammed Wardi. And to me, like that tapes really perfectly straddled my cultural amalgamation because it also really took me leaving home to understand that even at home, I was also strange because I kept trying to describe home and even when I was trying to describe it to other Sudanese people, I realized that oh, my household is extremely mixed. Being Nubian is, and especially because when you’re in it and in Sudan, there is this movement towards nationalization. And so, we’re all ones, we’re all just Sudanese. And this idea of trying to move away from your tribalism because tribalism is the root of all of our conflict, when I actually think nationalism is the root of all of our conflict. Because to me, tribalism is an inherent part of human development and evolution. And so, coming out of that was finally when I realized that, oh no, my culture straddles the two fluidly. And then realizing that I’ve always been from a people in-between lands. And then realizing that I’m from a people in-between lands who’ve already had an internal displacement actually eased the pressure of this displacement because it really, it allowed me to realize that I come from a long line of people that survived this. This is not a new experience, and I’m not alone in it. And realizing you’re not alone in something is actually really empowering, I think. And once I had that realization, I started to also look all around me, at all the other immigrants around me and realizing we all have this in common and I started to really align my identity more with immigrants than I did with…Like I will, I will always be Sudanese. I was born Sudanese. I’m going to die Sudanese. It’s how I navigate through all the different experiences. But being an immigrant who’s been displaced and Sudanese is also its own unique pocket of that. So, with those tapes I had, you know, Mohamed Mounir save for West El Dayra. A year after that, I acquired a bunch of other music because I was trying to replace my collection. And the public library. Oh my god. God bless the public library. Everybody, support your public library. Get a subscription. Give them money. I love them so much. I learned English at the public library. I learned about music at the public library because we didn’t have money for any of that stuff. And my public library was top notch. Like, they had a huge listening section, which apparently nobody used, because all these rich college kids had their own CD players. But I was like, there’s a free listening station here.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK: 

You know, you talk about the public library, and I’m brought back to moments in my own childhood of long Saturday and Sunday afternoons of my mom taking us to the public library and us sitting at the listening station. But you’re so right, for immigrant families who need it, right? That space for exploration and learning, the public library was—

ALSARAH:

And free babysitting.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK: 

Totally. Totally, my mom used to—

ALSARAH:

My mom, she’d just leave us at the library. She’s just like, don’t go anywhere. And she’d come back six hours later.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK: 

Absolutely, Alsarah, I was about to say the same thing. It was. It really was parents would leave us at the library and we’d read and listen to stuff the whole day. And you’re right, when she’d come back, the back of the car was filled with groceries. She’d been to the farmer’s market. She’d run all of her errands. And the funny thing was Alsarah, we still didn’t want to leave. We’re like another hour, another hour, give me another hour.

ALSARAH:

Me too! We would stay until closing. I was like, can you just pick us up at closing time? Cause I was like, I want to finish this book. She’s like, bring it home. I was like, I already maxed out my limit. And then as I spent more time in the library, I became obsessed with the idea of trying to figure out what does your country’s music sound like? Because people would ask me that and I grew up listening to so many different kinds of music. I hadn’t really made the connection as a child that each land has its own sound. I didn’t get that part at all [laugh]. I was like, but we have them all in the house. Why wouldn’t they just be all everywhere? And then I realized no one ever heard our music outside of us. And so, I became obsessed with the idea of trying to translate what it means to sound Sudanese. What does that mean? And so, I started to look at other countries. So from like when I was a teenager, basically like around 13, 14, I started kind of doing that nosedive into the ethnomusicology world of like trying to figure out what different folk sounds meant. How do you document stories in that? And that brought me full circle back to the Nubian ‘Songs of Return.’ After college, I really came back to them in a way, like a deliberate way to study them because I was just like, what’s coded here? And what’s coded here was the same thing that I found in that soledad sound from Cabo Verde, from a lot of other diasporas around the world. I was like, this is diaspora music actually, the Nubian ‘Songs of the Return’. This is not Nubian traditional sounds. It’s diaspora sounds. And you can hear it in the arrangements, the choices of words. And once I started to realize that, it kind of liberated me because it’s like there’s this obsession with purity in the music world and in general in America of making things into very hard categories with no bleeds outside of them and making people into flat, digestible things. And humans aren’t like that. And understanding that at the root of all tradition is fusion…is the most liberating thing, because then you can really realize that innovation is an inherent part of culture. Culture is made up. We have to really keep saying that to ourselves. Culture is made up, so you are an active participant in the making of that. And that’s why you need to be extremely conscious of how you consume culture and how you regurgitate culture. You know, you can’t just be in with a trend without knowing its roots, its history, how you ended up where you ended up. I mean, you could, but that’s on you.

“Habibi Tal” by Alsarah and the Nubatones

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

It was in Brooklyn where Alsarah started her band Alsarah and the Nubatones. Here’s a bit of the song “Habibi Taal” from their album Silt.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

Tell me about meeting your musical collaborator, Rami El Aasser. And the emergence of Alsarah as not just a musician, but Alsarah, the leader of one of the coolest bands ever.

ALSARAH:

You know, it was so organic. Because when I moved to New York, I was a freelance musician. So, you could just, you know, I would work on random, different gigs, anyone who needed a singer who could do stuff in Arabic. And I had gotten hired by this band that was working on a project of taarab music from Zanzibar and Kenya. And the project was in Swahili and I don’t speak Swahili, but it’s got a lot of Arabic in it and some Bantu. And so, I decided to learn how to sing in Swahili. So, I became the lead singer for the band, and I think I was okay. But Rami was one of the drummers the band leader had hired at a certain point, and Haig Manoukian, who was the original oud player in the Nubatones, may he rest in peace, was the oud player there. He was the one who had actually put me into the project because I was still quite young and just moved to New York, and I really didn’t know how to do this musician thing. Cause I knew I didn’t want to do pop and I knew I didn’t really want to sing in English. And so, there wasn’t really like a route left open to me that I could see. And so, I just kind of was puttering around like trying to work in different projects. So, Haig tapped me for that project. Then Rami joined the project, then Rami and I became really good friends. Rami is an incredible human being, one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever met. And a total nerd. And that’s my favorite kind of people. So, we would have these monthly hangouts that we called the Supper Club, where we basically take turns cooking for each other and having a full-on nerd fest about one subject or another with like examples of sound, reading paragraphs, looking up things in the bibliography, just hardcore nerding out. And at the time when we first started this, Rami was working on his master’s project, which was about agriculture in the role of modernity in Egypt, post the high dam. And so, you know, because the building of the high dam really affected agriculture greatly, especially because a lot of that was in the Nubian regions. So, he, you know, he was talking about that and him being a musician already, also a drummer, he was talking about, you know, the change of sounds from pre-high dam to post-high dam, from the choice of instruments, to the choice of lyrics, to the rise of the ‘Songs of Return’, which really became their own genre within Nubian music. And they grew up in urban centers that had high concentrations of Nubians. So mostly in Cairo and in Khartoum, but really predominantly in Cairo, the scene was concentrated there. Because in Cairo, Nubians are visibly different also than the rest of Egyptians. And it reminds Egyptians of the fact that Egypt used to be black. So, we grew up there. And so, Rami and I would talk about it a lot. And he would talk about it just from an academic perspective. And I would bring in my perspective as growing up listening to it and really not separating it mentally in my head, they all were continuity of the same traditional things. And so having that conversation over and over and like we basically both were like, Oh, you know, it’d be really nice if we could trace this in a concert. I was like, Dude, this isn’t just a concert. This is a band. And he was like, I don’t have time for a band. I have a job. I’m in 18 different bands. And he just like panicked. I was like, I have mad time. Let me just handle this. I was like, would you show up to rehearsals if I just arranged everything? He’s like, yeah. I was like, great. That’s all. [laughing].

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

I love the fact that the sound that eventually coalesced around Alsarah and The Nubatones was something you called East African retro pop. And you’ve talked about that, and you’ve talked about this Nubian music, which just seems like, as you’re describing it like, feels like I’m on the edge of a universe of sound right? I feel like I’m on the edge of all kinds of discoveries about to happen. How do you describe your sound?

ALSARAH: 

I feel like it’s something you really need to experience. Most sound is best experienced. Because words are inherently going to reduce it. So, like for me, I chose to create a genre and a label because I didn’t find one that fit me, and I was not comfortable with being consumed under somebody else’s banner of what I am. I felt like if you want to consume this, you need to understand this. And if you don’t want to understand this, then you don’t get to consume this. And I was always happy with that because in my mind, my idea of success was never stardom. It was never pop. My idea of success was making an authentic change in the way someone heard themself and others. And that could be eight people. And that’s fine. But, you know, retro pop I picked because we don’t make modern pop, but we make older pop, and people also need to remember that traditional music is just really old pop.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

I love that.

ALSARAH:

And it was so good that you really honestly didn’t even need YouTube to make it last forever. I’m just like, That’s how good those melodies were. Why wouldn’t you want to draw from that? Those are the classics. And so, for me, it was just like, I wanted to clarify that I’m not also doing traditional music in the way it would be practiced because I know how that should be practiced. And there is some brilliant practitioners doing it, and I’m not doing that. I’m not trying to do that. I am inspired by traditions because everyone is. And the idea that Western music and all its formats does not come from a tradition, it’s part of that weird centering the West thing where everyone else is ethnic and they are the only ones who are norm. And it’s like, no, you’re ethnic too. You’re just not as knowledgeable about it for some reason. So, it seems you’re ignorant. But, you know, that’s between you and your lord. [laughing].

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

You know, Alsarah, you bring this kind of new… I don’t even want to call it fusion. I want to say this new recension, right? This new moment of music. You start bringing it to audiences in New York. And I wonder how in those early days did audiences respond to you? The singing is in Arabic and other languages. There’s all these interesting musical instruments, the oud, the doumbek, the you know, the singing, the synths, the piano, all of these things being played and the sound coming out that probably a lot of people had never heard before. What was the reaction of folks as they heard your sound?

ALSARAH:

You know, at first it was confusion, cause it’s like even though New York is a very special place because it’s so diverse in its musical scene. People had seen the doumbek or seen the oud or seen the bass and never seen them put together doing these kinds of sounds. And they were used to hearing them all in very specific, Arabic-centered, specifically Turkish-centered sound, actually. So anyways, they were used to hearing the Arabic scene, quote unquote, is used to practicing that very specific repertoires in New York. So, people were very confused at first, and they’re like, Is this Arabic music or African music? I was like, It’s, it’s a little bit of both, actually. So, it took them a second, but God bless New Yorkers. Yo they’re ready to go in on anything if it’s good they’re like, Okay, we’ll bite. So, it took a while. It was a very slow uphill battle. You know, like in small rooms, and I was lucky to have still experience that last tendrils of the New York small music room scene. That was really an amazing opportunity for a lot of musicians when they first come up, having these small rooms with owners that are really, really into music and into new projects. After the collapse of the major labels, these kind of venues almost became like their own version of A&R on the local level, you know, like allowing musicians to come into start new things, new bands get created there. And so, you know, places like Barbes, especially who, like, you know, could not survive. I mean, a lot of them didn’t even survive the economic crash of 2008, and then COVID came and just kind of destroyed that. But a lot of those venues were really key in my upbringing as a local musician. And because the rooms are really small, you really get to practice training your audience. People want to learn when they come to things. It’s not to have a class, but like they’re down to have a good time. And the magic of music is that when people listen, they suspend a lot of things in their frontal lobes, you know, and so they end up actually being less judgmental than they ever could be. They’re more receptive to information, and they’re willing to roll with you. If you believe in what you’re doing and you know how to talk about it, you can teach people to almost like anything. You just got to believe that it’s really worth liking and not be intimidated by people being confused at first.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

You’re someone who engages, as you’ve talked about, in a lot of different musical traditions. And so, I am interested at this particular moment, what’s inspiring you right now?

ALSARAH:

You know, I’m feeling recently really inspired by a lot of cumbia and the way cumbia is moving. And I go through phases with cumbia where I like, I become extremely obsessed for a while and then I move on and then I become really obsessed again.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

Explain to us what cumbia is.

ALSARAH:

So, cumbia is a kind of music from Latin America. People fight over where it started. Peruvians insist it started in Peru. Colombians insist it started in Colombia, and Mexicans are in and down for this fight as well. They’re like, It’s ours. Venezuelans love to put their two cents in on it. So, I don’t really like to get involved in this fight. Seems like a local fight, but it has different, like hints depending on where it come from. So, Cumbia is like, it’s like a [singing beats]. It’s like a slow six eight. Maybe. Like I would say, it’s like a slow six eight with like a gait. So, it almost feels like bizarre cowboy music from Latin America. Every time I listen to cumbia, I feel like I’m riding a very strange horse or a donkey. [laughing].

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

I love that description.

ALSARAH:

It is kind of how I feel about it. I was like, It’s like donkey cowboys, you know, because the gait is a little bit different. It’s got a trot, but you’re not in the same light. You know, bluegrass trot is like [singing beats]. And so, you really hear that environment in a lot of sounds, of musics that come out of places. I’m going through this obsession with cumbia recently, I think because there’s so many really amazing Latin, like alt Latino artists that are coming out over the last two years that are really celebrating the folk traditions that they’re coming from and doing their own thing with it. And I enjoy being able to go see local cumbia bands and like dancing around. And you know, it’s really interesting because with the pandemic, what ended up staying true is all the local, folky things, you know, like the bands that would busk outside and so we’d go and hang out on the block and dance. And so, it’s kind of making its, a return for me. So, I’m listening to a lot of psychedelic cumbia from Peru, compilations from 63′ to 82′ kind of vibes. Yeah, a lot of compilations from that time period.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

I love it, Alsarah. I can’t wait to hear how that seeps in and starts to kind of interface with your musical ecosystem and we hear The Nubatones bring us some cumbia vibes.

ALSARAH:

There is a rehearsal coming up next week where this might very much happen. Because I was like, they’re six eight versus our six eight. Let’s take it.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

I’ll watch, watch the space. Alsarah, before we wrap up, I have to tell you that, you know, people who I have spoken to about Alsarah and The Nubatones and folks who’ve gone to your concerts will often describe those concerts as spiritual experiences. They are present with you and your music, but they are transported. And for you to have that impact on not only people’s bodies, but people’s hearts…I want to ask you about your heart, Alsarah. What’s moving your spirit and what do you think it is that we can hear that movement? Because we’re experiencing something and it’s very special.

ALSARAH:

You know, you are experiencing it with me. That’s why I was like, I am very, I’ve always been very bad about communicating my feelings in words. I feel like the fewer the words, the better. I really believe in that. That’s perfect to say. You know, the prophet said it I believe, a long time ago, you know, the less the words, the better, you know, keep it wise, keep it cute. But songs becomes, as a result, a place where I really navigate that and like, honestly, I write songs because I don’t have access to free therapy. So that’s why I write songs. I’m really sorry y’all have to go through it with me. [laughing]. I try to be as honest as possible in my songs and when I’m honest in my songs, I’m not reaching for a didactic message that I’m trying to give you. I’m reaching for…That grey, complicated space of a feeling that is many feelings at once. That, to me, is what you write songs about because you can’t really put it into one thing or the other. And my heart, my heart loves the grey zone. I am complicated. My capacity for feeling is very multidimensional. I can have opposing emotions at the same time very strongly. And they will live harmoniously inside my heart. And I think and I think a lot of us are that way actually. And I think we live though in a world that’s so obsessed with again, labels, definitions, binary oppositions that we are taught can never coexist that we have to constantly repress one side of ourselves or the other to be able to deal with the general social hypocrisy of the system we live in. And so, what I hope to do is when we’re in that room together is that we can all vibrate on that level of at least not lying to ourselves.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

Who or what would you like to welcome into your guest house?

ALSARAH:

Well, I’ve spent the last two years welcoming grief and sadness into my guest house. You know, and I’ve welcomed them very joyously. I was waiting for them. So, you know, it’s like, come in. I think now, though, it’s time to welcome light and mania actually into my guest house. I really love mania. I think she’s very under-celebrated. She gets stuff done. And so, I want her to hang out for a little bit, get stuff done. And then when we need a rest, we might ask her to leave. But till then, she’s welcome.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:

Alsarah, this has been blessed. Thank you so much for being on This Being Human.

ALSARAH:

Thank you so much for having me.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Thanks for listening to This Being Human. You can find links to some of Alsarah’s music in the show notes. This Being Human is produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Our Senior Producer is Kevin Sexton, with production assistance from Abhi Raheja. Our Executive Producer is Lisa Gabriele. Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Original music by Boombox Sound. Stuart Coxe is the president of Antica Productions. Katie O’Connor is TVO’s senior producer of podcasts, and Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO. This Being Human is generously supported by the Aga Khan Museum, one of the world’s leading institutions that explores the artistic, intellectual, and scientific heritage of Muslim civilizations around the world. For more information about the museum go to www.agakhanmuseum.org. The Museum wishes to thank Nadir and Shabin Mohamed for their philanthropic support to develop and produce This Being Human.