Let's do a little free association. The word is Iraq. What comes to mind? I bounced this off a few people in the past few days, and got back answers that included war, violence, Islam, Sunnis & Shiites, Arabs, Saddam Hussein, oil, WMDs (answer given as an acronym) and suicide bombings. You'd barely even know there was an actual country, much less any kind of culture, behind all that if you just looked at the collection of words. Really, the responses I got were a collection of impressions (very similar to my own) culled from news reports dating back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s-- it's exceedingly easy in our media culture to forget that behind all the no-fly zones, Sunni Triangles, concrete barriers, smart bombs, and corpses there are more than 25 million people trying to lead somewhat normal lives.
Amir ElSaffar doesn't live in Iraq and wasn't even born there-- he was born in Illinois to an Iraqi father and an American mother, but you can imagine that ever since 1991 his Iraqi heritage weighed heavily in his mind. He's played jazz and classical trumpet since the 90s, including stints with Cecil Taylor and Vijay Iyer, but in 2002 he traveled to Baghdad as the drum beat of war was slowly rising to learn to play the santoor, a Mesopotamian hammer dulcimer. He also learned to play traditional maqam music. The maqam is built around a ruhiyya, which is a basic modal melodic framework for improvisation-- the same approach taken by a great deal of modern jazz.
This trip back to his cultural roots led directly to his first recordings as a bandleader, including this one. The title Two Rivers refers to the Tigris and Euphrates, the two principle rivers of Iraq, and the water sources for some of the world's earliest civilizations. The record isn't a maqam recording in the strictest sense-- rather, it blends the techniques of maqam with modern jazz (Iraqi maqam is also a vocal form, but ElSaffar keeps it mostly instrumental for this record). The sextet includes trumpet, santoor, alto sax, oud, violin, bass drums, and hand percussion (not all at once, obviously) and swings back and forth between mellifluous themes, complex rhythms and time changes, and diffuse semi-free passages that often feature multiple instruments playing against a single one that holds down the theme.
ElSaffar carefully annotates each of his compositions in the liners, explaining where the rhythms came from and the origins of the maqams his own tunes are drawn from-- reading them, I got the rare feeling that I was actually learning something from the album notes. That's all great, but it wouldn't be worth much if the music didn't move me as well. And it does. The unique rhythms (one track is in 17/8) create an interesting framework for jazz improvisation, and the tension between structure and anarchy is high throughout the album. One of the record's most gripping moments occurs on "Khosh Reng (Maqam Awj)", when ElSaffar puts down the trumpet and sings. The phrases tend to begin with a few words sung on a single note and move away microtonally at the end.
It's also great to hear a new recording that showcases the santoor, a beautiful instrument that sounds somewhere between a piano, a mandolin and a harp. It's an instrument most people in the West don't even know exists, played in a style most people in the West aren't aware exists, and it gives us a piece of Iraq we can't get on CNN. In fact, apart from Sublime Frequencies' excellent Choubi Choubi! compilation, it's hard to hear any Iraqi music today and rare to get a glimpse into the country's incredibly rich cultural history. Two Rivers provides that, and it's also a great modern jazz album.
