Thread: Categorizing musicians who recorded in Arabic

I'm trying to organize info about music on my web site, and scratching my head over how to do so.

Some is easy:

For "classical" music, I think of the eras of Oum Kalthoum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Baligh Hamdi, Abdel Halim Hafez, and Farid al-Atrache.

For "shaabi" I think of Ahmed Adawiyya, Hakim, Saad al-Sogheir, etc.

For "al jeel" I think of Amr Diab, Nancy Ajram, Ehab Tawfic, Mohammed Mounir, Gawaher, Sherine, Nawal el-Zoughbi, Fella, Hanan, and others.

I think of shaabi and al jeel as both coming under the category of "Egyptian pop".

But where would you put Warda? To me, she sort of falls into an interim period between classical and pop. What do you think?

I'm trying to figure out what to do with Bassem Yazbeck and Emad Sayyah - their musical style is quite pop-ish, but I tend to think of them as creating "music for dancers" rather than being mainstream pop musicians.

And then there are the Lebanese legends - Rahbani Brothers, Feiruz, Sabah, etc. Feiruz sang a lot of muwashahat and debkes, but she also sang the popular music of her time such as Nihna wil Amar Jiraan. So how would you classify some of these musicians?

How would you handle someone like Farid al-Atrache and Fayza Ahmed who grew up outside of Egypt (in Syria) but rose to fame in Egypt's entertainment industry? Would you call them Egyptian singers because that's where their careers were based, or would you call them Syrian because of where they grew up?

Shira,
This is tough, and I don't envy you for taking on a project like this!

I tend to refer to the work of Um K., Abdel Halim, and the like as "classical" too, but really, in the scheme of the history of Arabic music, they're not classical...they represent the birth of popular music. But it would be nuts to label them "pop." OK, I'm not being helpful...

But then again, Warda represents kind of a bridge between the "classic" popular music of someone like Um Kulthum and the pop music of today. Maybe you need to create some kind of popular music continuum...

Someone like Feiruz or Sabah almost needs their own category...maybe a Lebanese equivalent to the "classic popular" category that would include Um K. et al.

As far as handling/categorizing Farid, I'd keep the categories based on music/music traditions and definitely lump him with the Egyptians, in spite of his nationality.

I am not sure if this is helpful at all. I am anxious to see what you come up with!

Nisaa

Originally Posted by *Shira*

I'm trying to organize info about music on my web site, and scratching my head over how to do so.

Some is easy:

For "classical" music, I think of the eras of Oum Kalthoum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Baligh Hamdi, Abdel Halim Hafez, and Farid al-Atrache.

For "shaabi" I think of Ahmed Adawiyya, Hakim, Saad al-Sogheir, etc.

For "al jeel" I think of Amr Diab, Nancy Ajram, Ehab Tawfic, Mohammed Mounir, Gawaher, Sherine, Nawal el-Zoughbi, Fella, Hanan, and others.

I think of shaabi and al jeel as both coming under the category of "Egyptian pop".

But where would you put Warda? To me, she sort of falls into an interim period between classical and pop. What do you think?

I'm trying to figure out what to do with Bassem Yazbeck and Emad Sayyah - their musical style is quite pop-ish, but I tend to think of them as creating "music for dancers" rather than being mainstream pop musicians.

And then there are the Lebanese legends - Rahbani Brothers, Feiruz, Sabah, etc. Feiruz sang a lot of muwashahat and debkes, but she also sang the popular music of her time such as Nihna wil Amar Jiraan. So how would you classify some of these musicians?

How would you handle someone like Farid al-Atrache and Fayza Ahmed who grew up outside of Egypt (in Syria) but rose to fame in Egypt's entertainment industry? Would you call them Egyptian singers because that's where their careers were based, or would you call them Syrian because of where they grew up?

Originally Posted by *Shira*

For "shaabi" I think of Ahmed Adawiyya, Hakim, Saad al-Sogheir, etc.

I guess I think of shaabi as being sort of their equivalent of what we call country music. The average dancer doesn't usually come across it unless it achieves a lot of pop-crossover success (for us, often courtesy of Miles), and sometimes it's hard to tell where "shaabi" ends and "beledi" begins. The older stars like Ahmed Adawiyya and Hassan al-Asmar seem to occupy a different band of the musical spectrum than newer singers like Hakim and Saad al-Sogheir, much as Hank Williams doesn't usually turn up on the same playlist as Alan Jackson.

For "al jeel" I think of Amr Diab, Nancy Ajram, Ehab Tawfic, Mohammed Mounir, Gawaher, Sherine, Nawal el-Zoughbi, Fella, Hanan, and others.

I'm beginning to wonder if the concept of "al jeel" still means anything. Many of the artists we as foreign dancers think of as "al jeel" aren't exactly "the youthful generation" anymore. That's not to say that Amro Diab, Ehab Tawfiq, Mustafa Qamar, Hisham Abbas, etc., aren't still massively popular, but they're all in their 40s now, and they're competing with a new wave of younger singers like Mohammed Hamaki, Louai, and Tamer Hosni, who skew toward a comparably younger fan base.

But where would you put Warda? To me, she sort of falls into an interim period between classical and pop. What do you think?

Perhaps it makes more sense to list everything as a spectrum of "pop," where some of it merely happens to be older, just like we wouldn't have a problem with sorting The Monkees, Duran Duran, and Fall Out Boy in a chronology of our pop music, even though they're slightly different styles.

How would you handle someone like Farid al-Atrache and Fayza Ahmed who grew up outside of Egypt (in Syria) but rose to fame in Egypt's entertainment industry? Would you call them Egyptian singers because that's where their careers were based, or would you call them Syrian because of where they grew up?

I would preserve the singers' original ethnicities. Unless they changed citizenship, they are whatever they were born as, regardless of where they worked. Besides, if you start splitting those hairs, then how would you accommodate the Arab tradition of performing songs in styles other than your own native one? Occasionally a singer will record something in a different dialect or musical style, and trying to sort out all of those recordings would be a logistic nightmare!

BTW, where are you going to put Kazem al-Saher? He's sort of an Iraqi party of one.

Originally Posted by Tourbeau

I guess I think of shaabi as being sort of their equivalent of what we call country music. The average dancer doesn't usually come across it unless it achieves a lot of pop-crossover success (for us, often courtesy of Miles), and sometimes it's hard to tell where "shaabi" ends and "beledi" begins. The older stars like Ahmed Adawiyya and Hassan al-Asmar seem to occupy a different band of the musical spectrum than newer singers like Hakim and Saad al-Sogheir, much as Hank Williams doesn't usually turn up on the same playlist as Alan Jackson.



I'm beginning to wonder if the concept of "al jeel" still means anything. Many of the artists we as foreign dancers think of as "al jeel" aren't exactly "the youthful generation" anymore. That's not to say that Amro Diab, Ehab Tawfiq, Mustafa Qamar, Hisham Abbas, etc., aren't still massively popular, but they're all in their 40s now, and they're competing with a new wave of younger singers like Mohammed Hamaki, Louai, and Tamer Hosni, who skew toward a comparably younger fan base.

These are really good points.

Perhaps it makes more sense to list everything as a spectrum of "pop," where some of it merely happens to be older, just like we wouldn't have a problem with sorting The Monkees, Duran Duran, and Fall Out Boy in a chronology of our pop music, even though they're slightly different styles

Agreed!

Another one that's making me scratch my head is the Khaleegy musician Mohammed Abdo. One of his songs, Aba'ad, was widely used by Bay Area dancers back in my student days. (Many people know the song as "Leyla Leyla" because there's a section in it where he sings that over and over and over.) I tend to think of his style as poppy, but if I understand correctly he was popular at least a decade before the likes of Amr Diab. So where does he belong?

Originally Posted by nisaasaintlouis

I tend to refer to the work of Um K., Abdel Halim, and the like as "classical" too, but really, in the scheme of the history of Arabic music, they're not classical...they represent the birth of popular music. But it would be nuts to label them "pop." OK, I'm not being helpful...

I think the reason I can feel comfortable referring to the legendary singers as "classical" is because of the structure of the songs they made popular. Musically speaking, their songs were complex, with introductory overtures, musical interludes, shifting rhythms, and complex orchestrations. Compare that to the very simple musical structure of today's pop - synthesizer and drum machine, for the most part, and simple rhythms... maybe a "dance beat" for the primary melody line, and possibly a Saidi riff thrown in somewhere.

Originally Posted by *Shira*

I think the reason I can feel comfortable referring to the legendary singers as "classical" is because of the structure of the songs they made popular. Musically speaking, their songs were complex, with introductory overtures, musical interludes, shifting rhythms, and complex orchestrations. Compare that to the very simple musical structure of today's pop - synthesizer and drum machine, for the most part, and simple rhythms... maybe a "dance beat" for the primary melody line, and possibly a Saidi riff thrown in somewhere.

I totally hear where you're coming from. And, saying "classical" vs. "pop" has a lot of utility for explaining this difference to students. I generally use this distinction myself; it still bugs me in my own mind, though, because I know classical should mean things like muwashahat. Sigh...

Re: Mohammad Abdo. That is a tough, tough one. It's almost like you need to have different popular music continuums (continua?) for different regions: maybe an Egyptian popular music chronology, a Lebanese chronology, a khaleeg chronology, and so on? Maybe do them like timelines?

I dunno...just thinkin' out loud! I'm also drinking red wine, so my contributions to your project may become more incoherent as the night wears on! ..g.:

Originally Posted by *Shira*

I think the reason I can feel comfortable referring to the legendary singers as "classical" is because of the structure of the songs they made popular. Musically speaking, their songs were complex, with introductory overtures, musical interludes, shifting rhythms, and complex orchestrations. Compare that to the very simple musical structure of today's pop - synthesizer and drum machine, for the most part, and simple rhythms... maybe a "dance beat" for the primary melody line, and possibly a Saidi riff thrown in somewhere.

I agree with your reasoning. I actually feel Warda, would also fall under that category. She was like the Nagwa karam of her generation. She sang songs similar to Um Kulthum's songs, the ones written by Riad Al Sunbati.

I would classify Farid Al Atrash as an egyptian artist even though he and
Asmahan did not grow up in Egypt. Nancy's egyptian CDs are still called Egyptian pop even though she's Lebanese.

I think Hamaki, Hamada Hilal and Tamer Husni are definitely more Jeel to us now than Amr Diab, Ehab Tawfik and Raghib Alama.
In the same way that Nancy, Rubi and Shereen are more Jeel than Nagwa, Sameera Said and Nawal Al zughbi

Thank you Shira. You are such a treasure to the dance community!

Originally Posted by *Shira*

Another one that's making me scratch my head is the Khaleegy musician Mohammed Abdo. One of his songs, Aba'ad, was widely used by Bay Area dancers back in my student days. (Many people know the song as "Leyla Leyla" because there's a section in it where he sings that over and over and over.) I tend to think of his style as poppy, but if I understand correctly he was popular at least a decade before the likes of Amr Diab. So where does he belong?

The same issue of how to sort "classical" or "country" out of "popular" isn't just limited to Egyptian music. It is true for the other regional/ethnic styles. Recently, I was at a dance event where a group of ladies performed a full-blown, hair-tossing, thobe-wearing Khaleegi routine to a song by the Miami band, and a friend from Kuwait commented later that it struck her as quite odd. According to her, thobes are now out of style for all but older women, who rarely dance to anything but the slower, more classical songs. To her, seeing people perform such a traditional, folkloric style of dance to a contemporary pop song (even though it was clearly a Gulf song) was so culturally out of touch that it was verging on wrong. In other words, there isn't just one "Khaleegi" style, either, and "traditional" versus "contemporary" matters there, too.

Would it work to classify like this?

Name (Ethnicity)--General Style--Specifics

Mohammed Abdo (Yemen/Saudi Arabia)--Traditional Gulf--classical and modern folkloric
Miami Band (Kuwait)--Contemporary Gulf--folkloric fusion, mainstream

Farid al-Atrash (Syrian Druze)--Traditional Egyptian--classical, mainstream
Hakim (Egypt)--Egyptian Folkloric--traditional and shaabi fusion, mainstream
Amro Diab (Egypt)--Contemporary Egyptian--mainstream, some folkloric fusion & Latin fusion

(LOL--maybe not...I can see this turning into a HUGE argument about how to classify singers!)

I think part of the problem is that "popular" is sort of a useless classification, which is why I went with "mainstream." Isn't it all "popular" in one sense or another? If you've got a record contract and your records are getting sold all over the world, you're "popular." How do you distinguish between "pop music" (as in Top 40 bubblegum) and the idea that Umm Kalthoum was enormously "popular" but not "pop"? Isn't much of what we consider "classical" now merely what was "popular" in the Mid 20th Century?

Originally Posted by Tourbeau

I think part of the problem is that "popular" is sort of a useless classification, which is why I went with "mainstream." Isn't it all "popular" in one sense or another? If you've got a record contract and your records are getting sold all over the world, you're "popular." How do you distinguish between "pop music" (as in Top 40 bubblegum) and the idea that Umm Kalthoum was enormously "popular" but not "pop"? Isn't much of what we consider "classical" now merely what was "popular" in the Mid 20th Century?

Somehow discussions of Arabic music always come back to jazz for me--in this case, the category of "pop standard," those songs composed by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Hammerstein and Rogers and many more that were performed by everybody who wanted to be taken seriously as a contemporary popular singer, from Ella Fitzgerald to Peggy Lee to Frank Sinatra, and are still performed by jazz and pop singers today who want to establish their chops.

Here's my first draft of my thinking. I'm very open to feedback.

Muwashahat

Sample song titles such as El Bulbul Nagha and Lamma Bada Yata Thana. Sabah Fakhri recorded some. Feiruz sang some muwashahat as well as performing other musical styles. Instruments used to play them included ouds and kanouns.

20th Century Egyptian Classical

Sample singers include Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Farid al-Atrache. Song format is overture followed by vocal segment followed by instrumental interlude followed by vocal segment and then some repetition of this format. Sample composers include Baligh Hamdi (Alf Leila wa Leila, El Hob Kulu), Farid al-Atrache, and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. Instruments used are orchestras containing a mixture of East and West: violins, kanouns, ouds, accordions...

Folkloric

This varies by country, of course. Lebanon has debke, Egypt has Saidi, Morocco has schikhatt... Sometimes new compositions would be created in the traditional folk style - example being the Rahbani Brothers in Lebanon. Singers that come to mind include Feiruz and Sabah (who both recorded debke music in Lebanon), and Metkal Kenawe in Egypt. I would include baladi in this category.

Pop (Late 20th Century and Early 21st Century

Musical style tends to have a steady, consistent beat and constant energy level. It might be a high, bouncy energy level for get-up-and-dance music, or it could be more of the soft, flowing energy level of a ballad, but high energy tends to dominate. (Compare to classical which may have a variety of different energy levels and rhythms within the same song.) I'm thinking of describing that both al jeel and shaabi fall under this category, but they both fit together under the general idea of pop because the musical structure is similar even if the message of the lyrics is different.

I personally find it hard to sort out differences between Lebanese pop and Egyptian pop, because they use the same musical structures and instrumentation. About the only thing that's different is the origin of the singer and sometimes some geography-specific references in the lyrics. I'd mention that certain pop artists bring a musical flavor that is representative of their own region into their music - Gawaher from Sudan, Mohammed Mounir from Nubia, etc.

Music Composed Specifically for Raqs Sharqi

An example would be Princess of Cairo.