Canary Records

My name is Ian Nagoski. I'm a music researcher and record producer specializing in early 20th century musics in languages other than English. I have a record label called Canary: canary-records.bandcamp.com I live in Baltimore, Maryland.

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An hour and a half of the first recordings of the monks of the Solesmes Abbey in France, where Gregorian chant scholarship and revivalism reached its height. Recorded in situ at the abbey in 1930, only about six years after the introduction of the microphone into sound recording.

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A sequel to our recent album of recordings made in Honolulu after WWII and preceding statehood, this collection includes more of the sweet music of the hotel and nightclub performers of the era along with two of the key transmitters of the ancient hula traditions to the revivalists of the generations that followed.

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Two side-long suites of rural Greek traditional music released as a scarce privately-pressed LP in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Despite the exclusion of immigration from South Asians during the first half of the 20th century, a group of recordings by intellectual brahman Bengali artists were made in the New York City during the Depression. They were immensely influential among the avant garde, and one of them became the main bridge between India and the counterculture of the 1960s. In the process, they nearly invented the idea of "World Music."

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Best known now as a dear friend of the artist Arshile Gorky and a profound influence on the composer Alan Hovhaness, Yenovk Der Hergopian was an artist and transmitter of old Armenian and Kurdish bardic songs who made memory and immediacy his life's work. He and his collaborator released only 16 powerful performances in the 40s (with the support of Hovhaness and friends).

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Fish & Poi: Hawaiian Independent 78rpm Discs ca. 1945-56, by Canary Records

19 track album

U.S. census counted the population of the Territory of Hawaii during the 1940s and ‘50s as less than a half-million individuals of whom about a third were Japanese, a quarter were Caucasian, and a sixth were native Hawaiian (between 60-100,000 people); the remaining population were largely Filipino, Chinese, and Korean. The cultural productivity and international musical influence of the Hawaiians during the 20th century outweighed practically any ethnic group on earth per capita, rivaled only by the performers of the tango halls of Argentina and Uruguay and the Black blues and gospel musicians of the United States. Stereotyping of Hawaiian music by outsiders and rapidly changing political and aesthetic views from inside the Hawaiian community have left much of the music that was recorded in Hawaii during the middle of the 20th century mostly unavailable today except on the original discs. This collection of recordings may serve as an introduction to the era for some people who haven’t heard them before and may fill in some gaps for those already devoted to the music.

Preceding the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by agents supported by the United States government in 1893, the archipelago had witnessed a flowering of literature, dance, and music, all of which were born on a foundation of prayer and an understanding that cultural life unified and expressed of the sovereignty of Hawaiians. By the early 20th century Hawaiian culture, having co-existed for centuries with traders and plantation owners, was highly flexible and adaptive to outside influences, while foreign capitalists had suppressed hula dance performances. In that context, Joseph Kekuku (b. 1874 La'ie, O’ahu, Hawaii; d 1932 Morristown, New Jersey) adapted the European guitar, which Hawaiians played using steel rather than gut strings, as an instrument played flat on the lap and using a steel bar to pitch the strings using the left hand, giving birth to the “steel guitar.” That instrumental style traveled the world with Kekuku and a diaspora of musicians who toured widely throughout Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and became the basis of much of modern guitar playing, still felt most notably in American country music in the mainland U.S. Hawaiian music (or Hawaiian-referential music) became outrageously popular in the U.S. during the 1910s-‘20s. The idea of Hawaii was a touchstone of the American pop charts for decades and so deeply influenced the past hundred years of music played on plucked string instruments that it would be reasonable to say that much of what is played on guitar today has some Hawaiian antecedent. In parallel to the rise of the steel guitar was a tradition of falsetto singing, particularly among men, which, drawing from a variety of both native and non-native sources, emphasized the break between the registers, as in yodeling.

Celebrity virtuoso native Hawaiian performers made popular records through the 1920s and ‘30s for major American labels. By 1940 Leo Kupina’i’ had established a recording studio in Honolulu, which was used by 25-year-old William Bell Fredlund (b. Michigan Oct 26, 1915; d. 1985) to establish his very productive Bell Records label (the second Hawaiian-owned label, following the HTP label of 1934-40). Raised in Minnesota by an Irish immigrant mother, Fredlund became one of the most important figures in the business community in 1940s Honolulu, employing union musicians. Bell released hundreds of hit records in collaboration with his wife Alice Davis Fredlund and her brother Willie Davis, both of whom were musicians, at a rate of more than a dozen a month for much of the 1940s, including the first discs by the crooner Alfred Apaka, the popular George Archer and his Pagans, singer-songwriter Andy Cummings (b. Aug. 2, 1913, Honolulu; d. June 23, 1995), master guitarist Gabby Pahinui, and many others including records in Filipino and Japanese.

Bell Records built a record manufacturing plant in 1948 in the working class Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu but folded around 1950, supplanted largely by the 49th State Hawaii Record label founded by record dealer George K. Ching around 1947. (49th State’s early newspaper ads magnanimously offered congratulations to performers on the Bell roster who had recently released discs.) Ching worked closely with John K. Almeida (b. Pauoa Valley, O’ahu Nov. 28, 1897; d. Oct 9, 1985, Honolulu), a brilliant blind guitarist, songwriter, and all-around musician, to scout for talent and work in A&R. Almeida had begun performing at age 15 and played in 1917 at Queen Liliuoukalini’s funeral. He was an eminent fixture on the Honolulu musical scene, composing and performing prolifically. In the 30s, he began recording and performing on the radio. In September 1948, his wife and collaborator of nearly 30 years, Elizabeth K. Nahaku, died. It was around the same time he went to work for Ching’s 49th State label; he directed every recording session for the label and performed on many of them.

Ching and Almeida drew much of the recording talent for the 49th State roster from the hotels and nightclubs that had become the lifeblood of Honolulu’s music scene in the ‘40s, including, notably, Genoa Keawe (b. Oct. 31, 1919, O’ahu; d. Feb. 26, 2008) who began performing as a teenager in the late ‘30s and performed for 70 years, earning numerous awards and acclaim as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist. Unlike the performers on Bell, the 49th State roster was non-union. There remains, however, some stigma surrounding the music of the era, connected to the colonialist “tiki bar” culture that grew through the 1930s-‘60s. Very few Hawaiian performers of the ‘40s and ‘50s could earn a living solely on their music. Those who performed regularly relied heavily on the hotels and clubs where the tourist trade was a significant part of their income. (The Cafe Pagoda in Honolulu used the tagline “It’s Fun to ‘Slum’” in their ads in the late ’40s, aimed at tourists wishing to mix with the locals.) As a result, although the local labels recorded a lot of songs that were local hits for Hawaiian (and Japanese) speakers, they also worked hard at finding new hits all the time to feed the record production machine, and that meant some stuff that was for the tourists. The influence of mainland popular music was pervasive, but many of the most influential American performers were those who came by steamship to play in person. As a result, among the popular Black women of the era, it is not Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughn, or Billie Holiday who made the biggest mark on Hawaiian music but Nellie Lutcher (b. 1912; d. 2007), partially by dint of her late 1947 appearances in Honolulu, around the time of her hit song “Fine Brown Frame,” which spoke to Hawaiian audiences.

The 49th State label’s eponymous wish for inclusion in the U.S.A came to naught in January 1959 when Alaska became the 49th state of the union, and it was around that time that the label drew to a close, but not before the short-lived Island Recording Studio label had appeared. Island was largely a venue for the Heeheno Serenaders under the direction of Joseph Kahaulelio (b. Honolulu Dec. 14, 1929; d. Honolulu 1985) who had previously recorded for 49th State. Kahaulelio came up through the hotels in the ‘50s and became an important dancer and teacher carrying a more distinctly Hawaiian cultural thread into an era that became increasingly more oriented toward an unassimilated and politicized independent Hawaiian expression in the decades that followed. But it all happened very fast, and there was so little money going around to support most musicians or dancers to develop their work. It is, in a sense, the totality of the work of many people together that so much of what Hawaiian music has retained its core values. In a 2021 interview the radio personality, record collector, and researcher Harry B. Soria, Jr. (b. 1948; d. Dec. 7, 2021) addressed the meaning of the 1940s-50s era music this way:

"There are two ways to look at it. Some people say, 'oh [the colonialists] outlawed the language and they destroyed the connection [to the past], and we lost our roots.' But on the other side without hapa haole [half-foreign] music, we wouldn't have had that string [of cultural continuity] to keep us going to this point so that we would have a generation rediscovering Hawaiian language and writing songs again."

He was right, of course. This collection by an outsider and novice might open a window and makes clear that there is a person-to-person sharing from the Hawaiian Kingdom through the Territorial era into Statehod of lasting value.

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Come On Honey: Arab-American Women ca. 1943-58 from Independent 78rpm Discs, by Canary Records

14 track album

Large-scale emigration from Greater Syria (territory now divided between Syria, Lebanon, part of Jordan, and Israel/Palestine) to the Americas began in the 1880s and swelled during the decades surrounding World War I. In 1926, an estimated 166,000 Syrians were living in the U.S. with another 40,000 in Canada and Mexico. Somewhat larger populations had settled in Argentina and Brazil. The U.S. government actively worked at retaining Syrian immigrants during the ‘10s and ‘20s, but with the immigration restrictions starting in 1924, only about 100 new immigrants could arrive per year from each of the nations of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Those restrictions lasted into the mid-1960s.

Arabic language disc recordings in the U.S. for the immigrant population during the 1910s-30s were largely imported from the homelands or recorded by Columbia and Victor during the period 1916-20 in New York City, with a few notable exceptions. (See the album Send Me The Bones canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/send-me-the-bones-from-the-earliest-arab-american-recordings-march-1915-feb-1920 ) The first independent Arab-American labels, specifically those run by A.J. Macksoud and Alexander Maloof (see the album America the Sweet canary-records.bandcamp.com/album/america-the-sweet-arab-american-music-1913-23-ca-1950) were established in Manhattan’s Little Syria in the early 20s.

During and after the Second World War, Arab-American music entrepreneurs flourished in Brooklyn. The Alamphon and Al Chark labels issued locally recorded material in tandem with many hundreds of pirates of imported Egyptian and Lebanese performances. Adding to their output, the Arabphon and Alkawakeb labels had a similar business model. Smaller, short-run vanity labels run by and for individual artists and their friends appeared in the 1950s, paving the way for the many labels that flourished during the microgroove era of the 1970s-80s.

This album presents a handful of the women who released discs for the 1940s-50s American labels during the period when immigration from Arabic-speaking countries was heavily restricted. Several had already achieved significant success before having arrived in the U.S. (Kahraman, Hanan, and Odette Kaddo). One, born in the U.S., became well-known in the Levant during her career (Fadwa Abded), while others (Marie Kabalan, Jamileh Matouk, Miss Nohad) remained more or less obscure perhaps the result of having been born in the wrong place at the wrong time to have been appreciated widely. They operated within a close-knit circle of performers for community gatherings, and in the notes below one will see the names of the instrumentalists who accompanied them repeated over and over.

Of the biographical information below for the eight singers presented in this collection, six have been researched by Prof. Richard Breaux whose syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com site has been a significant resource. Those singers have been marked with an asterix [*] and URLs for Breaux's associated texts are included after each of them. Where Breaux’s research has been derived from public records or newspaper accounts, I have made an effort to confirm or expand on his work, but some of his work has been drawn from interviews with the artists (Fadwa Abed, particularly) or family members, making it exceptionally valuable. Writing about this circle of immigrant performers is a relatively recent phenomenon with only a few people I’m aware of doing original research, of whom Prof. Breaux is the most prolific and dedicated. So, we present this collection at the risk of “working his side of the street” but with gratitude for his making the work available publicly.

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*KAHRAMAN Born Olga Agby on Dec. 21, 1926, in Ehden, present-day northern Lebanon. She and her older brother Naif (b. 1920) were signed in 1946 by a talent scout to perform in Egyptian films. About two years later, the siblings emigrated to Brooklyn. They performed around New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan from late 1949 through 1956 during which time, they recorded for the Cleopatra label (likely operated by Mohammed El Bakkar briefly in the mid-50s), the Alkawakeb label, and Naif’s own Sun label. Olga married Nat Sutton in 1955. In the first year of their marriage she announced her retirement to become a housewife, and she briefly penned a column reporting on events in Brooklyn for the English-language Caravan newspaper including the first U.S. appearance by the iconic Lebanese performer Sabah (b. 1927; d. 2014). Olga was naturalized as a U.S. citizen on Sept. 4, 1956, around the time that Ogla and Naif’s younger sister Jeanette immigrated. Olga’s time away from the stage was brief. Following trips to Europe and Florida with her family, and a visit from their mother, who ultimately settled in Michigan, Olga came back to the stage, performing relentlessly through 1957-61 across the eastern U.S. with her husband acting as her manager. April 1958 she released an LP titled Flame of Araby, comprised of songs composed by Naif, on the Des label (presumably a subsidiary of Sun, along with the E.S. and Metrophone imprints) including re-recordings of some material she’d previously issued on 78rpm discs, notably her English-Arabic hybrid performance “Come On, Honey,” first recorded at least five years earlier. That album was subsequently picked up by ABC-Paramount and reissued a few years later during the bellydance boom; Naif’s own LP El Debke: Music of the Middle East was issued by ABC-Paramount around the same time, followed by an LP for the Audio Fidelity label for whom their sometimes-collaborator Mohammed El Bakkar (b. 1913; d. Rhode Island 1959) was having enormous success by selling gaudily Orientalized packages. Both Olga and Naif prospered through the 1960s-80s. Naif died May 8, 1992 in Grosse Point, Michigan; Olga died Jan. 22, 2017 in Brooklyn. syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-incomparable-kahraman-and-naif-agby.html

*FADWA ABED Born March 3, 1935 in Los Angeles to second-generation parents (her father was born in Michigan, her mother in California), Fay Fadwa Abed spent a decade of her childhood in a suburb of Beirut, where she met Egyptian musicians including Riad Al Sunbati (b. 1906; d. 1981) who had already worked with both Oum Kalsoum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Asmahan. Fadwa (whose surname is given in many variants on various documents) returned with her mother to the U.S. in 1946. She completed high school in Dearborn, Michigan, and was singing publicly by age 17. Very intelligent and attractive and already highly skilled as a singer in the contemporary style, she was immediately in demand as a performer. By the time she graduated, she had already worked alongside Naif Agby, Mohammed El Bakkar, Najeeba Morad, Elia Baida, Anton Abdelahad, Philip Solomon, Naim Karacand, Joe Budway, Tony Tawa, and many of the other luminaries of the Arab-American music community. Around that time, she recorded for the competing Brooklyn-based labels Al-Chark (run by Albert Rashid b. present-day Lebanon ca. 1905-08) and Alamphon (run by Fred Alam b. ca. 1907-13) and lent her name to advertisements for the Eastern Star Restaurant on Atlantic Avenue. The performances presented here were among six that she made for Rashid’s label when she was still a teenager. In early 1956 she enrolled in Henry Ford College in Dearborn, initially studying Music and Psychology, but her performing career during the period 1956-61 took her through Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Ottawa, Minnesota, and D.C. In the 60s, she collaborated with the musician and film star Farid al-Atrash (b. 1916; d. 1974) on a series of recordings and became a television and recording celebrity in Lebanon, but she maintained her home in Dearborn. Her career in Lebanon was curtailed by travel restrictions during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90. In 2000, she married Tahir Mansour (b. 1936), an engineer and physicist; he died of cancer in 2018. A cancer survivor herself, she still lives in Dearborn. syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2020/03/fadwa-abeid-arab-american-singer-finds.html

MRS. MARIE JOS. KABALAN Born May 20, 1907, in Syria and married to Joseph Kalil Kabalan (b. Syria, July 25, 1888; d. Feb. 10, 1988), a clothing and textile salesman, in Brooklyn in 1921. Their three children were born between 1923 and 1928 in New York and New Jersey. In 1935, the family relocated to St. Louis, MO. By 1940, they had moved again to St. Petersburg, FL, and by 1946 to Miami, where Joseph co-owned a shoe repair business. Coincidentally, the violinist Naim Karacand (b. Aleppo 1891; d. Brooklyn 1973) performed at the state convention of the Syrian-Lebanese Southern Federation in May 1943 in Florida with Mohammed El Bakkar. It is speculation on our part at this point that this disc was recorded around then and issued on the Karawan label that Karacand may have briefly operated in the ’40s. He had been a well-known performer in Brooklyn in the 1910s and ‘20s when the Kabalans were still living there, so it’s not out of the question that they had known each other for four decades before this record was made. Marie Kabalan died Feb. 10, 1988. The performance included here is a cover of Mohamed Abdel Wahab’s “Ya Naiman Raqadat Goufounou.” It is the only performance of hers we know to have been recorded and is one of the last recordings of an Arab-American singer of her generation.

*JAMILA MA’TUQ Jamileh Matouk was born in Tripoli, Lebanon Feb. 25, 1911. Richard Breaux points out that her family gradually came through Brazil and Argentina to North America during the period 1912-23. She settled in Brooklyn and married Antoine Joseph Deeb in 1934; they had four children. She recorded for the Alampon label in the ’40s. This composition, titled “You’ll Be the Winner,” and its violin performance are by Naim Karacand with whom she was performing by 1954. In the late ‘50s, her family had a home in Florida but split their time with their home in Brooklyn. She died in 1997. syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2019/06/jamili-matouk-or-jameeleh-matouk-or.html

MISS NOHAD We have noticed documentation for about six men with the surnames Nohad or Nouhad who arrived to the U.S. from Egypt or Lebanon during the period 1930-52, and one woman born with the name in West Virginia in 1892. This young, amateur singer might be related to one of them, but at this point, that’s as far as we can speculate. The disc was issued on the Alkawakeb label run by Anthony M. Abraham (b. Aintourine, present-day northern Lebanon, 1893) of Newark, New Jersey who worked for decades as a crane operator at Crucible Steel Works and was a naturalized citizen as of 1928.

*MISS HANAN Born Jeanette Nehme Hayek on Nov. 8, 1929, in Beirut, Hanan was a trained singer. She traveled to Brazil and Argentina to perform in 1947 & ’48 and married Michel Harouni in Beirut in 1948. She appeared in the film The Bride of Lebanon in 1950 and toured South America, North Africa, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine in the early ‘50s. During that period she released discs on her own label in South America and collaborated on record in Lebanon with Fairouz (b. 1935). In the Fall of 1954, she commenced her first tour of the U.S. Over the next year, she performed widely at events in Brooklyn, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Mississippi, and Florida. Her daughter Claire was born in November 1955, and the family settled in the Prospect Park section of Brooklyn. From January through April of 1956, she was back on the road, performing in Miami, Detroit, Paterson, and Utica. Her son Joseph was born in November of 1956, but once again, she was back on the road by January, traveling with her husband and two infants through New England, upstate New York, and Michigan . Like Kahraman, with whom she often shared bills, she worked with a who’s-who of the Arab-American musical community, including Elia Baida, Eddie Kochak, Naim Karacand, Joe Budway, Sami Shaheen, etc. During that hectic period, she recorded in New York for the Alkawakeb (including the performance presented here) and Cleopatra labels (the latter in collaboration with Mohammed El Bakkar). A 1959 LP titled The Arabian Nightingale was issued in 1959 by the classical music label Period, followed by a half-dozen more albums and some 45s. She dedicated much of the 1960s to life as a mother but returned to Lebanon to perform and record prolifically in the early ‘70s. She performed periodically into the early 1990s during which time she was a care-taker to her ailing husband, who died in 1992. She subsequently moved to Staten Island where she died on Oct. 8, 2011. syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2019/10/hanan-dont-miss-her-wherever-she-will-be.html

*NAJEEBA MORAD Mary Morad was born in New York City on June 28, 1911, to parents from the village of Mradiyeh, present-day northern Lebanon. Her father was a musician. The eldest of fourteen children, she was raised in Boston where her father ran a grocery store and then a laundry. She worked at a shoe factory in early adulthood, began performing around 1933, and earned her high school diploma in her mid-20s. During WWII, she recorded some songs of American patriotism in Arabic for the small Petrophon label under the name Najeeba Morad. She married Toufic M. Karam in 1952 with whom she had four sons. The family settled in Buffalo, NY, and performed regularly in New England through 1953-1960 often accompanied by Russell Bunai, Philip Solomon, Joe Budway, Anton Abdelahad, Antoun Tawa, Mohammed El Bakkar, Elia Baida, Naim Karacand, and the Hamway brothers. Around 1958, she self-released a half-dozen discs. She continued to perform until about 1988. She died in Buffalo on July 22, 2004. syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2019/06/nageeba-morad-karam-daughter-of-mahrajan.html

*ODETTE KADDO Born August 21, 1927 in Zgharta, present-day northern Lebanon, she was one of six children and began singing at the age of nine, influenced by Oum Kalsoum (b. 1898; d. 1975) and Asmahan (b. 1918; d. 1945). Along with her brother Nassir, she performed in Lebanon until the eminent composer and performer Mohammed Abdul Wahab encouraged her to relocate to Cairo, where she studied at the school of Farid Ghosn, who’d mentored Asmahan and her brother Farid Al Atrash, and began recording for the Baidaphon label in the 1940s. Some of those discs were issued in the U.S. by Naif Agby, who grew up in the same region that she did, on the E.S. (Eastern Star) label. Following a series of appearances in Paris, Agby sponsored a series of U.S. tours for Odette and Nassir Kaddo in 1955-56 performing in Detroit, upstate New York, Los Angeles, and Miami alongside Agby, Djamal Aslan, Philip Solomon, Mohammed El Bakkar, Anton Abdelahad, Mike Hamway, and others. During these tours, she met Philip Peters (b. Hasroun, present day northern Lebanon; d. 1978) in Detroit and married him on May 4, 1957 at a huge party with three bands including Naif Agby’s group. Their first child was born in Michigan in April 1958. King Hussein of Jordan came to visit her there in Detroit. In 1959-60, she recorded several 45s and an LP, The Voice of the Cedars, with Nagby. Several more LPs followed along with several more children, coinciding with the development of a family business making sausages. Although much admired, she performed sporadically through the ‘60s and became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1968. Her mother and sister immigrated to Michigan shortly thereafter. On tour in Lebanon in 1970, she appeared on television and sang for president Sleiman Frangieh. She returned to more regular performing in the late 1980s and continued into the ‘90s, during which time her appearances were a point of connection between Christian Arabs from Detroit’s east side and Muslims from the west side. She died in Grosse Pointe, Michigan of cancer at the age of 70 on Sept. 1, 1997. The performances presented here were recorded for Baidaphon in Cairo and issued in the U.S. by Naif Agby in the 1950s. syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2019/09/odette-kaddo-arab-music-it-gives-me-life.html

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Enough Misery!: Recordings from Beirut, Cairo, Constantinople & Smyrna, 1906-1915, by Canary Records

16 track album

The Gramophone Company’s engineer Georg Franz Hampe (b. 1879; d. 1947) made the first recordings in Egypt (either in Alexandria or Cairo) in 1903. GramCo’s recording work proliferated in the eastern Mediterranean, including sessions in Constantinople, Beirut, and Smyrna over the next several years, followed quickly by the German Odeon and Favorite companies, Herman Blumenthal’s Orfeon label, as well as the company of Dr. Michael Baida of Beirut (founded ca. 1906). Our interest in the discs made by or for the immigrants to the United States has included a significant amount of material originally recorded during those sessions and issued from 1909 onward on American labels (Victor, Columbia, and Okeh in particular) but has not addressed the waiting market in the U.S. for discs physically imported at significant expense to the immigrant market by impresarios including A.J. Macksoud and M.G. Parsekian preceding or in parallel to the earliest of the Arabic- and Turkish-language releases in the States. This small collection presents a cross-section of material of the imported treasures that have survived more than a century in American households

The repertoires included have several tendencies. They represent musical styles necessarily left behind in the Old World - the “lowest” street music and the “highest” classical material — strata of performers for whom emigration was impossible or irrelevant. And they tend to represent the ethnic minorities of the Ottoman Empire who arrived in the greatest numbers to the Americas, often fleeing persecution — Christians and Jews of various churches , traditions, and ethnicities. So, of the nine credited performers on this collection, we can say with certainty that at least one (Arcshak Effendi) is Armenian, three were Jewish (Ibrahim Effendi, Zaki Mourad, and, possibly, Roza al-Zakhlawiyya), and one is Greek (Estudiantina Smyrniote), Of the Arabic-speaking performers, the women were not Muslim; it's likely that Badriyaa Saada was Christian, leaving only three credited performers who were probably Muslims (El Sayed Eschita of Cairo; Hag Abdel Sattar Sattar of Hama, Syria; and Omer Effendi of Constantinople) all of whom were comedians of and whom further research may or may not indicate some Roma background. Certainly discs by the highest level taraab singers of the period in Cairo - Yusuf Al Manyalawi, Abdel Hai Hilmi, Sayyed al Safti, etc. - were physically imported for immigrants to the U.S. (See: To What Strange Place: The Musics of the Ottoman-American Diaspora and More Notes From Home Vol II)

The styles and melodies presented here are, in several cases, germinal iterations of tunes that became standardized later in the 20th century. The “Raks Zakieh” (flip side of a comedy record) performed on the zamr pipes includes the melody of “Uskadara,” a song ubiquitous among many cultures (and eventually made a hit in the U.S. by Ertha Kitt in 1953). Roza al-Zaḥlāwiyya's "Qadduka l-mayyās" (Your Undulating Waist), according to Fred Ahlawi, is a qadd (light traditional style of song that flourished in Aleppo) that is shared among Greek, Turkish, Arab, and Jewish performers and has been widely performed and recorded with various sets of lyrics with the tune. “Trellokoritso” (Crazy Girl) was recorded through the 20s-40s by many Greek performers including Marika Papagika and Virginia Magidou.

Other performances remain of their specific time-and-place; Omer Effendi was a performer of the Karagoz shadow puppet play repertoire, centered around a foolish and lazy folk hero trickster character who often has great luck and real insight. (A series of Karagiozi performances were issued on discs in the early ‘20s by Koula Antonopoulo’s Panhellenion label in New York City.)

It's likely necessary to state to uninitiated listeners that all of these performances were recorded 10-20 years preceding the invention of the microphone and are, by today’s standards even after many hours of sound-restoration work, difficult listens. I know; I get it. The damage was done to them over the course of a century in the process of their having been played on old machines and neglected in storage is never going to be completely undone, future AI developments notwithstanding. But for those few people who want to hear performers born in the 1870s-80s from the Near East, there is not a lot in circulation. The Foundation for Arab Music Archiving & Research is doing great work. Otherwise, much of circulates is private work undertaken by whomever has the time and resources. So, you take it as it comes, and it is correct to the process of working with the discs to listen and represent it as best you can.

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"I met the famous singer Zaki Murad, the father of the famous singer Layla Murad, during his visit to Jerusalem in 1921 through my friends Habib Salem and Ishaq al-Ashquar, who owned the al-Nuzha Cafe which was located next to Doctor Pacal's property on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. Mr. Zaki Murad stayed with Jewish relatives of his. Their house was located behind the al-Nuzha Cafe, which Mr. Zaki Murad visited often. We once had an evening party to remember on the second floor of the cafe. I played oud for him in the snooker room. He sang a dawr for us [and] he also sang a well known taqtouqa that was new at the time and gaining popularity with Arabs. The taqtouqa was composed and sung by the great musician Sayyid Darweesh - "Zuruni kull sana marra" (Please visit me,once a year). It was of the maqam Ajam, and Mr. Zaki Murad sung it with such exquisite beauty, which was no surprise since he was the pupil of the famous musician Abdul-Hayy Hilmi from whom he learned the art of music, particularly the alayali. Zaki Murad's voice was of the same type as Abdul-Hayy Hilmi's.

After that night, I always kept company to Mr. Zaki Murad, particularly in the Jewish commune known as 'the love commune.' He really liked to meet friends and go to evening parties there because the people there were Jews from Aleppo who liked unadulterated Arabic songs..."

The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, 1904-1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, 2014. Nada Elzeer (translator), Salim Tamari and Issam Narrar (editors)

[canaryrecords]

Gamelan in the Mangkunegaran Court, Surakarta, Java, 1931-37, by Gamelan Kanjoet Mesem of the Mangkunegaran Palace

20 track album

According to Mantle Hood's The Evolution of Javanese Gamelan, the first bronze drums (horizontal kettle gongs) arrived to Java from mainland southeast Asia shortly after 300 BCE. Javaneses bronzesmiths worked toward casting tuned instruments for hundreds of years before the first sets of instruments were acquired by the kings around 300 CE. The forging of metallophone instruments of varying qualities proliferated for over a millennium. Some were exported to the mainland and surrounding islands, and nearly every village had a set, but the best quality instruments went to the palaces.

The court of the Mangkunegaran lineage was established in the middle of the 18th century. Within a hundred years its palace was a center of cultural activity, known for poetry, dance, and music. In the middle of the 19th century, the court became closely associated with the Langendriyan form of music-and-dance drama, danced and sung entirely by women, including the male roles. The recordings presented here were among the first made of the palace's musical art-forms including the Langendriyan tellings of the 14th-15th century stories of the hero-prince Damarwulan and his nearly invincible enemy Menak Jingga who threatened the Majapahit Empire.

A footnote in Sumarsam's Javanese Gamelan and the West points out that: "Besides the recordings of langendriyan at the Mangkunegaran court, the [record] companies also produced recordings of langendriyan music performed by kethoprak and wayang wong [theatrical] troupes outside the court, suggesting the popularity of langendriyan at the time. It seems that by the late nineteenth century, as wayang wong became a popular genre, the dancers of [that genre] adapted the music of langendriyan, especially the key musical feature of the genre: the singing of poetry by the dancers accompanied by srepegan [a brief rhythmic composition for the entrances and exits of characters]."

Some subsequent recordings of that repertoire were made in 1968 by E. L. Heins and, more thoroughly, in 1992 under the direction of Tamura Fumi. (Fumi made other notable recordings of the Mangkunegaran palace gamelans, as did Jacques Brunet and Alan Feinstein '70s.) The recordings made before Indonesian Independence have not circulated for nearly a century, so we have taken this opportunity to present these discs from the collection of Michael Robertson.

Certainly the 78rpm 10" disc format was not an ideal transmitter of the spaciousness and orchestral complexity of the music, particularly in the cases of long-form performance genres. But for those interested or with an abiding love of the elegance of the music, it is a rare opportunity to experience it in the present connected to a receding past.

[canaryrecords]

A Servant of Their Voices

For nearly three decades, Ian Nagoski has been collecting old 78 RPM records made by people who immigrated to the United States in the first

There’s a new interview by Brett Williams up on the Van classical music site.

[canaryrecords]

Turkish-Syrian Earthquake Relief, by Canary Records

12 track album

It would be difficult to overstate the impact that immigrants from the geographical region affected by this week's earthquake have had on the work that I have done over the past decade.

This hastily-compiled collection, drawn mainly from previous Canary albums, is made up of recordings from 1918-64 in the United States by performers who were born in the most affected regions.

All proceeds from this pay-what-you-want collection will be donated to charitable relief for those people in the region. (We are listening to advice from various people about which organizations would be best served by the funds raised. It remains an open question for the moment.)

The album will likely be deleted in about a month. In the meantime, it is here to demonstrate that all men are brothers. Any of the musicians, were they alive today, would have wanted to contribute to this effort, I am sure.

[canaryrecords]

Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri - Morghe Sahar parts 1 & 2

recorded in Tehran in 1928

I came across a worn copy this 1928 Iranian disc and asked my old pal Kevan Harris to translate the label for me. He told me it was by the great singer Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri (b. 1905; d. 1959. No relation to the composer and tarist Col. Ali Naqi Vaziri; she named herself after him) who was, famously, the first woman to sing in front of men unveiled.

She made dozens of recordings in the late 20s, but this one is significant and exceedingly scarce. Kevan pointed out a very good English-language entry describing the song's "long and troubled history." https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/morg-e-sahar

To summarize the article, the lyrics to Morg-E Sahar (Dawn Bird) were composed in the early 1920s when their author began to notice the rise of the dictatorship. When the country's new ruler Reza Shah heard Qamar-ol-Moluk sing it at a party in the mid-20s, he banned the second verse, which bemoans militarism, corruption, and tyranny. Over the course of the past century, the song has taken on significant nationalist meaning, through various administrations and hopes for a political new dawn in Iran.

The article, last updated a decade ago, points out there was at the time no evidence of a recording of it by Qamar-ol-Moluk existing. Since then, a copy of the first side has appeared on YouTube but the politically sensitive second side does not circulate online, so despite the poor condition of the disc, I felt obliged to make the entire performance available in reasonably listenable form. It is presented here in solidarity for the struggle of women in Iran.

The lyrics in English, taken from the above article are:

Dawn bird, lament! Make my brand burn even more. With the sparks from your sigh, break And turn this cage upside down. Wing-tied nightingale come out of the corner of your cage, and Sing the song of freedom for human kind. With your fiery breath ignite, The breath of this peopled land. The cruelty of the cruel and the tyranny of the hunter Have blown away my nest. O God, O Heavens, O Nature, Turn our dark night to dawn. It’s a new spring, roses are in bloom Dew drops are falling from my cloudy eyes This cage, like my heart, is narrow and dark. O fiery sigh set alight this cage O fate, do not pick the flower of my life. O rose, look towards this lover , Look again, again, again.

O heart-lost bird, shorten, shorten, shorten, The tale of separation.

Truth’s life has come to an end Faith and fidelity have been replaced by the shield of war. Lover’s lament and beloved’s coyness, Are but lies and have no power. Truth, love and affection are but myths Oath and honour are but vanished. For thieving, country and religion are pretexts, eyes are wet Landlord’s cruelty, master’s tyranny, The farmer’s restless from sorrow. The cup of the rich is full of pure wine, Our cup is filled with our heart’s blood. O anxious heart, cry out aloud And avoid those who have powerful hands,

Count not on justice. O rosy-cheeked cup-bearer, give the fiery water, Play a joyful tune, O charming friend. O sad nightingale lament from your cage. Because of your grief my heart is Full of sparks, sparks, sparks.

[canaryrecords]

Lemko Wedding and Life-Sketches: Carpatho-Rusyns in New York, April 1928 - Sept. 1930, by Stefan Shkimba & Co.

32 track album

Over 100 minutes of recordings at the intersection of rural mountain music, new recording technology, Slavic immigration, and folk theater, collected with the assistance of the foremost authority on Rusyn recording in the U.S., Walter Maksimovich , this album will seem strange and foreign to many listeners but just imagine how strange and foreign life in the U.S. might have felt to the performers.

Lemkos are one of several ethnic minorities, collectively called Rusyns, who have been natives of the Carpathian mountains on both slopes the present-day Polish-Slovak border, the historical district of Galicia, for centuries. Tens of thousands of Rusyns arrived in the U.S in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, settling largely around the factories and mills of Pittsburgh (Andy Warhol’s family among them) and Cleveland with communities in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Alberta, Canada. (Thomas Bell’s classic novel Out of This Furnace describes several generations of Lemkos around the steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania.) Like many other Slavs, they were often recruited through agents of the coal industry in collaboration with the steam ship companies to participate in the American labor force with the expectation that there would be a home to go back to. The wars in Europe prevented that.

While Canary’s bandcamp releases are primarily an outlet for my own research, some stories are inseparable from earlier, authoritative work. In this case, Walter Maksimovich and Bogdan Horbals’s beautifully detailed monograph Lemko Folk Music in America, 1928-30 (published by the authors in 2008) describes the details of the recordings of Lemko music in New York City in vividly. When I wrote to Maksimovich to ask permission to quote freely and use an image from it for this project, he not only accepted but also kindly offered to loan me exceptional copies of the original discs to use. With gratitude for his generosity, I’ll say that the vast majority of the story that follows is derived from his original research and writing.

Stefan (Steve) Shkimba (also Szkymba, Shkymba, or Skimba) was born Feb. 3, 1895, according to most of his surviving documents, or March 10, 1894, according to some family members, in Wołowiec, a small village 12 miles outside of Gorlice in present-day Poland just north of border with Slovakia. At age 18, he arrived carrying $60 at the port of New York on June 10, 1912 to join his older brother Jan (John, b. Jan. 8, 1887), who had arrived seven years earlier, in Brooklyn. He moved along with Jan and his wife Anna (b. 1891 in Volovets, present-day Ukraine) to Waterbury, Connecticut, where Jan had a job working on machine belts. Stefan worked odd jobs before enlisting for service in World War I from August 1917 to October 1918.

An estimate by Paul Robert Magosci in 1994 gives the number of Lemkos in the U.S. circa WWI as 55,000. Military service paved the way to legal citizenship for many immigrants, and Stefan Shkimba was naturalized in 1921. It may have also provided a degree of financial and social stability, allowing him to marry Mary Wislocka in New Jersey in 1918. The couple remained in Waterbury Connecticut, along with Jan Shkimba’s growing family, for about eight years. There Stefan preoccupied himself there in Lemko community activities, becoming a co-founder of the Carpatho-Russian National Club, an early branch of the Pennsylvania-based Lemko Committee.

Stefan and Mary relocated to Brooklyn in 1926, where he found steady work with the Transit System of the City of New York as a streetcar motorman, a job he kept for at least 15 years, while living at 96 Bedford Ave in Williamsburg. It was there that his devotion to ethnic organizing and his fascination with American technology culminated. Shkimba later described his situation (translated by Walter Maksimovich):

“…from the beginning of my arrival in America in 1912 right up to 1928 the idea was forming in my head that there will come a time when we Lemko-Rusyns, just like the other neighboring Slavic brothers, will be able to generate an artist that will take our beloved motherly words, lyrics, ethnic music, and place them on records. […] Seeing Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian records being produced, I asked myself why not our own Lemko recordings? This was eating away at my insides, causing lack of sleep, and I asked myself when will one of us, a Lemko, release our own music on a record?”

His worrying was perhaps unique but entirely understandable. Eastern European immigrants to the U.S. accounted for about a third of the massive inward migration to the U.S. during the period 1880-1920, and when the record business began catering to them from 1910 onward, recordings in Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovak significantly outsold those by German-, Irish-, or Italian-born immigrants, who represented vastly larger per-capita populations. Although there was an eagerness to participate in the modern inscription-and-dissemination process of the record business, Shkimba’s sensitivity to a kind of exclusion may have been heightened as member of a struggling and geographically scattered minority that the broader American culture viewed as one lumpen proletariat of “polaks” and “hunkies,” relegated to hard labor and just enough housing, sausage, cabbage, and beer to keep them and their screaming children quiet, while in the homeland, attempts at an autonomous Lemko nation had come and gone.

In December 1925, the brilliant village-style Ukrainian violinist Pawlo Humeniuk (b. 1883) released a few records on the Okeh label before recording again in March 1926. The latter session included a recording that was basically a comedy sketch with musical interpolations that was issued as a 12” disc titled the “Ukrainian Wedding,” depicting all of the big emotions that you’d find at a typical Ukrainian wedding. (Touring theatrical groups during the 1910s and ’20 presented reenactments of weddings as entertainment and excuses to party for the immigrants.) For the equivalent of about $25 in today’s money, it offered about eight minutes of entertainment and was a runaway hit, selling well over 100,000 copies in a time when 500 copies was enough to satisfy the labels. From that moment forward, Slavic Americans had a voice, and it changed the record business in America for decades.

So, it was probably not coincidental that one day in early 1928, Stefan Shkimba decided to claim illness and leave work early from his job running a streetcar, when he crossed the bridge to Manhattan to beg his case to record the music of his own people, it was Okeh records, the second-tier label that had first recorded Humeniuk, that he approached. Their hesitant agreement was accompanied by a requirement of $50 - nearly a month’s worth of his wages - as a guarantee to cover costs in case the recording didn’t sell. Shkimba quickly assembled a group of three singer and two instrumentalists including the violinist Van’o Zapeka (who had published a book of Lemko tunes in 1920), all of whom were born in the old country between about 1877 and 1897, and brought them on April 4, 1928 to make a record titled “Lemko Wedding.”

The performers had not played together before, and it did not go well. The resulting disc was extremely raw and amateurish. Shkimba decided to released it anyway, but perhaps by virtue of his having been well-established in the Lemko cultural scene, and perhaps because of his need to make the project pay back on his investment, it sold incredibly well. Okeh let him continue the series of Lemko Wedding discs at five succeeding sessions from August 1, 1928 through February 27, 1929, and he took on the task with increased professionalism and some additional musicians. When the “Wedding” had run its course, he supplemented the formula with recordings of a “Lemko Engagement,” a description of life “At Mother-in-Law’s,” of domestic life, and a dance party in a tavern, through the end of 1929.

Advertisements he placed in the Lemko language press excoriated its readers that pride in them being Lemkos should require them to buy the records, and they were often willing to do so. Having sold about 100,000 discs from the series, many of them out of his own home, Shkimba then worked with Michael W. Duzey (b. Pielgrzymka Nov 22, 1893; d. New York March 24, 1949) on a now lost Lemko Wedding movie, made according to Maksimovich on a farm in Connecticut. (An unrelated troupe made another Lemko Wedding movie in 1963 in Yonkers, NY.)

Following Shkimba’s lead, Victor P. Hladick (b. 1873; d 1947), a coalminer who immigrated in 1893, began recording Lemko material for Okeh in June 1928 with the singers Anna Dran (b. New York April 14, 1900; d. July 22, 1989 Passaic, NJ) and Eva Tzurik resulting in about 10 discs and, in the Fall of that year cut three discs for Brunswick including two-sided sketch-with music of a Christening. Over a dozen Lemko performers who had worked with Shkimba in 1928-29 made discs under their own names for Okeh, Brunswick, and Colombia.

Shkimba recorded four more brilliant sides with an expanded band in February for a two disc “Gypsy Wedding” series for Columbia (who, by that time had acquired Okeh) before three final discs in April 1930 in the onset of the Depression and the rise of the radio in replacement of the disc medium as modern home entertainment. Shifting his focus to a 10PM Tuesday night radio show called the Karpato-Russka Hodyna on WLBX from Long Island, Shkimba continued his work, producing and presenting Lemko music. He visited Gorlice country Poland in the late ‘30s, meeting with political activists.

As of 1942, when he registered for the draft for World War II as a 47 year old man, Stefan Shkimba was still working as a streetcar driver in Brooklyn. But it is no exaggeration to say that his vision and his efforts resulted in the documentation of a generation of Lemko-speakers in the U.S. and a deepened sense among them that they, here in America, were not alone and could be heard. The value of that project has resonated over generations after Rusyns of the Carpathians were ethnically cleansed, mainly in forcible resettlement following WWII, from their native territory and subsumed into larger nation-states. The recordings that Shkimba produced nearly a century ago from that first generation of the American diaspora are a window into their 19th century village life and a significant example to the people of the United States, as we continue to contend with questions about immigration, of the cultural brilliance of rural, mountaineering people who made this country their home.

Stefan Shkimba, a man who deeply believed in the value of music and the importance of representation on records, died on Nov. 16, 1966 in Saratoga, New York.

[dustedmagazine]

Slept Ons: 2022

Sleeping on a Shovel Dance Collective sounds uncomfortable. 

Every year about this time, soon after filing our definitive, absolutely comprehensive best of the year lists, we writers discover that we missed one…or two…or 12. It’s not our fault. We listen to a lot of music.  But we can’t listen to all of it, and often we find albums that we love after the fact, often on the best of lists of our friends and contemporaries.  Every year, we try to remedy this problem with a list of slepts ons, the best albums that we should have been paying attention to, but weren’t.  We hope you’ll find something you missed as well.  Writers this time include Ian Mathers, Jonathan Shaw, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Andrew Forell, Chris Liberato, Bryon Hayes, Bill Meyer, Christian Carey and Justin Cober-Lake.  

Keep reading

[canaryrecords]

n September 1950, the 29-year-old Aleppo-born Assyrian singer Djamal A. Aslan flew into New York City from Gander, Newfoundland, Canada, representing himself as Iranian and having an address in Central Falls, Rhode Island. It is clear that he was not Iranian and unclear if he had been in the U.S. previously. In 1952, he married one Rose Arena in Brooklyn, and the couple divorced less than two years later in Florida. Whether he was actively trying to undermine U.S. immigration laws, we cannot say with any certainty, but it does look that way from this distance.

By November 1953, he had he begun performing. We know he appeared with the Damascus-born, Boston-based singer Russell Bunai and violinist Louis Badwi at the Syriac (Assyrian) Orthodox Church In West New York, New Jersey. And he was very active as a performer in 1954-55, playing with Naif Agby, Philip Solomon, Naim Karacand, Mike Hamway, Mohammed El-Bakkar, Eddie Kochak, Odette Kaddo, etc. Notably, he made a string of appearances during ’54-55 with the brilliant and celebrated Aleppo-born Egyptian violinist Sami al Shawwa (b. 1889; d. 1965) who was on tour in the U.S. at the time.

In 1955 he married Alberta Olever of Paterson NJ, and they settled on the same block of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue as Albert Rashid’s and Fred Alam’s record stores. He could easily have recorded for either of their labels but did not. Instead, he played constantly at Arab-American gatherings in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania (with a visit to California in 1957) and set up a music studio on Flatbush Avenue that he called Cinara-Phone where he started giving music lessons.

Between gigs, teaching, and the birth of his two daughters during 1957, he self-produced a group of 14 recordings with all of the best Arab performers in Brooklyn and sold them to the record subsidiary of the 20th Century Fox film company. They were released together as an in April 1958 as Lebanon: Her Heart, Her Sounds, an elaborate - one might say “overblown” for an immigrant - production including a 37-member choir, dozens of performers, and a cover painting by the popular illustrator Irv Doctor (b. 1918; 2008). It was certainly made under the influence of the singer and film star Farid al-Atrash. Its title reference to Lebanon was meant to attract the largest Arabic-speaking group the U.S. (It was also issued in Argentina.) It was clearly the culmination of his hopes and dreams as an American immigrant.

Did it accomplish its aims for Aslan? Not that we can detect. In 1959, he traveled as far as Connecticut and Florida to play gigs for Arab-American gatherings. In 1960, he got the news that his mother Zahida had died in Aleppo. It does not appear that he was able to travel to visit his father Aboud, his sister Antoinette Sayad, and his brother Antoine at the time. So, he stayed in Brooklyn, playing gigs at Arab-American social events and teaching, year after year.

In the mid-60s, the scene for live music at Arab-American events dwindled to almost nothing, and many players had made the transition to playing multi-ethnic nightclubs. Djamal Aslan however did not. He made no more records, and at present, we have no more documentation of his having performed after 1966. He died in Brooklyn June 11, 2000.

Several pieces from his LP appear on our recent Hakki Obadia collection.

[canaryrecords]

New subscriber-only album: Paul and Angie Hagopian & the Phonophils - Armenian Folk Music in Massachusetts, ca. 1964-69

Paul Bogos Hagopian was born Jan. 6. 1906 in Adana, Turkey. He arrived in Massachusetts with his parents and brother Hagop who was one year older in 1910. He attended one year of high school before working in a textile factory and then as a finisher in a wood mill in Essex Mass. After having been stationed at Fort Devens during World War II, he went back to the wood mill married his wife Rose (16 years his junior). Their son Samuel was born ca. 1949. He later worked as a barber at the Medfield Insane Asylum.

His sister Angie (Angelina) was born in Massachusetts ca. 1925 and studied music at the New England Conservatory. She worked as a bookkeeper in a bank while playing piano at private events and playing as a church organist. They formed a quartet called the Phonophils and played nightclubs, concerts, picnics, and church functions before self-releasing their first LP in the mid-60s. A second LP was released several years later, by which time, although still credited to Paul, his violin-playing was less prominent and Angie’s leadership and increasingly florid piano-playing was dominant. But Paul’s recordings represent among the last made by Armenians of his generation in the U.S.

Both of them died within months of each other in 1981; Angie in March then Paul in October.

[canaryrecords]

Master Musician Plays Middle East Classics: Iraqi-American Violinist & Composer, 1958-72, by Hakki Obadia

24 track album

The ship that brought Heskel Haron Obadia by third class from Alexandria, Egypt to the port of New York departed on January 29, 1947 and arrived three weeks later. Obadia was a Jewish native of the Bataween section of Baghdad, Iraq. U.S. immigration was, at the time, heavily restricted, and Obadia came on a student visa with the financial support of his father to study music at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although dates of birth vary from 1921-28 among his remaining documents, he represented himself upon entry in the U.S. as 19 years old (so, born in 1927, although it’s reasonable to guess that he was a few years older). He had played violin since age six, had been involved in the organization of the first symphony orchestra in Baghdad, had a nascent career as a stage and radio performer, and spoke several languages.

According to Dr. Adhid Miri there were about 200,000 Jews in Iraq in 1910. Waves of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in particular during the next few decades resulted in repressive measures and violence against Jews. By 1941, a quarter of the population had fled, mostly to Palestine. Between 1945 and 1950, and especially after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 when Zionist activity or affiliation was declared a capital offense in Iraq, life for Jews in Iraq became untenable. Between 1949 and ’51, 124,000 Jews were evacuated out of of the country; by 1968, only 2,000 remained. Syrian Jews suffered a parallel fate during the same period.

Hesekl Obadia studied at U. C. Berkeley from 1947 to 1951 under the venerable composers Ernest Bloch (b. 1880 Geneva, Switzerland; d. 1959) and his student Roger Sessions (b. 1896; d. 1985), earning a Bachelor of Music. He relocated to New York City by 1953, where he filed his petition to naturalize as an American citizen before flying in January 1956 to Tel Aviv for a month, likely to visit his relocated family. Within six months of returning to the U.S., in November 1956, Hakki Obadia as he was known for the rest of his life, performed as a supporting artist for Sabah (b. 1927; d. 2015), the single most popular Lebanese vocalist of the 1950s and a major star of the Arab world for decades. The other musicians supporting her were a who’s-who of the best Arab players in New York: violinist Naim Karacand, oudists Mohammed El-Bakkar and Joe Budway, and percussionists Mike and George Hamway. Sabah simply could not have asked for a better band in Brooklyn or, for that matter, most cities in the world. In his 20s, Hakki Obadia’s career as a performer, not of the post-Schoenberg dodecaphonic school adopted by his West Coast teachers, but as an ethnic player for celebrations of the Arab-American community had begun.

In April 1957 at the Asonia Hotel in Manhattan, Obadia married Rebecca Musaffi (b. Baghdad, 1935) who had immigrated with her father Victor Abdulla Musaffi, mother, and sister Violet. Rebecca had just recently graduated high school in Elmhurst, Queens. Over the next couple of years, while living in Jackson Heights, Queens, he hustled gigs, advertising constantly for work as a performer in the Brooklyn Caravan newspaper: “His violin plays on the strings of your heart: For All Occasions.” Around the time of the birth of their son Eric in May 1960, he had parlayed his connections into some recording sessions.

The first two recording gigs were for labels associated with film companies. The first came in the form of sessions in 1958 for the ambitious Aleppo-born Assyrian singer and oudist Djamal Aslan that were released in April 1959 on the 20th Fox label as Lebanon: Her Heart, Her Songs; it was Aslan's only record and a big production he'd worked hard on, including a 37-member choir. Some other of the players on the album were the same as those who’d accompanied Sabah with Obadia including Karacand and Mike Hamway. Another was an African-Ameerican Bud-Stuy, Brooklyn native bassist named Ahmed Abdul Malik, who had converted to Islam and was then Thelonious Monk’s bassist; he went on to record a series of Arab-jazz fusion LPs for Riverside in the next few years as well as playing on John Coltrane’s 1961 Village Vanguard sessions. Two of the other players opened up new paths for Obadia as professional musician.

One was Joseph Sugar, who played cello on the Aslan LP and about whom we know very little except that he and Obadia co-arranged and co-conducted Obadia’s first personal statement on record, a lush, orientalist 1960 exotica production for MGM titled 10 Nights in a Harem. (We suspect that Sugar spent much of his life as a music educator on Long Island and died in 2009.) Obadia was proud enough of it to have taken out a series of ads in the Caravan newspaper announcing it to the Arab-American audience in the New York area. It’s a showcase for Obadia as an arranger, comprised of songs that sound like proposals for the soundtrack of a B-movie set in Egypt. A few instances of Obadia’s violin shine through the production and the relentless preponderance of hammering drumming.

And speaking of relentless drumming… The other significant performer on the Aslan LP was someone Obadia had already known for years, the Brooklyn-born, second-generation Syrian-American percussionist and entertainer Eddie “The Sheik” Kochak (b. Edward Sibouy Kochakji, June 5, 1921; d. Dec. 2018). They first met in 1953 and ultimately formed a close partnership, playing together for four decades. They made an album together for Decca in 1964 and regularly performed together through ‘60s, often with Jack Ghanaim (b. Ramallah, Palestine, Feb. 1920; d. New Jersey, 1971), who played both oud and kanun. Kochak was by that time more than a decade into a career as an extroverted performer with a willingness to play up oriental stereotypes and a commitment to a hybridized Arab-American style. In the mid-60s, they cut an independent LP called “Music With the New Armer-Abic Sound” and a series of jokey pop-crossover 45s including “Charanga Twist” and “No Shishkebob on Sunday.”

in 1963-64, Obadia made a series of validating, if fleeting, appearances in prestigious New York venues - Town Hall, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall. An appearance with Kochak at the Hellenic Near East Music Festival at Philharmonic Hall in April 1964 got Obadia his first mention the New York Times, who described his performances as “hair-raising.” He went unmentioned again in the Paper of Record for another twenty years. Meanwhile, as a husband and father, he simply worked as much as possible. An instrumental performance of Obadia’s was used as a filler track on a self-released LP by the Turkish singer and actor Lutfi Guneri who was living in New York at the time, and Obadia published an English-language oud instruction book. Obadia and Kochack spent the vacation season in the Summer of 1964 playing in Asbury Park with The Jamal Twins who were neither twins nor named Jamal; they were in fact the daughters of Eastern European Jews who settled in Egypt in the 1920s and spent the late 50s to the early 70s dancing in the U.S., because the Egyptian police became suspicious that they were involved in espionage while on tour in India and East Asia, making it unsafe for them to return home to Egypt.

Kochak and Obadia knocked out a series of LPs frequently in collaboration with the violinist Fred Elias and ad hoc bands between 1966 and ’69 for the Scepter Records subsidiary Mace, “designed especially for the go-go-go crowd… for the belly-dance cafe society people” at the 254 W. 54th St studio (where the Velvet Underground recorded much of their first LP around the same time). Among them are two LPs credited to “The Ethnic Turkish Orchestra” and “The Ethnic Armenian Orchestra,” both designations being purposely misleading toward a largely uncaring Western public. The group’s core - Kochak, Elias, and Obadia - were native Arabic-speakers; clarinetist Steve Bagoshian and oudist Joseph Kouyoumjian were Armenians. In any case, much of content of those LPs are derived from the repertoires of Greek (“Ouzo Ouzo,” “Miserlou”), Armenian (“Sood E, Sood E” and “Oglan Oglan”), Lebanese (dabkes), and Jewish (“Hava Nagila”) weddings in the 1950s and ‘60s where all of the musicians earned a lot of their livings .

In 1969, Obadia released his only solo LP, a visionary work in plain contrast to the orientalist populism of his work with Kochak and most of their contemporaries. It was technically masterful and presented as the work of an intellectual and serious artist. No fezzes or dancing girls on the front of the jacket; just detailed explanations of the scales and workings of the music on the rear panel. Titled Middle East Classics, it was recorded at Sidney Feldman’s Mastertone Studio at 130 W. 42nd St. in Manhattan, where, just a few years earlier, Elektra records had made a series of seminal folk recordings (Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil & Vince Martin, Oscar Brand, the Dillards, Phil Ochs, and Spider John Koerner), leading to recordings by Near Eastern musicians out of the Bleeker Street Feenjon Cafe and then the prolific Armenian oudist George Mgrdichian. Obadia used the studio for an ambitious project to redefine Middle Eastern music in the U.S. by playing it at its highest level, rather than as the lurid attraction for nightclubs run by mobsters that it had quickly become. Coalescing all his talents as an arranger and performer, and playing all of the instruments (violin, viola, cello, oud, and darbuka), he built the album alone utilizing the then-new multi-track recording medium, less than two years after the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and another year before Glenn Gould’s multi-track recording of Scriabin’s Sonata No. 5. Released with thorough liner notes for each track and an ingenious internal structure with each side playing as its own program, it was both serious and cutting-edge.

The Brooklyn-based independent label that issued it was run by the Rashid Brothers, Raymond and Stan, whose father Albert had begun releasing Arabic discs from their Atlantic Avenue shop in the 1940s. Obadia’s masterpiece reached few listeners at the time. It was reissued on CD twenty years later in 1990 by the Global Village label, where it reached a few more. (In 1993 Global Village released another CD of solo performances by Obadia titled Iraqi Jewish and Iraqi Music.) Presented here again in its entirety, another thirty years later with some contextual performances, who knows? Maybe the audience Obadia had in mind still waits for him.

Around 1972 Obadia recorded with Kochak again at another ad hoc bellydance session, under the guidance of the well-known RCA producer of “mood music” Ethel Gabriel. With the popular Greek clarinetist Gus Vali, Armenian reed players Souren Baronian and Steve Bagoshian (both previously of the Nor-Ikes band), Armenian oudist Haig Manoukian, and Arab violinist Fred Elias the band plays standards of of the nightclub and wedding repertoires for those interested in the ongoing wave of interest in bellydancing, which by that point was being contextualized as a feminist expression. From the mid-’70s through the early ’80s, he and Kochak released an extremely popular series of LPs, tapes, and books designed specifically for the bellydance community and it is probably that era of Kochak and Obadia’s work that has had the visible legacy.

In 1979 Obadia collaborated with the oudist and singer Vita Israel on an album titled Sephardic Hebrew Songs of the Middle East. While continuing to perform around New York and New Jersey, by the early 80s, after almost 30 years of continuous performing, Obadia took a position teaching music at Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, Long Island. In 1983, he gave a lecture at a Jewish folklife conference in New Jersey on “the influence of Arabic music on Jewish Middle Eastern music.” In the 1990s, he and Kochak transitioned once again from playing ethnic parties to an exotica act in nightclubs to performances at museums, where they presented their music to an inquisitive public as though they were something from the past and under glass with question-and-answer sessions afterward.

Hakki Obadia died on May 27, 2004, as the U.S. was in the midst of the Iraq war and only a few months after Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein was captured by the U.S. military. The stone erected in New Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon, Long Island, gave Hakki Obadia’s year of birth as 1924 and reads “Devoted Husband, Beloved Dad, Wise & Kind Brother, Uncle, Grandpa, and Teacher. MASTER MUSICIAN” His wife Rebecca Obadia died July 14, 2001.