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October 15, 2010

A global musical adventure

Deejay/producer Cheb i Sabbah’s unique sonic landscape.
BASYA LAYE

Algerian-born, San Francisco-based deejay and producer Cheb i Sabbah has built a career fusing traditional music with modern sensibilities, introducing people all over the world to Asian, North African and Arabic-inflected music in nightclubs, at festivals and on the seven albums he’s put out in the last decade.

Cheb (pronounced Sheb) is particularly unique in the world of electronic music – he doesn’t engage in sampling, today’s stock in trade. Instead, he has made a name for himself by traveling all over South Asia and North Africa to record traditional music for his albums, blending voices and instruments from Hindustani, Carnatic, Punjabi and Sufi traditions, among others, with his skills as a producer.

Growing up surrounded by music as a child in a relatively peaceful North Africa introduced him to the varieties of cultural exchange, especially in the world of music.

“Having those sounds of Arabic classical music [as a child], going from there to Indian classical music was really a short step, with a Persian influence and northern classical music,” he said in a telephone interview with the Independent from his home in San Francisco.

“In Algeria, two uncles were what you call a sheikh (elder). One was Sheikh Raymond and then Sheikh Silva, who were like the masters of malouf music. In Algerian Arab classical music, each city has its own school, Jews and Muslims playing the same orchestra and then, of course, having the same students, back and forth. Same as India. You can have a Muslim musical guru and the students are all Hindu, or vice versa. They all play together. It was the same thing in North Africa. Algiers has its school. We’re from Constantine, so I grew up with that kind of music, at all the celebrations, weddings, any happy kind of thing. Of course, the whole heritage, it all came out on a CD some years ago, Treasure of Judeo-Arabic Music, all the Jewish singers that used to play that kind of classical Arabic music, and there were many of them, women and men singing,” he said.

In 1960, as a young teenager, Cheb emigrated with his family to Paris, just two years prior to Algerian independence. Music became his passion and he got his first gig as a deejay at 17. It was 20 years ago that Cheb decided to make San Francisco his full-time home.

“I had met [well-known jazz musician] Don Cherry while I was working with the Living Theatre in Europe and he moved to San Francisco, so we got together and did theatre and music together. He kind of forced me to remain a deejay.... I was kind of like the first one in clubs who played dance music that came from what I call Triple A – Asia, Arabia and Africa – and knowing Don and his past, being the first one to bring those elements to jazz music, that’s how it started, me becoming his manager, doing theatre with him and actually performing with him, as a deejay. He was the first one to foresee that a deejay could play with a jazz quartet. At that time, his quartet was called Multikulti ... when he did shows, he didn’t like to do one piece, stop, and then everyone applauds and then on to the next piece. He liked to do like a continuous thing. I would play all the transitions between the songs.”

While deejaying is a job, Cheb said, it’s also a pleasure. In an industry heavily dominated by the young, Cheb doesn’t take his success for granted. “You look at musicians that play an instrument, they practise every day, alone or with other people, so it’s the same thing. Music is so magical. It beats working in a coal mine or Bank of America, for sure. It’s not like, oh, I’ve gotta go to work now. Every once in a while, you might have a cold or wish you didn’t have a show tonight, but you still show up and, if the magic is there, that’s all we’re looking for, really. Before the show and after the show, you’re just like everyone else, with all the ups and downs, life.”

Cheb doesn’t mince words when it comes to the intimate relationship between deejay/performer and his/her audience. “I spent a few days with [Qawwali great] Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn doing [his first] show in the Bay area. He said, if you have good musicians but not good listeners, it doesn’t mean anything. So, you need good listeners as well as good musicians. On the dance floor, it’s the same thing, you need the deejay but you also need the dancers. Fifty-fifty, back and forth, give and take. The idea on the dance floor is really to find that magic place.”

Cheb describes his musical community as a family. “I think some of us maintain [the values], more for the South Asian music scene, because we’re like a family, you know [people like] Talvin Singh ... what used to be known as the Asian underground, which I became part of. I made an album called Shri Durga [and it was] the first time somebody took really high-calibre musicians like Salamat Ali Kahn ... and Sultan Kahn [and put them in] an electronic dance context.”

Cheb takes his responsibilities in this regard seriously. “A lot of people thought that I sampled sitar or this and that,” he said, “but the fact is that there’s close to 40 musicians on that album.... One really important thing – because of the musicians that I use, first, I don’t want to embarrass them and, second, you don’t want to embarrass yourself, you have to be really careful.... It’s so old and so precise. Those musicians have been playing their entire lives, maybe since they were four, five years old. You can’t just sample and slap some beats onto it and there you go. I have a couple of friends who are musicians and they coach me if something is out of tune. They’ve been playing music all their lives. The important thing is to not embarrass them. Up to this day, I’m blown away sometimes.... For example, I was in Goa and Zakir [Hussain], who is a really fantastic human being, not just as a number one tabla player, but as a human being, I went to sound check before the concert and he’s introducing me to [guitarist] John McLaughlin, [Indian mandolin player] U Srinivas, like, really incredible musicians, and U Srinivas, he’s so sweet, he said, ‘Anytime you want me to work with you, here’s my number.’ I’m going, ‘Wow! U Srinivas is asking me’ – and that’s the beauty of it. Because they’ve heard something from Shri Durga or Krishna Lila and they know that, no matter what I do with it, there will always be the respect [for] their tradition.”

One issue inherent in today’s transnational world, he warned, however, is homogeneity, as music travels from east to west and west to east. “I think it’s both ways, although I always make the point that it’s important, first of all, to have and to know what the reference points are, because of the tradition involved, which hopefully will continue. We can’t just have beats, beats, beats, electronic music all the time. There are different kinds of music for different purposes, for different parts of the day. There’s no way you can play trance music 24 hours a day. You need some music for contemplation. In that way, we need different kinds of music – but the tradition is the challenge. Along with the positives, there is also the negative, becoming homogenous, everything we hear and smell and see. For each of us, being involved in the five senses, we all have a choice, how we involve those senses from the minute we wake up. There’s a certain mass homogeneous thing out there that I think is dangerous.”

The world of deejaying is predominantly male, as is the world of devotional music for the most part, and Cheb paid particular attention to the gender discrepancy when he made the album La Kahena, which exclusively features female voices and was conceived as a tribute to his mother, the women in his family and the women of the Maghreb (North Africa).

“I did it, actually, for my mother,” he explained. “It was for my mother, my aunts, the women I grew up with in North Africa and Paris, who have a very specific way of loving you and commanding you to come and kiss them. You’re just, like, doing something and they say, ‘Hey, you, come and give me a kiss!’ And you give them a kiss and you go back to whatever you were doing. I grew up like that. That was the idea, my mother and women of the Maghreb. And then, La Kahena, of course, being this mythical Jewish/Judaized queen of the Berber tribes [in the] eighth century, fighting the first Arab-Muslim invasion of North Africa. You always hear about La Kahena. You go to Morocco and you go to a small village and the chief of the tribe, he would have no problem telling you, ‘You see all those people? They all used to be Jewish.’ That’s the history of North Africa as far as how those Berber tribes were Judaized. I mean, before, Islam didn’t even exist, there was the whole Judaization of North Africa.”

About the place of spirituality in the music he plays and produces, Cheb clarified, “It’s mysticism more than religion. Forget religion. The mystical approach in music, like all mysticism, is the searching and longing for union. It could be a wife, a partner, it could be the divine ... that union of being close to that one, I think that’s what music is about.... I find monotheism not very practical, personally. I respect it, but I don’t find it very practical. That’s where I depart. The divine is the divine, but as far as a lifestyle, as a practice, I have never found it very practical. India is the only place where Jews were never persecuted. It was like, ‘OK, come on in. We’ve got so many already, one more, one less, doesn’t matter.’ I think the idea is, ‘That’s your concept of the divine? OK, we’ve got many! We’ll just add it.’ To me, that’s the more pluralistic approach that makes a little more sense than ‘We’re the only ones.’ Ten religions, 10 nuclear wars, basically.”

Cheb listens to a variety of music in his down time. “I’m more of a traditionalist. I spin so often that when I’m at home, I’m not into blasting the system with dance music. I do that plenty with really good sound systems, you know? At home, it’s definitely lower level volume-wise and more mellow, traditional, kind of chill music. A lot of jazz, actually, because I grew up with jazz. For me, that’s a heritage that’s still very important to me. There were some people in the jazz world who were really out there in the composition, the way they structured music, which only has seven notes. You can do incredible things with just those seven notes. To me, that’s very rewarding as far as listening to music. Dance music is cool but, for me, it fulfils that one particular thing, kind of like losing mind, body and soul, just going out there, but you can’t do that all day long. Other parts of the day need different kinds of music.”

Perhaps the ultimate message of Cheb’s music is one of peace. “We all wait for a better world,” he said. “It doesn’t look too good and, I think, besides the music, I think it’s important for us to do our homework and our homework is – whatever way and how much we can – to help the next person. I think that’s the important thing, because it’s OK, yeah, everybody’s cool and everything is cool and the music and ... dressing up and it’s very cool, but one has to somehow work to help the situation that we are presented with. I think we’re at a [crossroads] ... we’ve got to do something and the only way ... is each and every one of us, not count on, ‘Well, when everybody gets it together, I’ll be there.’ Yeah, that’s fine too, but before that. There’s the ‘I’ before the ‘we.’”

Cheb i Sabbah will be joined by Israeli percussionist Boris Sichon on Thursday, Oct. 21, 9 p.m., at the Red Room.

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