Pyramid scheme

>> The Exotic Egyptian Malha Laili and the Land
of Cush put the “fez” in festivities

by MARK SLUTSKY
n “I just want people to have a basic experience of what it would be like to go into a restaurant or café in Egypt on a Saturday night,” says Marie-Lyne Tarabulsy, chief organizer of the Exotic Egyptian Malha Laili, a night of Egyptian culture and music this Saturday at the Casa del Popolo. The soirée is poised to be an all-sensory experience, with a spread of vegan and vegetarian Egyptian food, hookahs available for the smokin’, Turkish coffee and a belly dancer, Shanna. “She’s a beautiful woman,” says Tarabulsy, “a Quebecker with an Arabic background. She’s a wonderful woman who teaches belly-dancing and she’s probably one of the best belly dancers I’ve ever seen in my life.”
And all of this is not to mention a special musical performance by the Land of Cush, an ensemble thrown together by musical everyman Sam Shalabi, who will not be belly-dancing. The Mirror spoke to Shalabi about his intriguing new project:

Mirror: What exactly is the Land of Cush?

Sam Shalabi: I’m composing—or I’ve composed—a piece of what I was sort of thinking was fake Egyptian music, kind of in the style of Muhammad Abdul Wahab, who was a very popular singer/composer. It’s kind of in that style of music, which is very sweeping, stringy music.

M: What do you mean by “fake” Egyptian music?

SS: Well, I call it fake only because this is actually the first composition like this that I’ve done. I mean, I’ve composed pieces to different orchestral music, and I know the music, but I haven’t had a lot of experience composing this sort of thing. And it’s also not really that traditional in some ways because there’s electric guitar, and saxophone near the end. It’s not so set up, I guess, in the traditional way of composing orchestral music of that sort. On the other hand, because there’s so many strings, it does sound traditional in some ways.

M: Where does the name come from?

SS: It was just a sort of off-the-cuff name, because I think “Cush,” in the Bible, refers to Upper Egypt, if not I’m mistaken, so I just thought of the name. But then I thought it might be more Sun Ra-ish to use “the Land of Cush.” In some ways the piece actually sounds like Sun Ra a little bit, because there’s a lot of improvs in it—or rather there’s sections where there’s improvised bits in it. It does have this kind of pharaonic sound to it, but at the same it has this sort of slightly skewered sound, because of the improvised stuff. Also there’s a lot of jazzy people involved in it. It sort of works more almost as kind of a orchestral-jazz-fake-Egyptian-jazz-Sun Ra piece.

Reverse exoticism

M: What are you responding to, in this piece, in Egyptian culture? Do you have any interest in the sort of exoticized representations of Egypt we’re used to seeing?

SS: Not really, no. I mean, I’ve obviously been exposed to Egyptian culture for a long time, being Egyptian. There is a kind of exoticism in Egyptian culture but that’s not what I’m that interested in. It’s more that there’s so much more stuff in the culture that’s interesting—exotic and non-exotic. A lot of the orchestral stuff that I’m interested in for this piece was really popular at a time when Egypt was modernizing, when it was opening up to other cultures and other kinds of music and becoming part of the 20th century or whatever. And so, in some ways, the exoticism that I would be interested in would be that connection, that exchange or appropriation of Western ideas into very ancient or old ideas. That’s sort of the interesting thing about a lot of the orchestral music—that it does sound very sort of Arabic and non-Western but at the same time there’s this definite element of Western harmony and Western music. That sort of element, the sweeping strings and the sort of overblowness of a lot of the music from that period, like the ’50s and ’60s, was really something—in Europe, anyway—that people really connected with. Just because on an emotional level it’s very sort of direct, very affecting in that way.

M: It’s like the Egyptian culture transformed Western ideas and incorporated them into its own.

SS: To me that’s the kind of exoticism I find interesting. You hear it in Indian music too, you know—a lot of the cinema music in India is like that. It has this very strong Western influence but nobody would mistake it for Western music because it just transforms into something else. n

At Casa del Popolo on Saturday, Dec. 22, 10pm, $5