A Touch of the Orient
Making music at a time when it seems that everything is permissible, and worse, that hardly anything is being produced that is aesthetically provocative, is certainly a challenge.
How does one actually find something to which one can relate, something that moves away from hackneyed clichés of perception and design and, ideally, that has a little more to offer than a self-referential exploration of the boundaries of the artistically possible?
There are as many answers to this question as there are people engaged in the search. With the kind of generally applicable, normative signification of meaning and values formerly bestowed by culture now lacking, we are left to seek individual answers. In the case of the Berlin quartet Cyminology, such answers have a touch of the Orient.
Music with a politico-cultural agenda?
What becomes obvious on reading reviews of the group is that certain stereotypes seem to persist. It is very likely that we will be reminded of the pleasure to be found in the experience of encountering such a congenial, friendly and effortless marriage of Iranian and American musical traditions. It's as though a group, which above all is engaged in a search for its own stylistic identity, was nurturing a politico-cultural agenda.
Upon closer inspection, however, we find something much more complex, more personal, and more arbitrary. Cymin Samawatie sings in Persian, the material for her songs coming from writers such as Hafiz, Omar Khayyam, or verses from the psalms. They are about love, the emotions, or about God; and although they are about the distant past, they have a timeless relevance.
Free of forced relevance
The words are beautiful, enduring, the fascination for the language they express having been passed on to Samawatie as a child by her aunt in the German city of Brunswick where her Iranian parents found refuge from the Shah's regime, and where the singer herself was born.
The songs' inspirations are random, distant historical intuitions without any compulsion to be relevant to the situations in which they are performed. They arise from the personal predilections of the 31-year-old singer, a child of the second generation, and, as such, are not of any crucial conceptual significance for the group. Presumably, were Samawatie to sing selections from the Tao Te Ching or the I Ging, the effect of the music would be very similar.
That, in turn, is very much related to the soundscapes conjured by the other musicians: Benedikt Jahnel on piano, Ralf Schwarz on double bass and Ketan Bahtti on drums. They have studied, mainly in Berlin, have learned that it makes little sense to copy the historical American model, and have grown up in a confused artistic universe of crumbling certainties and internationality.
Finely measured melody
Anything goes, and here, too, the rulebook is discarded. It's a case of do as you please, or rather, do what is enjoyable. Accordingly Cyminology's music is a colourful melange.
Take a pinch or two of chamber jazz, add ethereal expanses of restrained introspection, at times oblique, uneven rhythms, a finely controlled measure of melody in the form of rangy, meandering piano lines, the melodic double bass of the rediscovered avant-garde, the whole held together by a silky percussive beat.
What comes out, then, is very pleasant, caressingly smooth music, characterised by Cymin Samawatie's distinctive vocal clarity and legato, swing-resistant, delivery.
Two albums have been released over the last two years, "Per Se" (2005) and "Bemun" (2007), and a great many concerts given to what has now become a worldwide audience, with active support also coming via the cultural export efforts of the Goethe Institute.
The nice thing is that one happily can direct listeners to Cyminology, because their music is not going to offend anyone. This, of course, begs the question of who exactly is going to get anything out of it. The musicians themselves, certainly, engaged as they are in a search for ideas of their own in the contemporary, polystylistic world of the YouTube generation.
Individuality as the point
The audience for one, certainly, who, purely by virtue of the technical virtuosity on display, are assured of top quality entertainment. The cultural discourse has less to gain, because the music and concept of Cyminology are too much their own.
They are not trying to change anything, nor to champion any causes, or if so, then it is the cause of self-assurance, to show that they can integrate traditions without relying too heavily on them, show they have the courage, in other words, to trust personal instinct, and dispense with notions of hierarchy.
And who is to say that that is not the answer, the way to create something we might call art, free of the tiresome discussions and agendas.
Ralf Dombrowski
© Qantara.de 2007
Translated from the German by Ron Walker
Qantara.de
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The German-Persian singer Cymin Samawatie is the leader of the band Cyminology. With the quartet she has set texts of the Persian mystic Hāfiz and the scholar and poet Omar Khayyám, among others, to music. A portrait by Lewis Gropp
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