Milestones

Umm Kalthum

Name: Umm Kalthum – Alf Leila We Leila
Item: Alf Leila We Leila
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Alf Leila We Leila

1969 (Sono cairo)

traditional Arabic pop, ughniya

by Federico Romagnoli

In the years after World War II, Arab music reached unprecedented levels of complexity, due in part to its hybridization with Western music and in part to the development of new recording formats.

The arrival of the 33 rpm record led composers, particularly Egyptian ones, to write extended songs that spanned both sides of the vinyl and could run from thirty to forty minutes. Curiously, these recordings were still considered unsatisfactory for being too short: in live performances, the same songs often stretched well beyond an hour.

The difference from the studio versions was not a matter of the composition's length, since it contained the exact same sections, but of repetition, one of the defining traits of several schools of traditional Arab music. So, while a phrase might be sung three or four times in a row in the studio version, in concert it could easily be repeated ten times or more.

This obsessive repetition of words and concepts is tied to the idea of trance so dear to much of the music of the Muslim world (think of sufi dances), and specifically to the necessity of creating tarab, a sort of ecstatic emotion conferred by the voice of a particularly gifted singer (tarab is exclusively linked to the human voice: it cannot be generated by instrumental music alone, which also explains why traditional Arabic music has almost always featured a voice).

Umm Kulthum is the most beloved Egyptian singer in history, and across the entire Arab world there are very few who can rival her iconic status (Lebanon's Fairuz is perhaps the only one who operates on the same level). Her figure is legendary, so much so that nearly half a century after her death she remains one of the most listened-to singers in the Arab world. But this isn't just a matter of impact on the public: Umm Kulthum's body of work literally changed the very conception of Arabic music, particularly in the final stretch of her career. Active on the record market since 1926, the artist lived through every mutation of Egyptian music, right up to the long-form songs (in Arabic: ughniya in the singular, aghani in the plural) of the 1960s.

The authors of those pieces, chief among them Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Baligh Hamdi, have repeatedly said they wanted to write such long, complex songs partly because they were inspired by Umm Kulthum's concerts, during which even originally quite brief compositions would be stretched out to imposing lengths.

Umm Kulthum did not invent this mode of expression: it was common practice for many Egyptian singers to draw out songs to extreme lengths in live performance. What made the difference was her persona: for some reason - whether it was her extremely powerful and versatile voice, the suffering she was able to convey, or her stage presence - Umm Kulthum hypnotized the Arab world, and her legendary Thursday-night concerts came to glue the whole of Egypt to the radio. It was only natural that the most ambitious songwriters would want to raise the bar, to see just how far such a performer could go.

Paradoxically, by the time she recorded her first long songs, Umm Kulthum was already in her sixties and her voice was no longer as powerful as it once had been: and yet almost all of her most beloved songs belong to this era, a testament to how her interpretive powers could transcend even the passage of time. Listening to them today, they exude so much power and passion that it's hard to believe she was a singer in physical decline when she recorded them.

It is perhaps impossible to determine which is Umm Kulthum's most important long song, but two titles have particularly strong claims to the title: "إنت عمري" ("Enta Omry"), composed by Mohammed Abdel Wahab and recorded in 1964, considered by many the creative peak of the most celebrated and influential Egyptian composer of the twentieth century, and "ألف ليلة وليلة" ("Alf Leila We Leila"), recorded in 1969, probably her best-known piece today.

Both songs are musically excellent, but if we are to celebrate Umm Kulthum, it is impossible to separate the artist from the icon, which tips the scales toward "Alf Leila We Leila": on YouTube alone, adding up its various videos, it has amassed roughly 145 million plays over the past ten years, half of which come from versions running between forty and sixty minutes. Impressive numbers for a piece written over half a century ago.

The track, whose title means nothing less than "A Thousand and One Nights," was written by Baligh Hamdi for the music and by the legendary lyricist Morsi Gamil Aziz for the words, penned in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic. It's a passionate love poem, with an ending that flows into a prayer:

My love,

the night and its sky,

its stars and its moon,

the moon and the night watch,

you and I, my love, my life,

we all live love the same way,

ah, love stays awake to flood us with happiness,

and speaks to us with joy.

My love, come, let's live in the eyes of the night

and tell the sun "come back" in a year, not before.

This is a beautiful night of love, worth a thousand and one nights,

what is life if not a night like this night?

How can I describe to you, my love, my life before loving you?

I remembered no "yesterday" and I didn't even have a "tomorrow" to wait for,

I didn't even live a "today," my love.

You made me fall in love in the blink of an eye,

you showed me where the beauty of days resides.

After the night came longing, and you filled it with certainty

and life, once a desert, became a garden.

My love, what could be more beautiful than the night and two lovers like us?

We are lost, we no longer know if life is made of a single moment or of years

we only know that we love each other,

we live only for the night and for love.

My love, love is our life, our home and our strength,

people have their world and we have ours,

and if they say lovers burn in the fire of their love,

well, then their fire is our paradise.

Love has never hurt anyone

and its garden has never let anything go

if not happiness and joy.

Oh moon of my nights, shadow of my days,

my love, my life,

I have for you the most beautiful gift, a word,

the word of love that is inside,

it is better than the whole world

and offers you the treasures of the world.

Tell me this word, say it to the birds, to the trees, to the people,

say it to the whole world,

say, say that love is a grace and not a sin.

God is love, good is love, light is love,

Oh Lord, preserve the beauty of our first meeting in our hands

and the happiness of our first date with candles around us

and let time pass and wrap us in its security.

Oh Lord, do not [give us] a life in which we will taste the bitter taste of separation

and may sadness not know where we are and not come to us,

and may our nights be lit only by candles of joy,

our nights, our nights, my love

Reading Aziz's words without taking into account the context and the constraints of translation, however, risks missing their refinement. First of all, because, as already mentioned, each verse is actually sung several times: on paper, therefore, the trance tied to repetition is lost.

Moreover, the poetry appears impoverished in its choice of vocabulary in Italian, whereas in Arabic it is decidedly more refined. For example, in Italian one is inclined to translate as "amore" ("love") both "حبيبي" ("habibi"), "هَوَى‎" ("hawa") and "حب" ("hob"): the first could be rendered as "my darling", but such a choice would undermine the solemnity of the text; the second indicates the physicality of love and encompasses sensations like attraction, passion and desire; the third represents the concept of "love" in its most straightforward, universal form.

The long Egyptian songs represent the culmination of a movement sometimes referred to as "traditional Arabic pop", but more often known in the Arab world as the "golden age of Arabic music": these were hybrid pieces that started from Arabic folk music and connected it to Western music, both classical and popular. The fusion took place both in composition and in arrangement.

In the first case, by alternating parts composed using the system of Western harmonies with parts that followed the maqamat typical of Arabic tradition (to better understand what a maqam – maqamat when plural – see the special "The other Mediterranean", written for OndaRock by Marco Sgrignoli, which devotes ample space to discussing that peculiar system of scales).

In the second case, by combining traditional Arabic instruments (oud, nay, qanun, riqq and so on) and instruments imported from Western music in past centuries, such as the violin, with modern Western instruments like electric organ, electric guitar and accordion. It should nonetheless be noted that most Western instruments were modified when adopted by Arab orchestras, so they could blend with systems foreign to their nature, such as maqamat and quarter tones.

"Alf Leila We Leila" is emblematic in this sense, thanks to Samir Sourour's saxophone, Omar Khorshid's electric guitar, Faruq Salama's accordion and Hany Mehanna's organ. In particular, the first three are today considered the ones who "Arabized" their respective instruments (they also worked with many other major singers of the Arab world, in particular Abdel Halim Hafez).

The studio recording of the track dates back to January 1969, and its live premiere to the following month. The studio version is little remembered today, despite being the one originally released: starting from the CD era, in fact, all reissues have replaced it with a live recording, also from 1969, considered more valid since it is considerably longer.

Some of these new editions contained the full concert performance, which reached 58 minutes, while others made some cuts, but never going below 41 minutes: in any case, well beyond the 31 minutes of the original studio version (although, it should be reiterated, the latter was shorter solely because the phrases were repeated fewer times: compositionally, it lacked no section).

The studio version thus literally fell into oblivion during the CD era, and for this reason today, even on streaming, it is the live rendition that draws the most attention, to the point that many mistakenly believe the piece was already released in concert form back in 1969 and are entirely unaware of the existence of a studio version (the same phenomenon has also affected "Enta Omry" and several of her other songs from that period).

Whichever version you choose to listen to (the arrangements are almost identical), "Alf Leila We Leila" opens with a long muqaddima (instrumental introduction, often featuring solos from the lead musicians – in this case saxophone and guitar), driven by insistent string ostinatos, rich layers of percussion and sudden shifts in atmosphere, guided by the interplay between the orchestra's silences and swells.

The composition revolves around the maqam farahfaza (from the family of maqamat nahawand) with the jins kurd on the fifth degree (the jins is a subset of the maqam, essentially a scale fragment) and reveals itself to be extremely rich and complex, as indeed all of Hamdi's works are, incorporating the most disparate rhythms (ranging from thehacha', a dance of Iraqi origin, to the bambi, a typical progression in Egyptian folk music).

This shower of exotic technical terms, needless to say, serves a purely documentary purpose: anyone who has never played Arabic music will gain no useful information for decoding the listening experience. For that, one hopes the richness of the orchestration and the variety of the composition prove effective.

Umm Kulthum enters at the end of the muqaddimaand remains the protagonist until the end, save for a few moments of orchestral breathing space (for example at the start of side two of the vinyl release, taking the studio version as reference).

As already mentioned, her contralto voice was no longer at the peak of its power at the time of this recording, and not only because of her age: already suffering from autoimmune hyperthyroidism, in 1967 she had also fallen seriously ill with nephritis.

Nevertheless, listening to her it's easy to believe one of the best-known anecdotes of Arabic music: it's said she was forced to sing a full meter away from the microphone to keep the sound from distorting (needless to say, it's one of those stories that's appealing regardless of whether it's actually true).

What is certain is that the tarab that emerges is representative of the expressive power of a woman who attained a position of enormous power and cultural influence in what was one of the most male-dominated societies on the planet: even Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser showed signs of reverence toward her.

Umm Kulthum died in February 1975 of kidney failure, and her passing is generally regarded as the event that brought the aforementioned "golden age of Arabic music" to a close (sealing the sense of an era's end, the death of Abdel Halim Hafez would follow just four years later).

Her music has already shown in the past that it can transcend cultures: Bob Dylannamed her as their favourite singer, Maria Callas called her a "voice without equal", Robert Plant as a primary influence for the creation of "Kashmir" and, more broadly, as an artist who changed her perception of the possibilities offered by singing. As for the Arab artists who have cited her as a reference point, it's almost pointless to list them: one might as well ask who hasn't.

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26/06/2022

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. ألف ليلة وليلة (Alf Leila We Leila)
(Note: in the original vinyl edition the track was of course split into two parts)

UMM KALTHUM on the web

Page on Mazzika Group

Umm Kalthum on OndaRock

Monograph

Umm Kalthum

The mother of all ecstasies

She sang patriotic anthems and verses by poets in love, chanted the Quran, and became the ambassador of pan-Arabism. To the beauty of her singing she added a masterful technique and a boundless gift for improvisation. And when she let herself be overcome by ecstasy, the audience could not resist her. The legend of the greatest singer in the Arab world