Artist: Hamza El-Din
CD title: Escalay
Label: Nonesuch Explorer Series
Date: 1998 (orig 1971)
Whatever genre of music one listens to, if it has any history at all, the conversion from analog to digital technology has provided a second chance to discover classic recordings long out-of-print on vinyl.
For many record companies, though, it is an opportunity to generate fresh profits from stale product, and thus the mountains of mediocre CDs continue to rise. Still, amid the chaff, occasional treasures appear.
Hamza El-Din was a young man in the Sixties when progress, in the form of the Aswan Dam, submerged Nubia and its ancient civilization. As the choking of the Nile created Lake Nasser, the Nubian people dispersed throughout Egypt and the Sudan and elsewhere.
El-Din already had travelled widely to study music, a pursuit that lead to eventual rendezvous with folk audiences around the globe and, later, with musical collaborators as diverse as Mickey Hart and the Kronos Quartet.
El-Din is a virtuoso on the oud (or üd), an Arabic lute, yet his great achievement was to transform the music of his people and, by doing so, to help preserve Nubian culture even as its crucible disintegrated.
Traditional Nubian music used only drums, hand claps and vocals as instruments, so when El-Din transcribed Nubian melodies to the oud he not only set Nubian music on a new trajectory, he also made it portable.
No longer was a community required to perform the music, or even an ensemble. A single person with an oud could carry the music to wherever Nubians resettled, and to the world. Escalay (The Water Wheel) is perhaps Hamza El-Din's masterpiece, a brilliant and haunting 1971 recording that captures the essence of his innovations. The title track, Escalay is a musical interpretation of the start to a boy's day in a Nubian village, the boy whose responsibility is to keep oxen turning the wheel that draws water from the Nile to irrigate parched fields.
Twenty-one and a half minutes long, the fugue begins peacefully with slow oud notes reminiscent of classic Chinese music, mirroring the sleepy, early morning movements of the boy.
Slowly the pace increases and one begins to hear the steady rhythms of ancient Nubian percussion in El-Din's oud. One of the two other, shorter cuts includes drums and demonstrates how faithful El-Din has been in preserving Nubian folklore.
Through a stroke of luck I acquired the original LP of this extraordinary recording last year, when I happened upon someone on the internet who was dumping their whole record collection. It's a totally clean pressing and it sounds like it was never listened to before it reached my turntable, so the aural experience when I first heard it was profound.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
The original recording was part of the Nonesuch Explorer Series, and so is the new compact disc. The sound quality on the CD reissue is perfect, endowing the oud with the rich and full timbre that can be heard on the vinyl, yet without the inevitable surface noise on old vinyl. The CD offers another advantage: I can leave it in my computer, which I set to wake up before me in the morning, and
"Escalay" becomes my wake-up call when it automatically starts upon boot-up. "Escalay" is a perfect eye-opener for those who need to be eased into the day. All Nonesuch CD releases are impeccably packaged, and this one includes handsome recent photos of Hamza El-Din by noted photographer, Jack Vartoogian. Escalay (The Water Wheel) is as vital as it was 27 years ago.
Robert Ambrose produces "The Rhythm Connection" for public radio, and he writes about African music for The Beat magazine. The curious can reach him by e-mail at rambrose@alaska.net.
