Tarik Bashir and Yara tell Colin May about an extraordinary project bringing to life the historic & engaging music of 19th century Cairo cafe culture

SINGER and master of Arabic strings Tarik Bashir and his friend and singer Yara relax in a Cowley Road café drinking mint tea and eating pistachio cake. It’s a perfect setting for hearing how these talented Oxford artists are rediscovering their musical heritage, and presenting it in a new – and, actually, very old – way.

Tarik, well known as a member of local ‘Turkabilly’ band Brickwork Lizards and a master of the oud – a short-necked lute traditionally played everywhere from North Africa to Armenia and Iran – has teamed up with the Middle Eastern singer for a musical project called Oxford Maqam, aimed at rediscovering long lost 19th century Egyptian music, and recording it how it would originally have been heard – on wax cylinders.

The pair have pushed the idea full circle by taking the music back to Egypt. For both musicians the journey has taken them back to a particular aspect of their heritage; Tarik’s roots are Nubian Egyptian and Yara’s father is from Cairo and her mother from Palestine.

And it all began, says Tarik, with a chance encounter right here in Cowley Road.

“On my way to a Brickwork Lizards rehearsal with my oud on my back this Turkish guy, Gurkan, stopped me,” he recalls. “He said: ‘Do you play music around here? You must meet Martin Stokes who plays qanun (a sort of zither) and Mohammed who plays nay (Arabic flute)’. I was like ‘Really? I’d love to meet them and set up something’.”

Gurkan was also the catalyst for Yara’s involvement. She says: “He had heard I’d been to Turkey, met some musicians and done a bit of singing as we were hanging out. So he said ‘Do you want to sing in a workshop?’ And despite having no real singing experience, I said, all right.”

The first exploratory sessions were late 2008 and early 2009.

“Initially we started playing Arabic songs we all knew,” he says. “We’d sit in a circle and ask ‘what do you know? I know this tune. Okay let’s do it’. And we found enough material that we all knew. Then we had our first couple of gigs.”

Back then though it was different to what it is now. “Our understanding of what is the old music was the 1920s and 30s,” he says.

“We were learning songs but with no additions from us. While it was very satisfying to play them with authenticity, and very nice for Arabs in the UK to have this big dose of nostalgia by having this music played live in this authentic way, and though we stayed away from stuff that had been done and done, ultimately we were a glorified covers band.”

But things changed with the arrival of Ahmed Ali Salah. “He came along and he just opened that great big door for us really,” says Tarik. When we listened to the material it blew us away along with it being actually a repertoire that isn’t fully composed and finished.”

The door that opened was to a 19th century Egyptian repertoire which had, he says disappeared between the late 1940s and late 1990s.

“The best analogy is that this Egyptian music was like someone giving you a ball of dough to make a pizza but then it’s up to you how big the pizza is going to be and what sort of base and topping. Suddenly I am thinking I am not doing covers any more, there’s room for us to interpret things, sing them a bit different, and add our own sections while striving to be as authentic as possible.”

It took the band about two years to digest this material, which Tarik describes as “Egypt’s equivalent of classical music”.

He says: “It’s how people thought about music in the 19th century and centuries before that, and it was created entirely without any outside influence

“It was not only in the streets and cafes, either. In the 1860s a decision to give Egypt its own identity resulted in it replacing Ottoman music that was being played for the high classes and in the royal court.”

Yara says: “The Wasalla (sweet) repertoire can have parts that are popular and parts that are high art, so it could be found in the cafés or the palaces.”

In the 1950s, the music was overtaken. Yara says: “In the mid 20th century the interest in the new sound was terrific it was associated with independence and had a very strong identity. So, in the mid-20th century people were listening to the music of their time.”

When it came to recording some of the rediscovered music for their debut album, the band used wax cylinders. It is thought to be the first time they had been used for that repertoire since 1903.

They had to play and sing as loudly as possible down the horns of the wax cylinder recording machines, and were forced to tailor songs eight or more minutes long to the two minutes and 15 seconds allowed by the wax cylinders.

It turns out the band’s line up which includes Greek, English and Irish musicians is highly appropriate too.

“Actually it’s not that much different to an ensemble more than 100 years ago,” says Tarik. “Cairo and Alexandria were very cosmopolitan. One of the most famous violinists was Ibrahim Shaloun from an Italian Jewish background.”

Another parallel is Tarik’s background in Koranic recitation. “Until the 20th century, singers would have first sung religious music – hence half of them were called sheikh,” says Yara. “Reciting the Koran taught the basics of Arabic music and you could then move into secular forms.”

Returning the music to Egypt, they played two concerts in Cairo in March, and another at the Opera House in Kuwait City.

“It was an extraordinary experience,” says Yara, “Not only because Egypt is the focus of our work and we had not presented this music to the Egyptian public until then, but also it was quite moving to take the project ‘home’. Luckily, we were received very warmly. Our first night was sold out to an enthusiastic and interactive audience. They responded exactly as we hoped, praising the solos, clapping and singing during the call and response sections and laughter during the more humorous songs. It was a joy.”

Tomorrow they take it to the intimate Barn at St John’s College Oxford for a hometown performance. What can people expect? “They might think deserts and soundtracks but that will very quickly go out of the window,” he says. “While it can be presented seriously, we stay away from that.

Yara smiles: “ It is full of humour, with fast tempo pieces and some more melancholy ones. There are beautiful melodies, interesting rhythms, a lot of variety and sometimes it gets raucous with notes flying at you.”

  • Oxford Maqam are at The Barn, St John’s College, tomorrow (Friday, June 9) and The Mayor of London’s Aid Celebration, Trafalgar Square, on July 2