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Tiffany Hanssen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here.

On today's show, we'll talk about the exhibit, Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party. We'll talk about why young adults are living at home longer and how to navigate it, and we'll speak with the surviving members of the band The Arcs. That's the plan for today, so let's get started with trumpeter Amir ElSaffar.

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This is Transformations from Amir ElSaffar's 2021 album Rivers of Sound: The Other Shore. ElSaffar is a classically trained Iraqi-American trumpeter, as well as a vocalist, composer, and santur player, and in honor of the Iraqis who suffered as a result of the US invasion of Iraq, which began 20 years ago. Today, ElSaffar is performing a series of concerts, blending jazz and traditional Iraqi Maqam musical forms.

ElSaffar will be performing with his ensembles called Two Rivers and Safaafir, and will also feature vocals from legendary Iraqi vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi. ElSaffar will also be performing at Drom on April 2, as well as Rutgers-Newark on April 10, and Symphony Space on April 14. He's with me now, from Baghdad to preview the shows, and to talk about his music. Hi, Amir.

Amir ElSaffar: Hello, how are you?

Tiffany Hanssen: Glad you're here.

Amir ElSaffar: Me, too.

Tiffany Hanssen: Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. The concerts you have scheduled are at a fairly somber moment. This, as I mentioned, is the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. What was it about this moment that made you feel it was the right time to perform these shows?

Amir ElSaffar: Well, it's several things combining at this time. As you mentioned, today is the 20-year anniversary of the beginning of the US-led invasion occupation of Iraq. For me, it was an important moment in my own life. I actually went to Iraq in 2002 when I was 24 years old, and I arrived on March 20th of 2002, to begin studying Iraqi Maqam. It was an epiphany in my life in many ways to first start learning the language and reconnecting with my father's homeland.

I grew up in the United States mostly speaking English and playing Western classical music, as well as jazz, but throughout 2002, I became deeply connected with my family and with musicians and with people and became connected with the land. That was a moment that I wanted to hold on to forever, but it was also in the context of post 9/11, the war on terror. It's pretty clear that pretty soon there was going to be a US invasion, and we were watching the news, whatever news we could get because censorship was pretty extreme in those days. It was the last days of Saddam Hussein's reign.

In early January of 2003, when my relatives told me, "Look, it's not safe for you to be here, and it's really not safe for us to host you anymore because people are trying to talk. They think you might be a spy." There were all kinds of reasons that it wasn't wise for me to stay. I left and then March 20th of 2003 was when the bombs started dropping, and then of course, the ground war, and we kind of know what happened after that. I feel like a lot of Americans have forgotten about it.

I'm sure everyone has a different relationship to it. Obviously, they are veterans for homelessness, maybe still the memories are very prominent in their lives, but for Iraqis, their lives were completely upended, and completely-- things were in a total state of disarray, and they're still living with the reality of the war 20 years later. I'm doing this contest in a way to raise consciousness and raise awareness around the aftermath and what the effects and consequences have been of this invasion-occupation.

Tiffany Hanssen: Do you view it as a moment to grieve or is it a moment to celebrate? Then, how do these concerts fit into that?

Amir ElSaffar: It's a combination. I think grieving is in many ways first and foremost because so much has been lost. I'm in Baghdad right now. I'm seeing how difficult it is for people to cobble a life together when the governments are still not really functioning, when there's still a lot of destruction, and services and infrastructures just don't really exist, so people have to manage. Every family I know has lost at least one if not more, if not a dozen young men and women or parents or grandparents, as a direct or indirect consequence of the war.

I think that mourning and grieving is necessary at this moment, but at the same time, I also want to honor the lives of those that have been lost and honor Iraqis for what they've been through, and the incredible resilience that they've had in order to survive and continue to live their lives with dignity and pride, which is what I'm seeing every day since I've been in Baghdad. Then yes, a celebration, in this case, music as being the main focus, and the Iraqi Maqam is a thousands-year-old tradition that encompasses so much of the glory and the richness and beauty of Iraqi society and culture. I want to be able to present that and share that with audiences widely.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, I want to talk to you about that musical form in a minute, but first, I want to talk about your musical journey and your journey back to Iraq. You are a classically trained trumpeter. You studied at DePaul, is that right?

Amir ElSaffar: Yes.

Tiffany Hanssen: You play jazz, but you mentioned you find yourself drawn back to Iraq, which is your father's native country. How did that come about? What drove you to go back there? I guess, was it part of your musical journey? Or was it more of a personal journey?

Amir ElSaffar: I think ultimately, it's hard to separate musical from personal in my life, but I think that the music was my guide or is what led me, but throughout the '90s, I went to DePaul University from '95 to '99. I had a very good classical training with members of the Chicago Symphony. I played in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and worked with Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez, and Mstislav Rostropovich. I had really wonderful opportunities. I could have built a life as a classical trumpet player, but I never felt quite satisfied by the confines that orchestral musicians have to face musically and otherwise.

At the same time, I was playing jazz and I was working in Chicago as a jazz trumpeter, with big bands and small jazz combos, and playing with blues bands and rhythm and blues and wedding bands and Greek weddings and bar mitzvahs. I was doing it all, salsa. It was wonderful and very rich by then.

Tiffany Hanssen: It sounds fun.

Amir ElSaffar: What's that?

Tiffany Hanssen: It sounds fun.

Amir ElSaffar: It was fun. Then I moved to New York and wanted to find my place in the New York jazz scene, and I quickly discovered as anybody who's ever visited or spent time listening to jazz in New York. There's so many different scenes happening, and even more so at that time 20 years ago, I moved in 2000. Things were very fragmented, and I was to find my place and figure out what my contribution could be and what my scene was. That's when I started with the question and dig deep into my own background, ancestral and personal background.

My sister in the meantime had already been playing Arabic music, Iraqi and Egyptian, as well as Turkish and other forms in the Middle East. She was also an inspiration for me. In 2001, I found a trumpet that had a special slide on it that allowed me to play quarter tones because Maqam music contains all these microtones that are in between the western tones.

Tiffany Hanssen: Where did you find that trumpet?

Amir ElSaffar: I don't know actually. It was some website that had this instrument called the puje. There were a few of them. I'm not exactly sure why they added this slide, but it was very convenient for me, and that was the key for me to be able to start taking lessons. I went to the Arabic Music Retreat at Mount Holyoke College. Simon Shaheen still directs to this day.

That was 2001, and I joined an Arabic band in September of 2001. My first gig was September 10, 2001, and then the next morning, I woke up and saw what was happening just a few miles away at the Twin Towers and the 9/11 attacks. My life had this parallel trajectory between my own musical inspiration and excitement and that path, and then what was happening in the world. The geopolitical stage was this alternative and much darker and more sinister narrative.

Tiffany Hanssen: Was part of the reason for your trip to study music there, in addition to finding your roots as it were?

Amir ElSaffar: It was ultimately about the music because there weren't a lot of resources outside of Iraq that dealt with Iraq. I kept hearing about something called Iraqi Maqam. The word Maqam is a modal system that's used throughout the whole Arab world. It's present in Turkey and Iran, Central Asia.

Tiffany Hanssen: How would you describe the sound of it for somebody who doesn't know?

Amir ElSaffar: Well, the thing that people always say is, "Oh, it sounds like the call to prayer." I think if anyone's ever heard of muezzin or call to prayer if they've ever been in an Arabic country or maybe a lot of films use it as well. It's become omnipresent in the lore of popular culture. I think that's the closest thing. These long melodies that have a lot of twists and turns, and very, very long phrases almost as much melody as you could get in one breath.

Tiffany Hanssen: Is it improvisational?

Amir ElSaffar: It is, but it's only with a lot of rigorous study to understand because the little what sound like trills and ornaments, they're not random. They're very, very specific. For me, and other people I know have studied, especially Iraqi Maqam, which is a more strict and specific form, you have to really memorize and exactly learn how somebody else phrased it in order to get that material.

Tiffany Hanssen: I guess I was trying to draw a line that maybe isn't there between the improvisational nature of jazz and perhaps the improvisational nature of Iraqi Maqam. I'm hearing you say that maybe it's a dotted line. [chuckles]

Amir ElSaffar: Yes, I think it's a dotted line because in the same way that jazz musicians, depending on which style and which era, but there's often a form whether it's a 32-bar song form or blues, but of course, then there's free jazz, which doesn't have a form but then within the process, there are forms that emerge. In a lot of ways, Iraqi Maqam, I refer to it as semi-improvised because there are fixed forms that are more melodic in nature, and that you're expected to do certain phrases in a particular sequence, and there's room to change them around.

Then within that form, if you just imitate what your predecessors or masters of the past did, it's imitation. You're supposed to do something new, original and unique, even though it's a tradition. We like to think of tradition as being repeated generation after generation without change as if something could be the same 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago. It's really doesn't work that way. It's every generation, every individual within a society of these performers and singers and musicians have their own unique contribution that then furthers the music.

Tiffany Hanssen: Right. What you're saying there applies to jazz as well, that carrying on the tradition of jazz doesn't necessarily mean doing it the same way that Miles Davis did it.

Amir ElSaffar: Right. Exactly.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, you talk about that most people hear the music, this Iraqi Maqam associated with like a cultural prayer or something that would sound familiar to them, but what is the actual cultural history of the music?

Amir ElSaffar: It's as rich and diverse as Iraqi cultural history. There's elements of it that go back to ancient Mesopotamia. Of course, there are essentialists that would like to say, "Oh, this is Babylonian music of Sumerian." It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that. We do have records of the modes that were practiced at least as far back as 1750 BC. There're these seven-note modes that seem to resemble something similar to how Maqams are practiced today.

The instruments, like the instrument I played, the santur that you mentioned earlier, is like a hammered dulcimer instrument that was invented in ancient Babylon and hasn't changed much from then until now. Some of the texts from what we can gather about musical practices of antiquity have something that hints toward a similar type of musical practice as what we do today.

What I would say is more significant is in Baghdad in the Abbasid era, so this is the 8th to the 13th century when Baghdad was this incredible capital. It was the capital Islamic world and one of the most glorious cities in the entire world at that time, and attracted musicians and artists and poets and scholars, astronomers, scientists of all backgrounds from the Islamic world.

There was a very, very strong musical tradition and a few names whose compositions have lasted till this day. That was probably when a lot of this music was really formalized and codified, but we're still talking about over 1,000 years ago. Baghdad was sacked in 1258 by the Mongols, by the grandson of Genghis Khan. His name is Hulagu. That led to 700 years of massacres and horrible cataclysmic events and occupations between Mongols and Ottomans and Persians and various others.

Tiffany Hanssen: Deep, deep historical root.

Amir ElSaffar: Yes. I'm giving you a lot, but it's all of that and more.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, I want to hear something before we get too far from talking about this, because I think people are thinking like, "Well, just play something." I want to play this called Two Rivers. This is a blend of jazz and Iraqi Maqam, but we could talk about it after we play a little bit here.

[music - Two Rivers]

I mentioned, it's a blend really of jazz and this Iraqi Maqam. They actually fit together quite nicely to my ear. Do you find that when you're putting this together that they work really well together from your perspective?

Amir ElSaffar: When I initially started studying Iraqi Maqam that was my goal to connect it with jazz music. I was friends with Rudresh Mahanthappa and Vijay Iyer who were a few years ahead of me in terms of exploring kinetic music and connecting with jazz. I thought I would do something similar in the sense of learning some of the basic structures. What I ended up doing was I spent five years practicing nothing but Maqam.

Except when Cecil Taylor would call me to come play with his band at the Iridium, and then I would do a one week stint with him, and I jumped back into the Maqam. I was living in different universes, but really really focused on Maqam. When I got my first commission to write a piece combining jazz with Maqam, I would've thought this as impossible, because I had gotten so deep into it at that point.

It was a torturous period of months where I was just feeling like, "No, no, the Maqam is perfect. It's in its pure form." It took thousands of years to come to this. It's almost violent to try to connect it with western instruments and jazz forms. Why mess with something when it's already so perfect. Over time, I started to meditate and go deeper and deeper into the DNA of what makes a Maqam melody, the subtle shifts in intonation, the way the melodies blend and feed into one another.

Then I started to find parallels in jazz and certain harmonies, like one chord from Thelonious Monk that could accompany a Maqam melody, or a Duke Ellington, sort of some parallel. Then a little by little, it's almost like the pieces started to gravitate toward themselves, and then I just had to organize them into compositions. That was the beginning in 2006. Now, after 17 years of doing it, they just flow together, and it was obvious from the beginning that they should have been connected.

Tiffany Hanssen: It is a bit of a dotted line.

Amir ElSaffar: Everything is a dotted line.

Tiffany Hanssen: Everything is a dotted line. I want to ask you about these two ensembles that you are performing with Two Rivers and Safaafir. Explain the difference between the two, and how perhaps we might hear vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi in one or both of those, and are you playing the santur in one or both of those. Just a little background on both of those ensembles you're performing with?

Amir ElSaffar: Sure. Well, I'll start with Two Rivers since we just listened to it a little bit, and that's what I was just talking about. Two Rivers was founded really for the purpose of as the name suggests, blending these two streams of musical history and musical aesthetics. In terms of instrumentation, Two Rivers really combines the jazz instruments and Arabic instruments almost equally. I play trumpet and santur in Two Rivers, and I also sing. There's also a saxophonist and upright bass player and a drummer. There's also an oud, which is a Arabic lute, and buzuq which is another kind of lute. It's a steel string, a twangy instrument. On equal footing in terms of instrumentation, and the melodies and the harmony and the rhythms are coming really from both jazz and Maqam traditions.

Tiffany Hanssen: Safaafir, I want to get to a clip of that.

Amir ElSaffar: Sure, yes. Safaafir is really kind of Maqam, if we can use the word, pure sense in terms of the instrumentation, santur, joza is a stringed instrument, like a violin and percussion. That would be the traditional context for most singing, but I brought in Hamid Al-Saadi with both ensembles. Hamid is really the only person alive right now who has mastered the entire Maqam tradition as a vocalist, and sings it with incredible authenticity and depth and richness. You can feel the earth shaking beneath your feet when he sings. He's just incredible.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, I want to get to a clip here before we let you go. I'm sure I'm not saying this right, Safaafir, but you have the-- it's a little different pronunciation. Say it for me again.

Amir ElSaffar: Safaafir.

Tiffany Hanssen: Safaafir, okay. This is performing at Lincoln Center. Let's just hear a little bit.

Amir ElSaffar: Sure.

[music]

Tiffany Hanssen: Tell us a little bit about that clip.

Amir ElSaffar: Unfortunately, I couldn't hear it over the connection.

Tiffany Hanssen: Oh, no. Well, it was lovely. [laughs] I'm not sure if you were playing the santur on that or not.

Amir ElSaffar: Santur, yes.

Tiffany Hanssen: I saw a clip of you on YouTube playing, and there are a little mallets. Is that right?

Amir ElSaffar: Yes, exactly. Two very, very thin, delicate, wooden mallets that strike steel strings and the steel strings are in fours. There's four strings tuned to the same note times 24, so there's 24 different sets of notes on the santur.

Tiffany Hanssen: As folks are thinking about heading out to these concerts and reflecting today on this 20th anniversary of the invasion, what do you hope folks will think about today, and then also maybe if they're headed out the door to your concert?

Amir ElSaffar: Well, one thing I really would love to impart is just the beauty and the humanity and the strength and resilience and dignity and sweetness of Iraqi people. I spent 20 years away, and I came back, and not only my family who welcomed me with such a warm embrace, but every taxi driver, every shop owner, there's so much care, and it really feels like a family wherever you go. It's just a really beautiful society, and my hope and dream is that this society will be able to thrive and be able to have a beautiful life with all the modern amenities that people enjoy in Europe and the United States, but also be able to continue along the lines of their culture, and this beauty of the human soul and interaction here.

I think that the music is really the place where within the Iraqi Maqam where you can feel how the richness of the words in the poetry, and we'll do our best to translate those words for audiences who come to our shows, but also the delicateness and the sweetness of the melody and the beautiful infectious feelings that the rhythms bring. I hope that the music and the experience of listening to this music can be a small window and a glimpse into a world that has otherwise been represented through war and turmoil and dictatorships, but in fact, underneath all of the political science and historical side is really just a beautiful society that I really have high hopes and dreams for.

Tiffany Hanssen: Amir, thank you so much for your time and your reflections today, and for sharing your music with us. We appreciate it.

Amir ElSaffar: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Tiffany Hanssen: Amir ElSaffar is a trumpeter, as well as a vocalist, composer, and santur player. He's performing a series of concerts blending jazz and traditional Iraqi Maqam musical forms at Drom NYC on April 2nd, as well as at Rutgers-Newark on April 10th and Symphony Space on April 14th.

[music]

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