Transcript: Music of West Asia

[Howard Spring:] Thanks, Rob, for doing this, and welcome. Why don’t we start by you just introducing yourself a little bit.

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. Well, thanks for asking me to do this, Howard. It’s my pleasure. I’m Rob Simms, and I’m a music professor at York University. I’ve been playing music from West Asia and North Africa for many years, I guess since the 1980s when I first heard it, coming over as — I began as a guitarist and got interested in flamenco guitar as happens to exploring — people who are guitarists and exploring the guitar world. And I spent a lot of time playing flamenco. I worked with a dancer and got deeper and deeper into that. And then I started listening to related cultures and slipped into the oud, which I’ll be playing later. And yeah, opened up a whole universe of music and culture and ideas and wonderful experiences. So I’m a instrumentalist. This music is vocally based, but I’m not a great singer. So I kept myself behind the oud and the ney, which is a reed flute that I’ll also be playing today. And, yeah, it’s been a very enriching thing.

[Howard Spring:] Great, thanks. So you mentioned the oud. Can we take a look at that instrument?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. So the oud looks like a lute. Now, it’s got a bit of a cutaway, so it’s not a standard thing. Usually this is symmetrical and looks like a European lute, right, except the neck is narrower and there’s no frets on it. And, indeed, the lute comes from the word a-oud. And the — that was a prestigious instrument before the keyboard took over for music theory and just, you know, training your aristocracy, training your daughter to be refined, you make sure she played the lute, right? And that prestige came along with the instrument over from the southern Mediterranean and eastern Mediterranean area into Europe. So there’s a direct cultural link. And one interesting thing when you start looking at these cultures is we’re supposed to be — you know, we live in a world where everyone’s different and everyone’s digging into their borders, their political and cultural borders, but there’s a huge heritage between West Asia and Europe. And this is a perfect example, the oud. So we — you know, you play single lines. We’re not playing chords with it. But it’s a shared heritage, the instrument.

[Howard Spring:] Can we hear what it sounds like?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. So you play with a plectrum. It’s kind of long, and you hold it like this like a knife that you’re cutting.

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[Howard Spring:] So how many strings has it got, and how are they organized?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. It’s six double courses. So it’s like a 12-string guitar. They’re tuned not in octaves but in unisons, and it’s in fourths. So, normally, this is going to be a C, but this an Iraqi oud and it’s pitched up. So it’s like a transposing instrument. So it’s pitched up a fourth to F with the outside strings. But I’m a little bit flat of that, so I’m sitting around an E. But when I talk about the technical things, I’m going to just talk about what the untransposed pitch is, like what the theoretical pitch is. Okay. So we’ve got fourths going down just like a guitar. I’m going from top down. Then you’ve got the second, which is kind of strange for guitars and then the fifth. And this can be — we’ll see later, this can be tuned up to a fourth as well. And, in fact, with — this string here can be lowered by a — so you’ve got a second, and this can be lowered by a second. So you can actually get a major third here, in which case it’s like the guitar just in reverse. We’ve got fourths and a major third And then another fourth, which is kind of interesting. But the second seems pretty awkward at first when you’re learning it, but then it comes in really handy as a drone string. And that’s an important thing in music is getting the resonance of the instrument and playing the notes off of some reference pitch.

[Howard Spring:] And what are you using in your right hand there?

[Rob Simms:] It’s called a risha and plectrum. And it’s — they used to use eagle feathers. And some people do just to be traditional. But now it’s a soft kind of plastic. Some people like a hard plastic. You know, different players have different tastes with pick flexibility. But you can — with this technique, you can move your thumb around to vary how much pick you’re using. And you can use quite a bit or a little bit. And it’s a very subtle thing that you start doing without even thinking about it. But there’s lots of –

[Howard Spring:] So that changes — that changes the sound, and you do that on the go?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah, yeah. Depending on the context of what you’re doing. And, again, at first, this feels really strange having a big long pick like this, but it starts feel really good after a while and works quite well with the technique.

[Howard Spring:] Okay. So as your left hand is concerned, there’s no frets, right, on this instrument.

[Rob Simms:] Correct.

[Howard Spring:] So how do you know what notes you’re playing or –

[Rob Simms:] Well, it’s like any stringed instrument, usually your ears. And this is microtonal music, so that becomes challenging because we spend a good deal of our time learning how to play in tune. And now you’ve got to play in between the cracks. So — and that’s where open strings help as well, to keep you in tune. You’ve got a reference pitch to play off of and help you tune. And, of course, nice generous vibrato always helps with that to zero in on that pitch, you know?

[Howard Spring:] So when you say this music is microtonal, what do you mean? And could you demonstrate that?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. Well, I was playing here in maqam rast. Maqam, we can talk about that in more detail. It’s like raga. It means the melodic mode. It has all kinds of other associations. Right there. So this is like a major scale with a

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not

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how you want to hear that note [inaudible]. there’s another one. It’s a quarter tone flat, approximately quarter tone flat third, short major third.

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And, you know, the first one, you know, you’re not used to. Whoa, it’s out of tune. But it has a very nice resonance and a very nice tension in it. And you — after you play it for a while, you start to tune into that. And you actually get better gradations of pitch because, you know, we’re programmed to 12 pitches. Well, here, there’s just way more space in between those. And you — your ears improve after a while. But at first you do little tricks to get that — to get that note. It’s — on this string, it’s like here’s a minor third, fairly decent minor third. And you go halfway GMF. So you’re using — visually, when I started playing, I would look halfway down, you know

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but it’s music, so it’s ears, right? But to get going, you do whatever you can. And those visual things help.

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so that’s the atmosphere of Rast.

[Howard Spring:] So when you learnt to play this, you mentioned the word maqam. And I guess those microtones are part of the maqam.

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. Not all of them. Well, many of them are — have microtonal pitches in them. Not all of them. Some of them don’t. But this music modulates a lot too. So if you start in one that doesn’t have microtones, chances are as things unfold you’re going to move to one that does. So it’s pretty inevitable you’ll come across them.

[Howard Spring:] So what is the maqam?

[Rob Simms:] Maqam is a musical mode, if we want to talk music theory. But it has other meanings to it. And this is really important because we can get technical with it, but it’s really about a feeling and this creating an atmosphere like raga. Raga means that which colours the mind, right? Maqam means station or position so something to do with it with a position. And in Sufi practice, Sufism being the inner teachings of Islam — so you’ve got the outer teachings, following the word, the letter. But this is following the spirit of the teachings. And so it’s more interpreting and gets into esoteric kinds of ideas. Maqam means your station of your level of consciousness as you’re ascending up the Sufi path to higher levels of consciousness. So maqam means your sort of station of wisdom, how realized you are on the spiritual path. And so that’s a nice kind of — and we’ll see the connection between conscience and music, which is in every culture, but it’s very explicit here. And we can go into that now. Or we can leave that for later in the conversation as you like.

[Ryan Bruce:] Now, it’s good.

[Howard Spring:] Now is good. Sure.

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. Okay. So we’re going to be talking a lot about scales and notes and technical things. But the main thing — and when I finished playing, I said, you know, that was the atmosphere of Rast. You have to create the atmosphere. And so that goes beyond — and to do that, you need the rest to be right. So you need to be in tune. You need to know your pitches. You need to know a lot of the nuts and bolts. But that’s secondary. If you use all that but you don’t create the spirit of it, you failed in — really, as a musician. And the primary thing in this culture is — and when I say this culture, I mean, many cultures, you know. This — we’re going from — we’re going from North Africa, even around the corner to Mauritania I think you could include as a maqam culture clear across to Central Asia. And so there’s a lot of differences in there. And I think you had a unit in your series on Persian classical music, and that’s in there. And that’s going to be different from what I’m talking about here but not so different. The sounds are going to be similar. And a lot of the ideas are going to be the same. And these cultures have been sharing stuff, bouncing back and forth right from the beginning. But the idea is to create what they call tarab, which means rapture or enchantment. You want to create magic. And we all know about that as musicians. That’s our job, right? We want to create a magical musical moment. It’s very explicit in this culture. And the tarab, t-a-r-a-b, which means this rapture, is related to trance states and states of consciousness. So we know — we know vibrations. You know, we have different brain wavelengths, patterns. And when we’re sleeping and when we’re awake, it’s different vibrational patterns. Well, the same of this, and it creates different emotional and emotional states. And you’ve got to entrance your audience. There’s one guy, Central Asian master Turbin Elimuta [phonetic] who said first you — first you tune yourself, then you tune your instrument, then you tune the audience. And so you need that resonance, that focus; and you want to communicate that. And then the audience will communicate back to you through various ways, depending on the culture. Some of that can be very ecstatic where it’s, you know, flamenco, we get ole and assa, these people are verbally encouraging, just like after, you know, rock and roll or a good jazz solo, you know. And that is a feedback thing between the performer through the maqam that creates the atmosphere, that stimulates the people in the audience. Then the audience, that will flip back to the performer and you create this feedback of energy, musical energy that is supposed to create this rapture. So I think, again, all music is about that. But this is very explicit in this culture. And that’s the main — that’s your main job. So you’ve got to do your homework and learn all this technical stuff. But you also have to be aware of what the goal is, and that is tarab. And the — in the Persian world they use of word hala, which is an Arabic word that means state or condition. So we’re talking about states of consciousness being altered through the music.

[Howard Spring:] Now, are specific maqams associated with certain states of consciousness?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah, particularly in the Turkish tradition. So — and I’ll play through some of these things. I need to retune a little bit. But there’s some general consensus. Like I was playing Rast there.

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And Rast, the word means rectitude, correctness, righteousness. And so it’s really upright and on the straight path. Others are — and, again, the Turkish tradition, they — they’re very — they’re much more explicit, the Turkish Sufi tradition. I keep bringing up Sufi because it was the Sufis who really transmitted this music. You know, we got the Taliban swinging back into Afghanistan and abandoned music. This is an old thing. They didn’t make this up. This goes back to the Middle Ages. And it was because authorities realized that music was powerful, that you can manipulate people with music. There’s all kinds of stories back in Middle Ages. The musician would come in, and the saints would be called mutrid [phonetic]. That means one who does tara. And these guys were like shamans, you know. Their stories, they came in, and they played in this maqam and everyone laughed. You played in this one, everyone cried. You played this one, everyone fell asleep. You played in this one, everyone woke up. And so that’s, you know, that’s dangerous because people are losing control. And then the musicians are too influential. So that’s one reason why, depending on who was running the show, who was in power, it could be banned. But, yeah. Different traditions will have different associations. Some of them are fairly universal, like Rast is pretty universal. Another one, this is Saba. I should really bring this up to a D on the base.

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That’s a universally considered deep and sad.

[Ryan Bruce:] I noticed that you were bending or — sorry, like you had some bent notes. You were sliding on the neck of the lute? And is that something particular to Saba, or is that something you do in all the maqam?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. Well, it works really well in Saba, but it’s just part of the technique. And so, you know, like Indian music, it’s about going between the notes. And so it’s one problem when people start talking about maqam. They’re just worried about notes, like these dots on the page. And those are dead things, but and that’s why I like to play the ney because one note is so powerful, right, what you bring into it. Then the relationship between those notes, I think we lose a lot of that when we get obsessed with the technical aspects of it. You know, I have musicians when I first went to Egypt back in 1989, I was looking for traditional musicians. I went to the conservatory, and there’s all these young music students in with violin cases, and they’re playing Vivaldi and stuff. And I said, Oh, I’m interested in the traditional Arab music. And, ah, it’s just a feeling. And I thought, you know, they were brushing me off. But you know what? They were telling me that, as it turned out later on, I realized, well, yeah. It is all about feeling. And as an outsider, how do you get that feeling? And we will feel things in different ways, and there’ll be a lot of misunderstandings. But because it’s music and it’s not language, there’s that room for communication, right, where if someone’s speaking to you in Arabic and you don’t speak Arabic, you’re going to zone out in like five seconds. But if they’re playing Saba, you can sit and listen for 10 minutes. And you can, you know, there’s communication going on there. And you might not feel it sad or whatever they feel it is. But on the other hand, you might. And I did. I felt — you know, I felt that pretty powerfully, particularly the Saba. But in the Turkish Sufi tradition — and, again, it was the Sufis that kept this music going when it was repressed. They would go underground, and the Sufis were using music as a spiritual tool because, again, maqam means state of consciousness. It’s the state of realization. That’s what — that’s a philosophical meaning. And they have some very precise meanings for the maqam. So when I’m on the ney, I’ll show you that. But Hijaz is for separation. So these are not just emotional states, but it’s also like a kind of — it’s not just emotion, but it’s a dynamic. It’s a dynamic. So one is separation. Another one is Ushaq for love or, union, Sega. And you keep those things in mind when you’re playing, and you’re trying to evoke that. So, first, it’s just abstract sounds and everything. But then you realize, no, they’re steering somewhere with this. And that’s — you know, that’s what a good player can do is steer you to these places.

[Howard Spring:] You’ve used a few different words to pointing to different modes. How many of them are there?

[Rob Simms:] You know, theoretic — there’s theory and practice, right? So an index for this is how many compositions exist in different modes. So there’s some esoteric modes. And some people are like, that’s their specialty. They want to be, you know, it’s like stamp collectors or whatever. They want to — they want to collect all these esoteric modes. But I think the main modes, you can boil it down to in the Arab and the Turkish world, probably more in Turkey, you know, if you get eight or nine under your belt, you’re doing pretty good. And then they fan out into families. So there’s variations on each one. So if you get that down, you can relate to the other ones because they’re refinements of those basic ones. In Turkey, there’s probably more differentiation. And then, you know, you go to Iran, it’s a completely different system. Although a lot of the sounds the same, they call them — it’s organized differently. And they have different names for things, and it can get very confusing as you start going between them. But, historically, there’s a heritage. And I think you can hear it. If you play to people who’ve never heard this music, Turkish, Persian, and Arab music, they’re going to say it all sounds the same. And they’re right. Then you study it for a while, you go, no. You can hear the differences. And then if you study even more, you go back to going, yeah, it’s all the same. And, you know, that gets very political. And people get very nationalistic with that. And that’s one good thing about being a cultural outsider is I’m not — I don’t have any nationalist program with it. But if you look through the history, it’s really hard to tell who got what from whom. And if you talk to different musicians from different traditions, they’ll say, oh, yeah. They got it from us. And some of the more, you know, open ones will recognize where there are — where there is evidence that there was connections. But it’s impossible to separate where Persian music ends and Turkish and Arab music begins. It’s just too complicated. The evidence that we have — and at certain periods, like in the 13th century, it was the same art music that was practised in courts from Spain all the way clear through to Central Asia. And I think what we have — this is an oversimplification, but we have, you know, depending on how things change politically, we’ve got now dialects of that language, of that shared language. And that’s a long time ago. It’s almost 1000 years ago.

[Howard Spring:] How did you learn to play all this?

[Rob Simms:] Well, you know, I came by pretty honestly, as I mentioned, I came into — through guitar so typical Canadian guy playing guitar. Go into flamenco, and all these signals are in flamenco with the singing in particular and in the modality. What’s interesting in flamenco is that it’s got that harmonic, underpinning, too, so it’s right in the middle of everything. And then I started listening to this stuff, and I just fell in love with it. I mean, music’s a love affair, right? We do it in spite of ourselves. Everyone says, no, no, don’t do it. Don’t go there. And we spend our lives doing it. And through recordings and then meeting people and then travelling to places, working at it, just like you work at anything else.

[Howard Spring:] So you said you went to Egypt. Did you study with musicians there?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. Yeah. And those trips really — you know, I had kids and I had to — you know, there were real expeditions of going and getting resources and learning as much as I could in a short period of time and coming back and working with the resources, books, recordings, and whatever lessons I took at the time. And, you know, travelled to — then you start seeing, okay. This is how they play the oud in Egypt. Then you go to Morocco, and they play it a different way. Then you go to Syria, and they’ve got something else going on. You see the common denominators, and you see what’s different. It’s all very rich. It’s extremely rich. Then you see individuals within the same tradition. You’ve got different master oud players. It’s like jazz, you know, they got their own style. They got their own language. They’ve got their own way. Maqam is a relationship. So we can put dots on the page, and I can talk about all this technical stuff, but it’s really my understanding of it, and it’s my relationship to the maqam. Same with these masters. It’s their relationship to the music. And some of them are noted for certain modes because they evoke them better because that resonates with them. So, you know, Munir Bashir was great at Nahawand. And, you know, it’s a different — he was an oud player from Iraq. Or so and so was a master at Saba. And why? Because the guy spent a lot of time playing Saba. So another way to look at these modes is they’re like personalities. And the more time you spend with them, you spend time with the personalities you like, right? You hang around with people who you enjoy. And so this mode, you’re really, you know, it’s really giving, you know? You’re having great conversations playing this mode. And it’s the same with Indian music. You know, guys, there’s a really accomplished musician. You may know, 20, 25 ragas, but the ones that he’s really good at, he or she, might be five or six, that that’s their specialty because that resonates with their inner, you know, with their personality.

[Howard Spring:] So when you went to the Middle East, did you study with any particular players, or you were just there to listen or –

[Rob Simms:] No. I was seeking. It’s always about learning to play, you know. And I didn’t have context. This is pre-internet. You know, you just jump off the plane and check around and look for it. In a way, you know, I kind of miss the old days. I get nostalgic and romantic about that. The internet’s great. And you can do a lot of virtual travels. You can learn a lot. You can learn to play — you know, people learn to play tunes now on — play Stairway to Heaven. You don’t have to go to the music store anymore. You can, you know, where everyone’s checking out the guitars and you learn a new chord. No. It’s right on YouTube. Someone will show you know, step by step what has to happen. So that’s great. But there’s a social element here that is important. And being in the context and hanging out with musicians, going to their gigs, listening to them play, listening them playing a wedding, listening to them hang out, drink, tea, and play, all of that’s really important. Some of the heaviest, definitely the heaviest experience — musical experiences I’ve had are in people’s living rooms, and that’s where this music belongs. It was music from courts. And it’s become commodified and turned into music business and big huge concerts and recording contracts and all the rest of it, but it’s very intimate music. And even the pros who do that will acknowledge — and they sing and they play differently when they’re in these social contexts. And people talk and drink and eat a bit. Then they’ll play a bit. Then they’ll stop and then they’ll eat and drink and talk and do a little bit more. It’s — the music is along with all these other things. And so that’s — you can’t pick that up on the internet, you know?

[Ryan Bruce:] Do you get the sense that others in — so where you’ve travelled, but there’s also a kind of a wide range of learning, or was your way of learning kind of outside the traditional norm?

[Rob Simms:] No. I mean, I wanted to get — you know, I wanted to get as correct as I could. And so I was looking for people who knew. And I must say I did have a few leads. George Sawa put me onto some very good people in Syria before it was ruined. I was lucky I went there in the late ’90s. Aleppo is — was the main centre for classical Arab music. And it’s — there’s great musicians there. But more than that, there was great listeners. So that’s another thing we don’t really talk about too much anymore is that any golden era of music is not just about good musicians. It’s about good listeners. And so you have to be on top of your game to perform in there. There’s a high bar, a discerning bar where — I think that you could say the same about the jazz form, too, right? There’s different kinds of listeners. And with a discerning audience, you’re going to play differently, right? Yeah. But, no, I was looking for, you know, people who were knowledgeable. And then, you know, one guy — my oud playing’s really affected by some guy from Marrakesh, some young guy who had a crappy oud, old beat-up oud. And I can’t remember how I got to meet him, but I’d just say, who plays oud? Oh, this guy, he’ll play. Go to this place. And he was playing on the on the – crouched on the floor with, instead of a risha, he had — he had like a match booklet, you know, the card of match. And he was playing. I recorded this guy’s playing. I loved his playing. He wasn’t a virtuoso by any means, but he had a lot of soul. This music’s like blues in that sense. You’ve got to — as I was saying, you’ve got to evoke the atmosphere. You need the tarab, the rapture, all that stuff, the enchantment. It’s about what you’re putting into it. And this guy had a lot of heart in his playing. And so I listened to it. I met him two afternoons, and that was it. He was off. Never saw him again. And I got these recordings, and I just loved his playing. And so I stole a lot from that guy. I learnt a lot from him. He stole it from someone else. There’s no copyright here. There’s no stealing, right? It’s just tradition. It’s oral, oral tradition, oral composition. And you pick up stuff, and you pick up stuff that you like. When you like it, then you do it. And then, after you play it for while, you turn something else. Even if you try to do exactly what that guy did, you can’t. It’s always going to be a bit different. Thank goodness.

[Ryan Bruce:] You were talking about a few different things with the maqam. And one was about how it’s spread quite on a wide range across geography. And I’m wondering if historically maqams are associated with particular places or emerged from certain places? Or is there kind of a parent maqam that things are derived from? How is it that this tradition emerged and represents such a large area?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. It’s — everything in this part of the world is complicated. And that’s a complicated question because, the same with ragas, you have the [inaudible] or whatever, that thing has a history. And so it was a certain way, you know. It first appeared at such and such a time. And then through this stretch of 100 years it looked like this. Then it looked like that, you know. Music’s changing all the time. The music that we play today, the contemporary maqam music, was really consolidated in the late 19th, early 20th century. And, gee, whiz. That’s just corresponding to the high colonial period. So these countries, these cultures were hunkering down and repackaging their music to fit into their new, you know, identities as in the colonial and post-colonial context. That being said, in the Arab and Turkish tradition, which is very closely related because the Arab world was part of the Ottoman Empire in — up until World War I, right. And so those traditions are very close, and it’s really hard to see who got what from whom. And there’s all kinds of nationalistic politics come in when people talk about it. But a key, a source of that system, of that maqam system, is the maqam Rast, which is why I played that when I began. And you can actually understand a lot of the other — the diversity of the system through that maqam. And if you get that scale down, that’s a good reference point for understanding other modes and other maqams. And because this music modulates so, like, yeah. I keep coming up to Indian music because it’s a good foil character because there’s a lot that it has in common, but there’s a lot of differences. You stay in one raga for an hour and a half, you know. It’s raga immersion. You don’t modulate. They do have some forms that modulate, but those are really secondary use. You stay in that raga. This music is more like Western music where you’re travelling. You’re going from — you’re going on a journey. You’re changing keys, and then you’re coming back home. And so that returning, that whole process is more of a Western sensibility than what you have in the South Asian modal world. So to learn one maqam, you’ve got to start somewhere. So you’ve got to jump in and learn. And usually Rast is where people jump in. But to learn one, you’ve really got to learn them all because they’re all interrelated in very interesting ways. And part of the skill of quality of a performer is how they navigate that. So you’ve got to be like, in the old days before GPS is like what kind of a taxi driver are you? How well do you know the city? Do you know where all the back alleys are to take a shortcut to get over here and to get over there, and you can zip around, really navigate the system really well, whereas, like, knowing the TTC, you know, you know your bus routes. You know your hubs and all this stuff. So it’s a little bit like that. And you — so you’ve got to start somewhere, but you soon realize that you need to know a little bit about everything. To even play one properly, you need to understand others. So, again, it’s more relationships, right? It’s relationships on multiple levels. So, yeah. You know, you look at the history, you look at the music theory, you look at just about anything; and it’s complicated. There’s always Yeah, buts all over the place. So sorry I can’t make it much simpler than that without, you know, simplifying the truth out of it. [Ryan Bruce:] Yeah. When you were saying that Rast is kind of a starting place, is that also — is that just a theoretical starting place? Or is that also a starting place for other ideas like the spiritual, spirituality or other [inaudible] things?

[Rob Simms:] Well, another thing I’d like to mention that’s really important here is, well, Rast, maqam Rast is generally the maqam used — the one that’s used internationally for a call to prayer. So this is the public, you know, broadcast. And in the old days, you know, people would go out, and there’d be no microphones. And now you go to large cities, and there’s mosques close by. And it’s on loudspeakers, and so you can hear them overlapping. But — and there’s local maqams used. In Turkey, they have different maqams for different times of day. It’s really amazing. These guys are amazing vocalists. But the standard one that you’ll be likely to hear pretty much through the Muslim world is in maqam Rast. So that’s an interesting unifying factor. And then the other ones you can hear a lot is Bayati, and that — that’s one that’s used a lot in Quran recitation. And I already mentioned the Sufi connection with this Quran recitation and the call of prayer are not regarded as music. It’s Quran recitation. They don’t call it music. But, structurally, the maqams that are used and the techniques and the melodic progression and all that is from the art music. And there’s a lot of traffic between Quran — people began their careers Quran reciters and then went into classical singing. Umm Kulthum, primary example. She began reciting Quran, got into art music. And Kristina Nelson wrote a great book back in the ’70s called The Art of Reciting Quran. And she documented this in Egypt where there’s two-way traffic. They’re going back and forth all the time. They do a Quran recitation; then they’re doing art music, sometimes even simultaneously. Or they’ll start out as art music singers and they go into Quran recitation. It’s kind of like the blues guys going into, you know, preaching. Happened to a lot of guys, you know. They give up the blues later get into preaching because it was coming from the same spot, just different sides of the tracks, you know. And so you’ve got all this really sensitive stuff going on with music and spiritual qualities. And it’s [inaudible] it’s really important. But there’s all kinds of danger zones there, and you don’t want to associate it directly. So you don’t want to call Quraan recitation music. But the best advice I got when I was learning, I got that when I was here in Winnipeg just starting out in the late ’80s was a guy, he said — Egyptian guy. He says, Well, if you want to study, you want to understand Arab music, you better listen to Quran recitation. And that was really good advice. And, you know, I’ll play maqam Bayati in a bit. And maqam Bayati is basically the second octave species of Rast. So you take the scale of Rast, notch it up. Like, on the piano, you go from C to C, D to D. That’s how you get your modes, right? Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, etc. , C to C, G to G, you do the same thing. You cycle. You cycle them out. And that’s the first — that’s going from D to D in maqam Rast. And that’s used a lot in sacred recitation.

[Ryan Bruce:] Why don’t we hear that now?

[Rob Simms:] Yes. Let’s introduce ourselves to Bayati. So I notched up this bass string to a — it used to be C. so it’s got a nice octave here. So I’ll go back to Rast first without the bass.

[ Music ]

Then I’m going on the second degree starting on the D and coming down in Rast, you can do a B flat. It’s normally a seventh quarter tone, but you can — coming down. So it’s the B flat that’s getting used in Bayati.

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So it’s like minor with a quarter tone second degree.

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Completely different atmosphere from Rast, right? And in a way it’s kind of like the major minor thing that we have in Western music. These are really important modalities, really important atmospheres. They behave quite differently. But if you know those two maqams, you — there’s lots of compositions, those. Are home to the most number of compositions, those two maqams, both in Turkish and in Arab traditions.

[Howard Spring:] So what kind of compositions are there? And when you play them, is there any improvisation?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. Okay. So I’ve been playing in an improvisatory style called taqsim. And taqsim, as you can tell, the rhythm, there’s no — there’s no consistent beat. Now, sometimes you can go into a beat and into a pulse, but it’s not four beats or six beats or anything like that. And then you can drop it and slow down and stop it. And that is mimicking reciting poetry. And in a way, although, again, you have to be very careful to be separating this from Quran recitation. But that’s — Quran recitation, the delivery of the text is — the rhythm of it is very controlled. The pronunciation, how long you stay on syllables, the phrasing, all that’s very controlled. But, melodically, it’s completely open. And it’s following, you know, maqam grammar. And it’s, you know, tapping your toe to it, you know. So this taqsim style is, like, alap in Indian music where you’re trying to bring out the essence of the mode of the maqam. And you’re improvising, and you’re trying to create — then then there’s an element with the instrumentalists using idiomatic devices, and it can get virtuosic and everything. And that’s where you get a lot of individual expression coming out with that. And, for me, that was the interesting thing. I liked listening to taqsims. I wanted to learn how to do this. And as a — as someone interested in jazz and other improvisational forms, this is the one that attracted me the most. But in order to do that, you have to learn a bunch of compositions. And the compositions are varied. There’s classical compositions. That’s for chamber, small chamber ensemble. So it’d be for oud, ney. And then, in the modern, violin was appropriated. That’s a really interesting — you know, violinists have it really good because that instrument just went all over the world, and people made it their own in India and in West Asia. And one or two percussion instruments, a goblet drum called darbuka, or tambourine called riq and the singer. And there’s — there’s strophic, songs. So some poetry is really big. You can do some poetry in this freestyle, free rhythmic style where they just improvise, and that’s really beautiful stuff. And it’s very — structurally very close to Quran recitation. And then there’s instrumental compositions. I’m sorry. Let me go back to the vocal repertoire. There’s vocal repertoire. There’s metrical and strophic. And there’s all kinds of great rhythmic modes, additive modes, very interesting. We have 8 beats, 12 beats all of the things we expect. But you also have 7, 9, lots of great interesting rhythms that they’re playing with. Seventeen beats in the Arab stuff can get really intricate in that level. And so you memorize these pieces. And the vocal ones tend to be more rhythmically varied, because it’s related to the poetry, the prosody of the poetry. Then there’s a whole genre of classical instrumental music. And then there’s light classical and popular genres that are — Egypt was a big centre of the recording industry. And so people were writing new music in Bayati and in Rast and selling records, keeping the traditional feel but also updating it. So there’s a lot of fresh compositions there. And that’s a whole realm of sort of connoisseur expertise of knowing all these. It’s a huge amount of repertoire between the classical stuff and the — and then the golden age of that period was 1940s to the 1970s, about there, ’30s to ’70s. And that — those were also film tunes, big hit film tunes so starting to sound like Tin Pan Alley a bit. And that’s actually not a bad example. There’s a whole genre of new music that came out for cabarets, for people writing songs for famous singers that would be recorded, selling records, on the radio, in the cinemas, mediating music. So it’s kind of like knowing your American Songbook, you know, in — and your fake book so all of those things. And then, same way. How do you become a good improviser in jazz? Well, you learn a bunch of standards, right? And you learn structures through memorizing those standards, and then you listen to solos. And so you’ll copy also improvisers who you like. Like, you’ll take some phrases here and there like this guy in Marrakesh I was talking about who I really leaned on for my early vocabulary. Yeah. So here’s — here’s a classical composition in Bayati. It’s in ten beats. It’s called the — ten-beat cycle called Samai Thaqil. And there’s a drum — the frame drum, and it’s called a tar or in Morocco they call it a bendir. But the way the rhythmic modes are structured and how it’s taught is through using two — it’s not just a number of beats, but they’re organized in certain groupings. And then there’s a qualitative aspect of strong beats that are Dum, which is the resonant sound of the drum and Tek, that is on the rim. This is Dum, ten beats, Dum, Tek, Dum, Dum, Tek, Tek, Dum, Dum. there’s lots of compositions written in — classical compositions written in this — it’s a very popular modal.

[ Music ]

So that was the first — the first strain and the refrain, so that this part going

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that’s the refrain that keeps coming back between different episodes. And it has a lot of information about Bayati there. First of all, even though Bayati I said the scale goes from D, that’s a very Western way, sort of useful. But this music moves in tetrachords. It moves in smaller sections. And this actually starts halfway up. Bayati’s character, you know that’s the whole note. It starts in the middle. Can do a little improvising too.

[ Music ]

Starts in the middle, goes up a bit and comes down. And then this B flat that’s implying sort of the B flat majors which is called Ajam maqam. So if you’re accustomed to this music and you listen to it a lot, Bayati is kind of a good friend. A good friend of Bayati is B flat tetrachord. And your ear so it’s a temporary tonicization of that. Your ears temporarily shifts over to that. And that’s the pleasure of listening to the music is hearing these subtle little excursions. You know, you’re walking down Bayati Street. No, hey, there’s Ajam. How are you doing? Just tip your hat and move over. You might stop in and have a little chat, you know, depending what you want to do. As an improviser, you can hang out in there a bit longer, or you can — composer, too. You could write a longer kind of — spend more time in that door that was opened leading to that. So it goes back to what I was saying. To know one you have to kind of know — you can’t just no one maqam. You have to know — because they’re pregnant. There’s different implications and different options, different networks that are conventional. So if you’re performing an improvisation the taqsim, which is like a prelude in the function of — in Western music, you know, preludes came out of guys tuning their lutes, right? You’re in front of the king, and you come in with your lute. And so, you know, you’ve got to tune up. And it was in a free rhythm, right, where you started arpeggios or something. And it’s also tuning up the key. So you’re getting the people accustomed to the key, and you’re tuning up slowly the instrument.

[Ryan Bruce:] Taqsim is like a — taqsim is like a prelude?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah, right. Thank you. So before composition in Bayati, say that piece that I playing, Samai — in Samai Thaqil, that’s a very famous composition, it would often start off with a taqsim by the oud player or the kanun player, which is a zither and plucked zither or the ney player. So it’s like, okay. Let’s start this piece. But, first, we’re going to hear some taqsim, just to get us in the mode for Bayati. And then we’re going to hit this composition that everyone knows. And so you get this shift between improvised material and composed material. And, meanwhile, that piece that you play, everyone knows it. But when it’s played in an ensemble, its heterophony. So it’s not a nice, clean unison line. Everyone who’s playing in the ensemble is doing their own version of the line. And so it’s — you have lots of — everyone’s ornamenting it differently. And maybe they’re rhythmic hesitations; or they’re adding a few notes, a little flourish here and there. And when you first hear this music, it sounds disorganized for our ears. But if you listen to New Orleans jazz, it makes perfect sense, you know. You get that a lot, you know, playing the head at the end. It’s nice to have a nice tight head when you’re in jazz, but it’s also nice to let it — you know, let people sort of stretch out a bit and ornament it the way they want. So we do have that heterophic — heterophonic kind of approach in our music too. But — so those are all kinds of different improvisations you can have or some of them anyways. When you’re playing the line, you can decorate it any way you want. But when you’re in rhythm, you’ve got — you know, you’ve got to keep it moving, and you can’t go too far out and too far behind or ahead of it.

[Howard Spring:] So, Rob, after the taqsim happens and the composition, is there any improvisation going on, after the head, if you like, or after the composition is played?

[Rob Simms:] You know, there’s all kinds of different forms and options, performance practice options. So sometimes it can go into a vamp. And singers — again, this goes back to the tarab thing, and Umm Kulthum was really famous for this. If they catch a line that seems to be hitting the audience, she’ll go back and do it again. And she’s famous for taking the same line of poetry and delivering it with different decoration and emphasis, sometimes, you know, five, six, seven times. And the ensemble has to sort of be behind her, you know, with that. So they’re not just ploughing ahead, here’s the composition start to finish. It’s based on what’s happening in the room. And, you know, that’s a big thing with qawwali music, too, when they’re vamping and they just stay in one thing. If someone goes into a trance, it’s the job of the guy to — the lead singer to keep that person going. And that can be dangerous if you break that too quickly. So that’s why you get this repetition a lot of time. In the Arab classical scene, it’s not so driving. Those lines are going to be longer, and there’s going to be more space. It’s going to be a bit more refined than that, I mean. But, basically, the process is the same. And people, particularly some real war horse compositions, people are going to try to — I mean, people, they need to do something different with it. So there’s — you’ll hear someone who will really stretch out their ornamentation or their rendition, or sometimes a little fragments will come in. Again, we’re talking about many different — if I — if I look at the Iraqi maqam tradition, sometimes you’ll just take one section of the famous composition, and that’s how you’ll start it off. So you want to play the whole piece. So it’s a lot of sort of cut and paste grabbing things, too. And that’s what you’re doing when you’re improvising. I think that’s the way it is with all traditions is you’re recombining stuff. Yeah. You’re programmed with a big vocabulary, and there’s a grammar for putting it together. But, again, the motivation here is to be responding to the audience and what they’re needing. So my conversations, particularly singers, it’s really important. And a lot of these singers, Umm Kulthum and I know Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, a great Persian singer I did a lot of work on, he wanted the house lights on. He wanted to see faces so that he could interact. He didn’t want it all dark. It was all about — and there, in that tradition, it’s not about getting people to go, Yeah! You know, Rock on! It’s about, he says silence, when people were dead silent, he knew he was getting at them. And he would target people and, you know, work his magic that way. And he would elaborate. And sometimes he’d throw an extra melismata. So he’s got his poem. That’s set. He knows what he’s going to sing in terms of the text. But how he’s going to deliver that depends on what’s going on and how he’s feeling and where he is. Is he in Toronto? Is he in Tehran? Where is he? And Shajarian also started out as a Quran recitation prodigy. And that’s the job, by the way, of a Quran reciter is to bring out the spirit of the scripture with a proper, beautiful rendition. The Prophet Muhammad said, when you cite the Quran, make it beautiful. And in Egypt, there is this response that’s very much like the art music that, if the guy makes a poignant point and then there’s a certain line in the scripture that comes out and he nails it with a high note or he goes into Saba at a certain point, they go nuts. It sounds like a football game, you know, that really overt ecstatic reaction would not work in Saudi Arabia and a lot of places. So it’s a local Egyptian thing. So, you know, we’re talking in general terms here, but we also have to be very careful about looking at specifics. It’s the same thing when you’re talking about Indigenous people in Canada. You just can’t talk about Indigenous people. What people are we talking about? What exactly — you know, what community? And even within one ethnic group, there’s different communities with different things going on. So it’s tricky, you know? You need to get a handle on things and get some basic concepts down, but you also have to be tweaked to local practices. And so what do you come up with? At the end, like, how do I play? It’s completely unique, you know. And same with the any individual is going to be a unique combination of their listening pool, what they’ve been listening to, how they grew up, what their — what their musical career has been, all that stuff. So it’s, yeah. It’s infinite. Infinite. Yeah.

[Howard Spring:] So you also play the ney. Can we see that and hear it?

[Rob Simms:] Yeah, yeah. So this is the ney. It’s — the word ney is a Persian word that means reed. And this reed is literally the same reed, exact thing that you have with a saxophone or clarinet. You just slice off. It’s grass, you know. It’s like bamboo, big grass. And you go into warm countries, and some — I’ve seen some in Canada and in Ontario. It’s just a wild thing that grows, and they call that the ney asen [phonetic], the place of the ney. And it’s by the — it’s by the — it’s usually by river beds. And these things can grow huge just like bamboo, you know. This can be like three stories high. And get same thing with the shakuhachi, right, in Japan. And, of course, flutes are the oldest instruments that we’ve — that found flutes that are 40,000 years old, so there’s a real ancient heritage. And getting back to the plant itself, it’s very symbolic of a lot of Sufi philosophy. And there’s a very famous poem by Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Now, Rumi was a medieval Persian cleric who escaped Genghis Khan and moved into what is now Turkey. And these are the famous Whirling Dervishes, you know, that spin around to the ney, the flute music. And Rumi wrote a huge his masterpiece poem called The Masnavi. And it can — it’s usually spelled m-a-t-h-m-a-w-i or sometimes Masnavi, m-a-s-n-a-v-i. And apparently the story goes, because he was a spiritual master and had all community behind him and he would improvise poetry. And one of his followers said, like, why don’t you put together like a comprehensive collection of your poetry? And he pulled out of his hat this poem that is — was the seed for the Masnavi. And the Masnavi is like 40,000 couplets. It’s like twice as long as the Iliad or Odyssey. And it’s about the reed. And this is a literal translation. There’s millions of translations out there, but you need to — you need to know this poem before we get into the ney because it’s bringing so much stuff together here. So it’s about the reed being torn away, being separated from its reed bed, and it’s longing to get back to the source. And that’s the wailing of the ney. It’s wailing to get back to its source. So you can see the spiritual kind of project going on here. And the first line of this poem is, Listen to the ney, how it makes complaint, telling its tale of separation. Ever since I was cut from the reed bed, men and women have all lamented my bewailing. I’m going to skip some lines and just go to some key points. Everyone who — in every company, I’ve poured my lament. I’ve consorted alike with the miserable and the happy. Each became my friend out of his own surmise, but none sought to discover the secrets in my heart. My secret indeed is not remote from my lament, but eye and ear lack the light to perceive it. This cry of the reed of the ney is fire. It’s not wind. Whoever doesn’t possess this fire, let him be naught. Whoever saw poison and antidote in one like the reed? Whoever saw sympathizer and yearner in one like the reed? So this goes on, it was about 17 couplets, and he pulls it out of his hat. This is the legend, right? And then this huge didactic poem follows. And it’s all a variation on that original, those original 17 lines that is to do with the ney. So the ney is about separation and the yearning to get back towards union. It’s about a fire, a passion. And people read into it what they want. People thought, you know, that people were happy or sad, that no one sought the secrets. Everyone thought they heard. They heard what they wanted to. It’s a very deep poem. So I suggest anyone, you know, to check out that poem before they — to understand the whole connection here. And the Sufis, particularly Rumi’s order, were very important for music. The classical music and the Ottomans, all of those musicians were playing in the court. They — there — it’s synonymous with the Ottoman tradition. And there’s a separate repertoire for the ritual music where because Rumi would — sometimes he’d go into, like, his own trance, and he would like to spin around a pole and recite poetry. And they’d say, Oh, he’s doing it again. And they’d have to go — and he’d be writing, he’d be improvising this poetry, and they wrote it out, then they’d read it back to him, and they edited it. And that’s how he — that was his creative process. And then they turned into this ritual of listening that they called sama, s a m a. And that was reading poetry, dancing in some cases, and for sure with his order, and listening to music. So, you know, and in terms of the legality of music, here’s music used as a spiritual tool. And, apparently, Rumi was talking to some cleric who was against music. And he says, Look. We both agree that music is very important and that, you know, takes you onto — it takes you to some important position, say, the Gates of heaven. He says, The difference between you is me is that you hear the Gates close; I hear them open. And so it was never about the music itself. I mean, the music — so you have this debate. We see it right now in Afghanistan. It’s not about music. It’s about the person. And the Sufis felt that way. It’s like fanning a fire. Whatever you are, that’s what it’ll be. And, you know, one famous poet said before we talk about the legality of music, show me the man because it’s right — it’s about how you take it and what you do with it. If you want, you know, sex and drugs and rock and roll and decadence, then that’s what it’ll be. Sorry, but that was a worthwhile — you know, I could go on and on about that. And I know we want to — we only have so much time here, and I should get to the ney. But this is what the ney is. This is no ordinary instrument.

[ Music ]

That was a bit of Rast. Didn’t even go up the — I actually did go up the full octave. But you can just sit on three or four notes, you know, and evoke Rast. I was trying to do that at the beginning. And what’s great about the ney versus the oud as horn players and singers is you can see it’s — again, there’s not just some dots on the page or geometrical patterns. It’s a living, breathing thing, each note. And Turkish ney playing the taqsim style of playing is really slow and stately and non-virtuosic. It’s sliding around a lot, kind of like Indian music, you know, a lot of articulation, sliding between notes. And it’s used as a model to study maqam. If you’re studying any instrument, they say listen, to the ney players because they come to the essence of the maqam without all the, you know, virtuosity and fast playing and things like that. So — and there’s a lot of symbolism, too, in the ney. There’s nine notes to the day. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So notches like pieces of — you can see notches. There’s nine of them. There’s also nine holes. Nine is three times three. I mean, there’s numerological numbers, three is the number of perfection. Nine is the number of openings in the human body if we can include our eyeballs. And so the ney also, because it’s straight and Rast, remember, Rast, rectitude, this is what they — what’s called in Islam the straight path, walking the straight path. So this is like the first letter in the alphabet, aleph. It’s just the straight line down. And it’s loaded with — everywhere you look, there’s some symbolism. This is no ordinary instrument. Well, that’s an interesting thing about the ney, too, you know. And I had my own little initiation with this instrument when I was in when I was in Cairo. I’m a string player. And, yeah, I heard the ney and I loved the ney. So I bought a ney, went to take some lessons with a guy. Well, I couldn’t get a sound out of it. And most people can’t. It’s an oblique embouchure, and it’s kind of tricky. And this guy, he had a student there, and he’s putting it in this — he’s saying, do this, do that. And the student there, I felt like I was at the dentist, you know, because these guys are hovering around and trying to get me to get a pitch. I couldn’t get a sound out of it. And I said, Okay, guys. Thanks a lot. I guess I need to just, you know, work on it. I took it home, nothing was happening, brought it back to Canada. And every once in a while, I would pick up the ney, blow it, and still nothing, you know, maybe two or three times a year. But one time I did it went. I got a toot. Oh, my God. I did nothing different. I believe the ney was testing me. This is my initiation. What am I going to do? And I had to — there’s all these stories of where you have to, you know, work for the guru and cut his grass and go do his groceries and everything for five years before he teaches you anything. It was kind of like that. And then I started playing, and I got a foothold on it. And it was amazing. But the thing is, when you’re watching the oud, you can say, okay. My hands working. There’s nothing to watch with the ney. So I’m backing up here so you can see but it’s all inside. There’s nothing to see. You can see me using, and it is interesting watching how the fingers work. And I can show a few little things, but it’s all in your mouth. It’s all inside. It’s all in your breath. So that’s an interesting — again, built right into the instrument, all this — all of this philosophy. And to get a good tone on the ney, you have to push hard. But you can push too hard. So it’s balance. And when I go into the lower register, if I get entry permission from the instrument, which is tough to do, I’m actually in — why need to take my — hear what’s going on with the overtone series. I’m actually playing the multiphonic when I go down there. I’m playing — because the fundamental is very quiet, and to get some punch on it, you need to bring the octave up and balance that. So here’s the fundamental, you know, just in terms of physics. This is what the toot sounds like in the lower register. Oh, I need to go down. Sorry.

[ Music ]

It’s very quiet. But if I get a bit of the octave in there

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When I am getting the octave, when I’m getting that lower octave and it’s sounding big and fat, that’s because I’m playing a multiphonic down there. And that also goes back to this whole Central Asian thing of overtone singing. So the Turks, the people in the — the present people who live in Turkey are central Asians, right. Turks originally came from Central Asia. And some people believe that this Turkish specialty of playing in this low register is — Walter Feldman talks about that there is maybe some heritage with the overtone tradition.

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In terms of what you can see, the orientation is like, again, transposing, this is — this is pitch towards A is all notes closed. But I’m thinking — here’s another nationalistic thing. The orientation of the system in I said with the oud is C to C, in Turkish tradition, it’s G to G. So in the early 20th century, everyone was trying to be different and show that they’re different. Oh, we’re not like the Arabs. We’re Turks, you know. So we base our us on G. And you can have different sizes of ney starting at different pitches. But you’re thinking it’s just like a recorder, you know. It’s like C, D, E, F, G, right. And at the back, there’s a hole. And this hole is actually a — depending on how you blow it, has — is really wide. It’s like a — almost a major third. And that’s the quality you get, a lot of sliding around when you’re playing with that, and it’s all on your thumb, sort of quarter holding it or half holding it and how much pressure you’re using. And you hear this unstable note that is really idiomatic. And it’s that break between you get — between that lower octave and getting to that next octave. I’ll try to demonstrate that.

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I don’t know if you can see it.

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So in terms of looking, that’s about all you can see. You know, everything else is kind of inside with this instrument, which is really appropriate.

[Howard Spring:] You know, when I think — hear that sound and compare it to a Western flute sound, for example, this is a lot more breathy.

[Rob Simms:] Yep.

[Howard Spring:] A lot more air. So is that just the way the instrument is constructed, or is that a technique or –

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. It’s breathy. It’s supposed to be breathy. I think it’s part of the physics. Just the acoustics of the instrument, it’s a breathy — just the embouchure. And this is not a Coke bottle embouchure, right. This is a — this is a very strange embouchure. It’s coming off the side, hitting off your teeth and into the tube. And you’re getting the — you know, the air’s going this way. So it is breathy. But also breath, I mean, that’s — you’re dealing with breath. I mean, breath is your vital force, right? And there’s — in Sufi doctrine, there’s this whole thing called the breath of the compassionate, which is what animates the whole universe. And so, when you think of it, you know, Sufism isn’t to — is really not — it’s more — it’s a deeper version of Islam, but a lot of Muslims don’t agree with Sufism, because it’s about trying to connect with God instead of obedience to God because, in Islam — and I don’t want to get into a big, you know, religious discussion here. But God has completely transcendent. You’re just a little human. You cannot — sorry, you can’t reach God. That’s the exoteric view. But the esoteric view is you can and they’re trying to. And you can see the heresy of, if — the ney was also a symbol of the perfect — the perfect human, you know, with all its anthropomorphic. The ney is the human soul, right, the poem. It’s separated from their reed bed and longing to get back. And then every ney, when you’re making a ney, you know, many are called but few are chosen. To make a good one, you might have to throw out three or four, you know. So — and if you’re really playing this thing properly and this thing is breathing and it’s this breath of the compassionate, well, I mean, the symbolism is pretty heretical, right, like you are blowing life because — in and of itself, it’s nothing. This can’t make a sound without a human being blowing into it. So I think that breathy sound is something to do with that. And musicians are very practical, and they talk about the technical, scales and the rhythms and all these things. But particularly with the Turkish ney, it’s very tied into all of this stuff. And so it may seem that I’m going over the top here, but I’m just trying to open up a whole different way of looking at this music. And they say the way someone plays, that’s who they are, you know. That’s not just revealing them as a musician. That’s their — that’s their maqam, their spiritual station. I want to play a couple other maqams, though, just to get these different — so Rast is rectitude, Hijaz is separation. So this is the beginning of — the beginning of Rumi’s poem, you know. Listen to the ney as it wails in separation from the reed bed.

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You know, when you play this — when you play this thing, you have to really get into it. So I’m talking, I’m playing. It’s different, completely different modalities. And you have to slow, slow, slow down, you know, big time. So I just kind of rush into it in the beginning and, you know, I’m playing the ney here. Got to slow down. Separation. What I like doing is going from separation with Hijaz to union which is Sega. Sega, and you were asking earlier about places, Ryan, like where does this music come from? Is there certain places. Well, Hijaz means the — the word Hijaz, there’s a lot of place names with maqam names. And Hijaz is the Western side of Saudi — the Saudi Peninsula, Arabian Peninsula. Sega means third place, and it’s the third octave species of Rast. But you’ll see I’m going to really go to town if I can get access permission into the lower register. I will really exploit this thumb region. There’s a whole universe in the thumb. All you need is your thumb.

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It’s very chromatic in there, too, which is quite interesting. And those are very deep maqams, so see Rast, Hijaz, and Sega, tons of compositions in there. And so you listen to these compositions. You learn them. Then you listen to taqsims and put it all together, and you’re conversing with the maqam and you’re playing. You’re having a conversation with it as a player, you know, trying to, trying to evoke that feeling of union there or separation in the case of Hijaz.

[Ryan Bruce:] So in these last two pieces that you just played, how much of those were composed; and how much was improvised?

[Rob Simms:] That was improvised. So that was improvised based on my reassembling of all kinds of phrases. Some of them are cliche. You know you’re in Sega as soon as you hear

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And the ending.

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[Inaudible] little gesture coming up. A lot of them are sort of giveaways with just a few motifs, you know, because they’ve given their character away. They’re like personalities, right? And you can — sometimes you can just see a little profile and suddenly go, Oh, I know who that is because it’s just so strong that character, that feature. And that personification is, I think, really correct. And, you know, I got that actually from Jim Kippen who was talking about Raga and that Raga is like complex personalities. And some of them can be very similar, but they have their own idiosyncratic behaviour, you know, or characters. They can be very closely related, but they’re different because this one behaves this way and, you know. You can predict behaviours in people, right, if you know them well enough. And so the more you hang out with them, the more you can predict what’s the next note supposed to be. So when I’m listening to a taqsim in Sega because I spent a lot of time in that, sort of took a hint on the union thing. I thought, gee. I’d better pay attention to this one. You can predict what they’re going to do next. You can hear what notes should come next. And that’s from just what’s out there in the repertoire. That’s from the personality, understanding the personality of Sega. And someone who’s really good can throw in surprises, like any other kind of improvisation. There’s expectations and then surprises. And then — but the main thing is bringing out that spirit, that quality, that magic of it. And in the Turkish tradition, again, it’s a very precise — the head space that you get in. Ushaq is love. And this is like Bayati. So I played Bayati earlier on the oud. But this has a different — it’s called sayir, a different path, a different progression, path or progression. So Bayati is the same scale. Bayati starts up on the fourth degree and then goes up a bit and then comes down. This one stays low and goes up and comes down. And if you start up really high and come down, that’s Muhayyer. And then there’s another one that’s in the middle. So they’re all pretty much the same scale, but they behave differently. They’ve got different personalities. When you think about it, you’re excluding certain motions and you’re including others. So anything that’s written in that mode is going to have certain feel to it because — because the behaviour, its path. Ushaq.

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So that note I’m playing there is the tonic.

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Easy to slip into Rast there. And that’s where we’re talking about drones and how drones can sort of help. On the oud, you’re hitting those notes to help keep you, you know, clearly bringing out the maqam that you’re trying to evoke. So here’s some maqam Husayni. And this is in the same scale as Ushaq and Bayati. There’s six — the sixth degree you’ll hear is variable on it. And — but it has a different feel to it and a different progression, different sayir. So I’ll just run up and down the scale and then I’ll quit.

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So that evokes nostalgia and is related to separation, all this — all the Rumi stuff that we were talking about. But you’ll hear there’s some pentatonic kind of connotations to that and a little bit more leaping going on there than what we have in these other maqams that are — it’s because of the vocal nature of it. And, again, this goes back to the vocal models that goes into a lot of sacred recitation where it was reserved and, again, especially with the ney, you don’t — you can have a nice dramatic leap, and they’ll shift octaves for that kind of effect. But it’s true. The music’s very compacted. And that’s where I was saying earlier, you follow the tetrachords. You can — you’ve got to be good at making music when you’re improvising with a taqsim with three or four notes. So how do you do that? You — rhythm. You have to — you have to get a good sense of rhythm and not tapping your toe rhythm but when to hold it, when to when to go, when to play with a few figures and pace it, how to make — how to make a sentence like an utterance that makes some kind of sense based on the grammar of that music. And, again, that comes from just a lot of listening and absorbing compositions. But some maqams, particularly the ones that leap up high often start with one lone note, low note and then jump up really high. So this one will start on the tonic and then jump up to the fifth right away or to the seventh and then down to the fifth.

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Or:

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It’s very Husayni. As soon as you hear that, you know it’s Husayni. You don’t have to do anything else. And we get nostalgic, or at least we learn to get nostalgic.

[Ryan Bruce:] So that’s different than the other maqams you were playing that have much more stepwise motion or

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. I was trying –

[Ryan Bruce:] Why is that we hear the other maqams much more stepwise?

[Rob Simms:] As I was saying, these are quirky personalities. That’s Husayni. So you have to know the personality and that Husayni has the same — wears the same clothes as Bayati a lot of time and Ushaq, you know. A lot of — there’s certain things that — there’s a lot of overlap. If you have a Venn diagram, you know, they overlap in certain ways, but they also have their own identities. And that’s why it’s a family. And those ones share a very similar scale. That’s a very interesting group of maqams there. And, again, that’s the Turkish side. An Arab musician would say it’s all Bayati. They wouldn’t — a lot of them would say that. A lot of them wouldn’t differentiate. That’s one difference between the Turkish Ottoman maqam tradition and the Arab tradition as it emerged in the late 19th, early 20th century. They tend to think more — the Arab musicians tend to think more in terms of a scale and then with starting high and going lower, whatever they’re thinking more in terms of, well, that’s a Bayati scale whereas the Turkish thing is more differentiation based on the progression of it.

[Ryan Bruce:] You’ve mentioned that the drone is important, and you have something for us here to do a demonstration of how we can hear the drone with the maqam.

[Rob Simms:] Yeah. It works really well with Sega because, again, Sega is this very chromatic — Sega is the third species of Rast so — right. Rast is the major scale. It’s the third and the seventh slightly flattened. And this is beginning on the — that third degree, third place, Sega, se is three and Persian ga is place. And what I got here is a little green box that allows me to do drones. I think this one is probably still on here. We were doing them in our soundcheck, so I might be able to just turn it on. And I’ll play around a little bit in Sega. And you can hear when the drone’s there, you can hear the tension between the notes and the energy between them, the dynamics between it. And you play differently when you have a drone. You enjoy those notes more. And this is a thing that’s used a lot in Turkish, particularly Sufi circles, whether it be a bunch of ney players. And a few of them will just hold the drone, and someone will go off and solo. I’ve heard it with Arab music, too, although a lot less. They’ll have the unison, you know, doing a tremolo on the oud or something while the ney player takes a solo. Let’s see if it’s still on here. Prefab.

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[Howard Spring:] I just want to get at that thing about a Canadian doing all this music and tie that in with, you know, in the world today, as you pointed out before Rob, you know, talking about music in terms of strict geographical area makes less and less sense or at least corresponds less and less to the reality given mass communication and transportation. And I just wanted to know what — if you had any thoughts on that or, in your particular role, playing this very deep music but being Canadian and that kind of thing.

[Rob Simms:] I always make sure when I play, first of all, that I tell people about the really great players, you know, because a lot of times I’m playing — sometimes I’m playing in communities who they know — I don’t have to say that. They know that, you know. And — but if I’m playing for people who’ve never heard the music before, so there’s some — Kutzier Bruner [phonetic] and his father — the Heir Bruner family are amazing. [Inaudible], people like that. So they can go out and listen to, you know, the source of it. And, on the other hand, what fascinates me about music is that how we can be — we can have huge cultural — be separated culturally hugely, and yet music, there’s a hook there. We can relate to each other through the music. We can appreciate music. People all over the world love, you know, Beyonce, and they don’t speak English. I dug — got first into Indian music and into flamenco, you know, which is kind of like sideways. Grew up with North American music, went into flamenco, opened up a whole new palette of sounds. I think if someone loves music, any kind of music, that means there’s probably music out there they don’t know about that they love too. They just — they’re just — there’s some latent interests in other musics that — that will also attract them. And I find it sort of transcends all the culture, politics and all that other stuff that is — you know, the gears are grinding in our world right now, that humans can just resonate to each other’s music or food, you know. You go somewhere and you go, Wow. What is this dish? I never had it before. Boy, I’d like some of that. Give me some more of that. You don’t have a clue what it is, but it’s just — it’s — you’ve never thought of doing it that way, you know. And you hear sounds, and you fall in love, as I mentioned. So it’s — you know, it’s a language of the heart in a way, and it shows our common humanity. That’s very cliche. Music is not a universal language in the sense that it’s usually regarded as, but it is in that sense where we can — again, we can — we can be more receptive to music than we can to language and other ideas in a culture that we don’t understand. And we’ll have — we’ll project all kinds of misunderstandings on it. But it communicates in a very deep human way. And I think that’s really significant and profound. And I’ve always — I just was following my musical ear. But then later, when I thought about it in a more intellectual way, I thought, No, I like this. This is — this is the way it should be. You know, we’re — humans have more in common than differences, although we live in a time now where the differences are really being emphasized. And there’s a lot of injustices happening between those differences. But when you look at it, right from the beginning of time, we’ve always needed — you know, we have the same number of bones, the same number of organs. Our DNA is the same. Physiologically, we’re very similar. And we’ve always needed, you know, a roof over our heads. We need food. We need shelter. We need to feel part of a community. We need to have loved ones. These are all basic human needs. We’re more similar than we are different. And meeting people through music is so amazing because if you go over and you’ve don’t a little bit of homework and say, yeah, I love ney playing. And they go, Oh, really, it’s a great way to open up relationship with people. You talk about music; it’s totally positive. It’s — to me, I think there’s like — it’s almost like some kind of a passport where if you show interest in another music, other musicians will say, Yeah, yeah. We can show you that. Oh, you’re a musician. Oh. You play guitar? Okay. And they might know a little bit about guitar or whatever or jazz or whatever and you start talking about that. Musicians tend to — you know, I brought this up, and other people say, well, there’s also barriers where musicians are very, you know, protecting their turf and everything. And that’s true. Professionally, they don’t want you to know because you might — you might steal some gigs from them or hurt something. But I’m not a threat. I’m not going to steal any gigs from anybody. So — and as long as you’re honest about it and — you know, I’m lucky to have a job in academia. I don’t have to make my living playing this music and representing another way. And I played mainly for myself and I always have. It’s for my own edification.

[Howard Spring:] Yeah. I think — I think you’re absolutely right. That’s — I mean, that’s been my experience, too, in terms of research. As soon as you say you’re a musician, that just opens up the gates. The other stuff about protection, I think, is about more about money and the economy rather than about music, per se. When it comes just to music, that connection is always — I mean, I’ve always found that.

[Rob Simms:] I’ve just had so many amazing experiences with completely random people who immediately as soon as they know you and especially if you show a little bit of competence and interest in their music, they’re more than happy to open that up to you. And, travelling, it’s just been an amazing, as I say, passport to meeting other people. Then you started with the music, and then you start to learn other things. So another thing is when you really get turned on to another music, then immediately you respect those people. If you love their music, sometimes I hear something. What is that? It’s from Turkmenistan. Never heard it before. Turk — well, I immediately like these people because they make music like that. So it starts things off on the right foot, you know. And then you go, I’ve got to do some homework. I need to learn a little bit about the geography and the cultures and history and everything. And you educate yourself about other people. And — but, you know, it’s always coming back to me for the music as the — as the connection and the hook for getting into it. And, you know, music’s an irrational thing. It’s been rationalized through music theory and the music business and everything, but at the base of it it’s a very primal, irrational, spontaneous thing. And it presses buttons in a way that nothing else can. So as long as you show that respect — and, look. The classical music world, look at all the great Asian artists like top notch. There’s opera singers. There’s pianists. There’s violinists, conductors and everything. This is proof that anyone who spends enough time, any human being, you put a kid in a home speaking — kid’s born in Argentina. Put him in a home in China, the kid will speak Chinese, you know. It’s just the way it works. And if you put enough time in, there’s musicians in Africa and all over the place who want to learn to play Bach. And if they put enough time in, they can play Bach really well. We can do that. It’s just how much time you’re putting in. By the same token, just because you meet someone from Turkey, they may not know a thing about the ney or care about it at all. So it’s really about where are we putting our focus. And the identity politics, you know, I’m all for, you know, making more social justice and everything. But we need to — we need to keep the whole, our humanity up front, the whole of humanity and our — and what unites us. And I think music’s a fantastic way to do that.

[Howard Spring:] Agree.

[Ryan Bruce:] Yeah.

[Rob Simms:] Here, here.

[Ryan Bruce:] Thank you.