Sudan on Parade: Summer 2008

Click here for 2008 Sudan Festival of Music and Dance locations and dates.

Click here for Afropop’s review of the 2007 Sudan Festival of Music and Dance.

Who better to tell the story of Sudan than the country’s musicians and dancers?  The vast East African nation is home to many cultures, religions and ethnic heritages.  While this complexity has fueled conflict, it also brings tremendous depth and richness to Sudanese arts.  The Sudanese Music and Dance Festival is a summit of superb singers, dancers and instrumentalists who believe that by bringing together their diverse cultural expressions, they point the way to a peaceful and productive future for Sudan.  In its second year, this festival will present a magnificent tableau of performance arts from all corners of this fascinating African nation.  The artists’ virtuosity is matched by a unique passion, for their performances are literally aimed at changing the course of history.  Featured artists include veteran vocalists Abdel Gadir Salim, Abu Araki Al Bakheit, Omar Bannaga, Ali Sigaid and the legendary, female vocal group Al Balabil.  Omer Ihas represents Darfur, Emmanuel Kembe represents southern Sudan, and Rasha represents progressive trends in the Sudanese diaspora.  The entire performance will be accompanied by the The Nile Music Orchestra under the direction of one of Sudan’s most established composers and producers, Yousif El Mosley.  Dawn Elder Management and the International Sudanese Arts and Music Institute (ISAMI) are co-sponsoring the 2008 Sudanese Music and Dance Festival, which will include performances throughout the United States, Canada, England and Europe 

Yousif El Mosely is a shining star among the producers, arrangers and composers of Sudan.  From boyhood, he showed extraordinary musical talent, including the ability to hear music in his head and write it down directly.  When he was 19 and studying music in Khartoum, his peers gave him the stage name El Mosely, a reference to a great Arabic musician from the past.  El Mosely composed and recorded his own songs, as well as works for many of the great singers of the era.  He went to Cairo to earn his Master’s degree during the 1980s.  Upon return to Khartoum, he found conditions very difficult for musicians under the new, Islamist regime.  Unwilling to perform in support of the government, he returned to Cairo and continued there producing works for the greatest Sudanese singers of that day, Mohammed Wardi, Abdel Gadir Salim, Abdel Karim Elkabli, Omer Ihsas and Al Balabil, among others.  El Mosely’s 1996 song “Salimta” was a landmark recording credited with restoring calm between Egyptians and Sudanese refugees after a tense, political standoff between the two countries.  Since 1997, El Mosely has lived and worked in the United States, where his musical services are in great demand within the country’s large communities of expatriate Sudanese.

Mohammed Mergani is an accomplished violinist and arranger who now leads the Nile Strings, a crucially important ensemble of instrumentalists that accompanies a host of singers important to American Sudanese communities.  As a young law student in his home town, Khartoum, during the 1970s, Mergani defied propriety and convention when he embraced a career in music.  He was inspired by the evolution of devotional music (madih) into increasingly secular and popular music (haqiba), and even more adventurous genres that flourished prior to the rise of Islamism in the 1980s.  He spent three years studying composition and theory in Moscow, and returned as a professor at the Institute of Music and Drama in 1989.  He endured the fear and uncertainty shared by most professional musicians in Sudan during the early years of its repressive, Islamist government.  Then, in 1996, he traveled to the United States with a musical group, and decided to stay there.  He soon founded the Nile Strings in Virginia, and his group has been a magnet and a haven for many great Sudanese musicians no longer willing or able to work back home.  Mergani sees the Sudanese as “one people,” and his group strives to embrace all the country’s diverse traditions and genres. 

Abdel Gadir Salim is one of the most beloved singer/bandleaders Sudan has ever produced.  Born and rasied in an oasis town in the heart of Kordofan, Sudan’s western desert region, he absorbed a wealth of traditional melodies and rhythms, which he adapted on his own to the oud.  He took that experience to Khartoum where he studied at the Institute of Music and Drama.  There he studied orchestral and classical music, and gained ideas he then applied to the Kordofan folklore he so loved.  Through his work, Khordofan’s 6/8 merdoum rhythm, and others, became standard fare at urban weddings in Sudan.  Salim is a statuesque presence and a warm, charismatic performer.  His band combines the aesthetics of an orchestra and a jazz combo, combining, oud, violin, traditional percussion, saxophone and electric guitar.  He is also an ever curious scholar of Sudanese music, and a hugely important figure in the modernization of the country’s folklore.  He has released some of the best known recordings of Sudanese music around the world, including a ground breaking collaboration with the young rapper, Emmanuel Jal.  Their album Ceasefire stands as a powerful symbol of collaboration and unity between artists from the country’s politically divided north and south. 

Al Balabil burst upon the Sudanese scene in the 1970s.  This trio of talented, musically trained Nubian teenagers—Hadia, Amal, and Hayat—became Khartoum’s answer to the Supremes, and they revolutionized social and artistic possibilities for Sudanese women.  Coming from the northern Nubian region, where women enjoy great freedom and influence, these sisters were well positioned to shake things up in the socially conservative capitol.  Working with a series of excellent composers, they began recording and performing and eventually gained a reputation throughout East and West Africa.  Their career did much to foster acceptance and interest in Nubian culture.  Although Al Balabil performed a variety of styles and sung in various languages, the goal of promoting Nubian language and culture has remained very important to them to this day.  In the late 1980s, the sisters got married and devoted themselves to family.  Hadia and Amal now live in the United States, but the sisters gather whenever possible to record and perform.

Omer Ihsas grew up in the complex, multi-cultural environment of Darfur, and spent his youth absorbing the music of many local ethnic groups.  An extraordinary singer, he moved to Khartoum and began a successful career.  At first he tried to adapt himself to the conventions of the urban music scene, but with time, he realized that, “They were limited to 5 or 6 styles of music.  I wanted to bring the richness of Darfur to the world.”  With that revelation, Ihsas returned to Darfur to deepen his research.  He created his band in 1987, for the first time adding string and brass instruments to arrangements of Darfur traditional sounds.  In 1996, he added twelve dancers to the ensemble.  Ihsas faced suspicions of being a musician with a political agenda, but his dedication to music and culture won out in the end, and he became a respected and influential representative of his region.  For three decades, Ihsas has continued this mission, performing “Sudanese songs from Darfur” with his group, and remaining very much on the scene despite all the travail that has unfolded there.  He returns to Darfur often and has performed in refugee camps as well as at gatherings all over the world aimed at resolving the conflict there. 

Rasha represents the modernizing, opening affect of artists from the Sudanese diaspora.  Born in 1971 in central Sudan, she grew up in a family milieu of theatre and music.  At the age of 20, she pursued a long-held dream to travel and went to visit her brother in Spain, which has been her base ever since.  Rasha began her professional career there, performing with Spanish musicians, and creating two very different albums, Sudaniyat, a collection of inventive takes on Sudanese tradition, and Let Me Be, a crossover pop album made with mostly Spanish musicians.  Rasha’s rich voice, and her willingness to revamp and modernize Sudanese music won her fans among Sudanese all over the world.  Despite having sung frank messages about the troubles in Sudan, she began returning home on a regular basis, and finds much support and acceptance there.  These days, she finds herself digging deeper into Sudanese tradition and is now at work on two recording projects, one approaching orchestral songs of central Sudan with what she calls a “classic jazz” approach, and another setting works by young Sudanese poets to music.    

Abu Araki Al-Bakheit:  This enormously respected singer/composer began his life in a traditional, rural village in Aljazeera province.  When the family moved to Omdurman, home of Sudan’s radio and television orchestra, Abu Araki devoted himself equally to religious and musical studies.  After graduating from the Institute of Music and Drama in 1978, he became a popular young singer on Sudanese radio, and released important recordings.  After the rise of Sudan’s Islamist government in 1989, Abu Araki, like many Sudanese artists, had difficulty working, in part because of the strong social content of his song lyrics.  Since that time, however, he has continued to perform as much as possible, including well-received performances for Sudanese diaspora communities around the world.

Emmanuel Kembe was born in 1969 in Wau, in southern Sudan, not far from the border with Central African Republic.  He sang in choirs from boyhood, learning Christian hymns and local folklore, and he continued singing after he moved to Khartoum, where he became a choir leader in 1989.  By that time, he was also trying his hand at electric pop music, influenced by his hero, the Congolese musical icon Franco.  During these years, civil war was displacing and traumatizing many southern Sudanese.  Kembe’s landmark song about their suffering, “Shem Shem,” led to his arrest in 1994.  His music banned, and forbidden from performing, Kembe fled first to Ethiopia, where he worked with local musicians, and then to Kenya, and in 1997, the United States.  From his present base in North Carolina, Kembe’s music has absorbed a strong reggae influence, but he continues to sing about the concerns and struggles of his people in Sudan.

Ali Al Sigaid hails from Madani, along the Nile River, south of Khartoum.  He was already a singer before studying voice, composition and piano at the Institute of Music and Drama.  Upon his graduation in 1987, he began a formidable career as a composer, creating over 40 major works, and establishing himself as a major vocalist of the era.  The Islamist regime that came to power in 1989 tried to force As Sigaid and other popular singers to support them with their music, but he refused.  Although life was extremely difficult during these years, he tried to remain in Sudan, going to Cairo to record, and performing in Sudan where opportunities presented themselves.  Barred from radio play and concert hall appearances, this grand artist was reduced to singing at weddings.  Finally, in 1995, he decided the situation was untenable, and moved to the United States.  Performing often with the Nile Strings out of the DC area, Al Sigaid performs 40-50 concerts a year for various Sudanese communities in the U.S..