What I’m going to do here is use a review of a new CD by Toronto based musician/actor Ahmed Moneka as a means to explore some ideas about listening to music.  But first the CD itself.  It’s called Kanzafula and it contains nine tracks rooted in an unusual musical tradition; that of the Afro/Iraqi Sufis of Basra.  These are descendants of people originally from the East coast of Africa who wound up in Basra in the 8th century CE and have maintained a rich musical tradition combining Arabic and African influences.

Kanzafula takes this further and adds elements of jazz, soul, funk and rock to the mix.  The orchestration is very varied with various combinations of traditional with western acoustic and electronic instruments.  It also mixes texts from very different eras from the contemporary to the “traditional”.  To give a flavour, there’s a traditional Iraqi maqam; Chi Mali Wali, that appears twice.  First up the instrumentation is  very traditional and the lyric is abstractedly about being alone and unprotected in the community but it’s repeated with a lot of jazz influence setting a poem about British colonization of Iraq in the 1920s.  There’s also a number of songs that reflect on the destructiveness of war, displacement and recreating community often using lyrics by Moneka plus other traditional material in new arrangements.

He’s backed by a large and varying ensemble including other vocalists and it’s an enjoyable and thought provoking listen.  Full Arabic texts and translations are provided for all the tracks.  It’s cleanly recorded and available as a standard res (44.1kHz/16bit) physical CD.

And so to the discursive element.  I usually experience music in one of two main ways.  I’m either at a live performance where the Mahlerian rules of polite audience behaviour are more or less closely observed (and I get seriously grumpy when they are not!).  Or I’m listening at home; always closely, often on headphones, always to pretty high quality sound reproduction.  Background music is not really part of my life except in so far as it’s a movie soundtrack or incidental music at a play.  So my listening is an “active” act of listening but listening is essentially all I am doing.

Last night I was at the CD release party for the above described album at Lula Lounge.  The technical quality was so-so; pop style sound system and tons of background noise.  People were eating and drinking, dancing and making videos, talking loudly to their neighbours, coming and going.  It had little in common with a concert at Koerner Hall (except when there’s a celebrity Russian singer!).  It was, in essence, like being at a noisy party with the music not always taking first place.  There was though an undeniable energy that was communicated both ways between audience and stage.  I can’t say that the audience was not experiencing the music.  Clearly they were; deeply, and if he music making was rougher than on the CD it was more engaged.  But it somehow left me with a sense that this was not “my music”.  Oddly enough, listening to the CD again I completely lost that sense.  This was music that I could thoroughly enjoy!  Different strokes I guess.  There’s no “right way” to experience music.

I don’t have a serial number for the CD but it’s released on Lulaworld Records.