Cheb I Sabbah

East Is South – LA Weekly

ri — Wed, 28 Jun 2000 18:37:14 +0000

Cheb i Sabbah’s divinity dance

By Brendan Bernhard Wednesday, Jun 28 2000

It was a decidedly multinational crowd that gathered a couple of months back at Louis XIV, the French restaurant on La Brea Avenue, to hear the Algerian-born DJ Cheb i Sabbah mix up some heady sitar- and tabla-tinged sounds. The women stood out. One girl, dark-haired and very pretty in a Salma Hayek kind of way, wore a cell phone in a holster strapped to her right arm, which was as tanned and smooth as her back. Next to her, a black woman in dreadlocks talked to a white woman in dreadlocks, though only the black woman carried a backpack that looked as if it had been made out of her own hair. Also on hand (smoking bidis on the patio) was a sallow young American woman whose deepest wish, to judge from the saris and unbelievable amount of weighty silver jewelry she was wearing, seemed to be to have been born in Bengal or Madras rather than Echo Park or Woodland Hills.

Oh well. For an hour or so, DJ Cheb i Sabbah made the fantasy seem almost real. He began by playing a 40-second invocation to the Hindu deity Lord Ganesh, the “remover of all obstacles,” and it seemed to work: It cleared the air, even as the air itself began to thicken with incense and hashish. Standing on a narrow upstairs balcony overlooking diners (eating monkfish and fricasse de poulet) as well as some freestyle dancers who had presumably finished their dinners, the 52-year-old Sabbah smoked aromatic Gudang Garam cigarettes while flipping switches on the soundboard with small, precise hands. Wearing a floppy wool hat, orange T-shirt and chains, he looked every bit the mad musical scientist combining sounds rather than chemicals.

As music to dance to, Sabbah’s work is on the slow side. It‘s really trance music, almost holy music. Though designed for the club scene, it’s supposed to evoke in its listeners a sense of blissed-out religiosity, as if they were dancing barefoot on the banks of the Ganges rather than (as in this instance) in a chic French restaurant a few miles from the Hollywood sign. Listened to at home, however, the effect is slightly different (and the “dance” element more subdued). It makes great background music, if that‘s what you want, but it can be enjoyed in its own right too.

Though a lot of people may have learned about Sabbah only recently, with last year’s CD Shri Durga and his new Maha Maya – which is a remixed version of Shri Durga, with the mixes done by Sabbah and his colleagues in London‘s South Asian club scene (Trans-Global Underground, FunDaMental, etc.) — he has actually been around for a long time. He started out as a DJ in Paris in the 1960s, after his family had moved there from Algeria “with a mattress and some boxes,” as he puts it. (As Berbers of Jewish descent in a predominantly Muslim population, they had been issued French passports by the French colonial government.) By the late 1980s, he had become a fixture on the San Francisco club scene, where he created a series of world-music concerts called “1002 Nights” and, in 1994, produced The Majoon Traveler, in which he mixed the music of Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman and Angus MacClise with the Gnawa and Jilala music of his nativeNorth Africa.

Sabbah will be back in L.A. on Friday, June 30, when he plays at Vynyl. Recently, he spoke by phone to the Weekly about his life and music.

L.A. WEEKLY: What kind of music did you play when you first deejayed in Paris in 1964?

SABBAH: American soul music, on seven-inch vinyl. If you wanted to be a DJ, that’s what you had to play. I did that for a while, then I did some theater, then May ‘68 came (and went). I was 21 in ’68, and that was a very exciting time for a lot of us. Then I came to this country at the end of ‘68 and joined the Living Theater in 1971. I acted in New York and Europe with them. I started an acting group in San Francisco about 14 years ago called Tribal Warning Theater. We created plays and sold out every time we put one on. We did street theater too, just as in the Living Theater.

Then I realized that it was very difficult to do theater in America, partly because there was no money in it, but also because it was hard to find people with the dedication that I have found in other places. So I decided to become a DJ, because that way I didn’t have to rely on anyone else to be on time and do their homework. It‘s a little lonely sometimes, but you only have to rely on yourself.

How is it working with CDs rather than vinyl?

It’s a different way of working, because you can‘t see the grooves as you can on vinyl. Most of the music I play doesn’t come on vinyl, so I‘ve had to adapt. CD players can loop, sample, speed up, slow down, and some of them can speed up or slow down four times more quickly than a turntable. So when I use four of them it’s kind of a studio mix there — playing four things at once on two double CD players. Vinyl is restricted to dance music as we know it — hip-hop, house, trance, techno, drum ‘n’ bass — however, there‘s a large portion of dance music that’s not geared to the club market, and that‘s what I fall into. I try to play songs rather than dance-beat music, which has very little or no vocals, and very little or no instruments. That music works in the environment that it works in, but the other music also works — songs, real songs.

The dichotomy here is that in a lot of countries most people don’t go to clubs, but they do gather to listen to music — music is a gathering principle. In other parts of the world, women will get together to sing their songs, men and women will gather to celebrate a birth, a wedding, a departure, but in the West it seems you have to go to a club to have the gathering element. You have to go somewhere to dance — it doesn‘t happen right in your courtyard; there’s no one playing live right outside your doorstep. Here we buy the music, and we go somewhere to listen to the music. Hopefully, going to listen to music is an act of celebration.

A lot of the music you sample is religious or spiritual music. Do you really think it can be transplanted into a Western setting with its spiritual dimension intact?

It‘s always easy to be holy in a holy environment. But what happens when you’re not in one? I have no problem playing anything spiritual anywhere. My feeling is that it‘s done in total respect, and at the same time, we have to live with the good and bad — we can’t just say that it‘s all good, and that the bad doesn’t exist. There‘s nothing bad about bringing something spiritual into a club where you might have people looking for sex or taking drugs or whatever. We’re all creatures of the sacred and profane, so when I play those samples I‘m trying to bring something good wherever I go.

What can we expect to hear from you at Vynyl on June 30?

It always depends on the dance floor and the vibe, and I never know till I get there. So I adjust to the conditions. As far as tempo, I like to play low beats per minute. I can play low tempo for hours. Some people call it chill music. I can also play fast tempo, but again it’s according to the crowd, because as much as you need good players, you need good listeners as well.

Original Article

PBS Frontline

ri — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:28:56 +0000

The same Judeo-Arabic Andalusian music that inspired Maurice El Medioni more than half a century ago is still enchanting younger generations of North African Jewish musicians. One of these is dj Cheb i Sabbah, born to a working-class Jewish-Algerian family in Constantine, Algeria, in 1947. He moved to Paris as a teenager, where he became a DJ. Currently he lives and works as a DJ and world music producer in San Francisco. FRONTLINE/World associate producer Sheraz Sadiq interviewed him in May of 2003. Take a journey with this pilgrim of the musical spirit — and learn more about the roots of his eclectic mix.

You go by “dj Cheb i Sabbah.” What does your name mean?

“Cheb” basically means young, having an opinion and good looking. “Sabbah” means morning. “Cheb i Sabbah” literally means young of the morning.

That’s the name that I took when I started spinning about 14 years ago. I had been a DJ before, but there have been three DJ incarnations so far. So the third and latest incarnation, I took on that name.

dj Cheb i Sabbah jams in Paris, 1968

Can you tell me how you got into DJing?

When I started, [in Paris] in the mid-1960s, that was the beginning of discotheque in France.

At that time it wasn’t really DJing, it was a job. You worked six nights a week and sometimes one or two afternoons for under-age [clubs] The format was strictly soul music, 7 inches.

I left high school when I was 15. I started to work, but I didn’t last long. I was rebelling against I guess everything, and I didn’t want to do what my parents had always done and I didn’t want to study either.

So at the age of 17 I was a DJ living in a hotel room in Paris.

dj Cheb i Sabbah performs with the Living Theatre in Bordeaux, France, 1975

[At the end of the 1960s] I moved to New York with the Living Theatre. I met [jazz musician] Don Cherry in the early 1970s, that was a whole other influence on me.

The main thing was [Cherry's] approach to study and incorporate music from other places. He would go to Bombay and learn vocals and tabla from Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, or he would go to Turkey and learn percussion. We listened to Indian ragas, we listened to music from Mali. It was this huge palette of music from so many places.

What is it about DJing that continues to appeal to you?

There’s a give an take between you and the audience. It’s half and half. That’s something that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan taught me: If you only have good musicians and no good listeners, we are useless.

dj Cheb i Sabbah surveys his turntables as he spins at a San Francisco nightclub, 2003. (photo: Leighton Woodhouse)

What’s the worst habit of DJs from your perspective?

I think chain smoking.

Which you’re guilty of.

It’s part of the ritual. I’m not actually smoking them — it’s part of the hands and the buttons and the CD or the vinyl and the cigarette — it kind of all goes together.

I was wondering if there are any other DJs like you who are using elements of the Judeo-Arabic-Andalusian tradition in their music today.

Not that I know. Not specifically Judeo-Arabic. If you approach Andalusian musicians that are very, very classical, they might go, are you crazy? You’re going to put a bass line or whatever on top of this? No way.

So talk a bit about the tradition.

The music that we heard from very young [in the Jewish community in Constantine, Algeria] it was always a live group of musicians, for me Cheikh Raymond because he was very close to the family.

Who was Cheikh Raymond?

He was the flame or the torch of the Constantine School of Andalusian Music in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s.

So he was Jewish himself?

Yes. He was the head of that city because each city had its own school of music. Just like India, it doesn’t matter if you’re Hindu or Muslim, you learn from a Muslim Ustad, or if you’re Muslim you can learn from a Hindu Pandit. Music doesn’t make those distinctions. So there was Cheikh Raymond, playing oud and vocal, and then Cheikh Sylvain, who was also Jewish, playing violin, and the rest of the orchestra was all Muslim. That kind of music was always there for celebrations: birth, marriage, bar mitzvah.

When it comes to music, there’s always that common ground — and that seems to be what music is able to do. It doesn’t resolve all the problems and conflicts, but within music you always find a common ground, and that was true in North Africa. Even to this day there are recordings made by Jewish people that are maintaining their tradition — and when you look at the orchestra, they’re all Muslims.

dj Cheb i Sabbah, in his pre-DJ days, is pictured here on a family outing in Constantine, Algeria, 1954

What is your earliest musical memory in Algeria?

It was the Andalusian music that was played at weddings and births. It would start around noon and go on until late, late that night, and the music was a big part of those kinds of celebrations.

Whenever there is music like that, women start dancing and they’ve never gone to a class and learned belly dance, they just know how to dance. The women have the dancing part, the men have the musical part, and it’s always present for a joyful celebration.

What are the ingredients of Andalusian music?

Andalusian music was more like a court music and definitely for the upper classes. It wasn’t the popular music. The Arabic word in Algeria is “malouf” — people don’t say “Andalusian” music, they say “malouf.” The music is poetry, it’s highly, highly refined. I think the best example is really like Indian raga music. It’s a serious, classical music.

What happened is, singers from the Judeo-Arabic tradition took elements from Andalusian music and made it more popular with songs and words that most of the time depicted lost love or waiting love or, in some cases, Hebrew religious text.

A North African musician plays for a crowd in Marseilles, France, 2003

At that time, everybody lived together, worked together and created together, so you couldn’t say one is Jewish, one is Muslim. All those people were living in Spain. It was the same kind of people with different religions working out this classical music. They already had the oud, they already had their own percussions. … But the violin and, later on, banjo came into a lot of North African music. There were times when they would take a Western instrument and make it work for what they were doing.

The only thing that would be different would be the lyrics. The lyrics would be in Arabic or Hebrew. Now of course the Muslim wouldn’t sing anything in Hebrew, but the Jews were able to sing both. And the other difference would be that Arabic lyrics would be profane, whereas Hebrew lyrics would be sacred because they would be taken directly from the scriptures, in this case the Bible. Because Hebrew was never spoken as a language. Hebrew was always and only used for worship.

I think historically if we talk about the classical music from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, the Jews maintain the classical tradition called malouf, and Jews and Muslims played together in the same orchestras. The Jews maintained the tradition after it came from Spain into North Africa proper, at the time of the Inquisition.

What was the first music in France that made an impression on you?

A young dj Cheb i Sabbah peforms at Nova Park nightclub in Paris, 1980

What started me musically was like French rock and roll. There’s no way to escape that. You’re young and you start listening to rock and roll and then blues and then jazz, and then you become a DJ and meanwhile your father, on afternoons when he wasn’t at work, he would sit down with very strong coffee, smoking Gitanes and listening to Cheikh Raymond.

To you, that’s like, well, that’s Dad listening to his music; and you being a teenager, well, you’re listening to other kinds of stuff. But then you eventually go back to it. Eventually. Because me — I think because in my ears I had so much of that Andalusian music, when I was 17 I started to listen to classical raga music from India,

So it wasn’t like it took me 20 years to go back to my roots or something. Because when I started to listen to classical Indian music, Pakistani, Persian music, all that stuff, it was a very short distance from what I grew up with. When you listen to Persian music or Hindustani music, you hear all the Arab Muslim influences.

Maurice El Medioni, on piano, performs with other Algerian musicians in their native country, circa 1950. (photo: Maurice El Medioni)

And what about raï music?

At first raï music was mainly sung by women, “cheikhats.” The cheikhats were the women that started to sing raï songs, which usually had something to do with Muslim prohibitions, meaning alcohol and love. Not that love is a Muslim prohibition, but sexual activity without marriage is.

Raï started in the city known as Oran, in Algeria [where Maurice El Medioni was born] and this still today is the capital of raï music. Alcohol wasn’t allowed by Islam, but Algeria, having had the French colonization, had bars and clubs. Oran, being a seaport, had all those influences from the Mediterranean. So from there grew this raï movement: Raï music took mostly folk influences and traditions from the Sahara, from Berber tribes, from rock and roll, Spanish elements like flamenco. From that point of view, raï music really has nothing to do with Andalusian classical music. Probably classical musicians would look at raï music as really low.

San Francisco nightclub Nickie’s BBQ is a mecca for dj Cheb i Sabbah fans every Tuesday night. (photo: Leighton Woodhouse)

It sounds as if music has always been a sanctuary for you because it helps dissolve ethnic, religious and cultural divisions. There’s that universality to it.

Young people always resort to music as something they can relate to, because all the other stuff takes a few more years to understand. At first, the only thing you have is music. Because it speaks to you. You can speak it, it speaks to you and you leave the other stuff for later.

Original Article