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Biamp Portland Jazz Festival: The Arab Blues
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
Egyptian percussionist, DJ, and dancer Karim Nagi is a ubiquitous presence on the Chicago music scene. He performs solo concerts, which include dancing and storytelling; he leads Huzam, a quartet of Arab American musicians who play original compositions in traditional forms; and he plays in the Arab Blues project developed by Rami Gabriel, who’s not just a musician but also a professor of psychology at Columbia College. Gabriel switches between electric guitar, oud, and buzuq. At the same time, Nagi accompanies on riqq (a small tambourine-like frame drum), tabla (a goblet-shaped hand drum, often called a “darbuka” in the West), or an unconventional trap kit assembled mainly from traditional instruments (for a bass drum, he sometimes uses a box drum). As the name says, the Arab Blues seek connections between the Middle Eastern compositional and improvisational canon — called the turath — and the Western traditions of blues and jazz. This isn’t an entirely new approach, and in the duo’s sets, you can hear occasional echoes of earlier East-West hybrids, such as Dick Dale’s surf-rock workout on the Eastern Mediterranean folk song “Misirlou” or Rabih Abou-Khalil’s oud fusion classic “Blue Camel.” The Arab Blues’s synthesis is accessible, gritty, and exhilarating, and Nagi is a born performer—he always seems to be having the time of his life onstage. He and Gabriel create a sound that’s sometimes graceful, sometimes bracingly noisy, like a Middle Eastern garage band.
The Biamp Portland Jazz Festival is a ten-day multi-venue celebration of jazz presented in Portland, Oregon. The Festival is dedicated to evolving America’s art form, featuring recognized jazz masters and rising jazz stars alongside local jazz heroes.