...continued

Abu Ar-Hail is a solitary man, terribly scarred from a childhood battle with glaucoma. He is functionally blind.

He brought his rebaba, a simple instrument made of horse hide, and sticks of wood. Its one string is tightly-stretched horse hair; its bow is also made of bent wood and horse hair. It has no frets, no sound hole...it uses a wad of cotton and a twisting piece of wood to tighten the string. Yet according to our research, the rebaba may well be the historic ancestor of all stringed instruments.

The guitar, the violin, even the piano may trace their origins back to this simple instrument, used by the Bedouins for thousands of years to create a haunting sound to accompany them across the desert.

People sat in silence, as Abu Ar-Hail began to play. We turned on the recording equipment, and here is a 30-second sample of what we heard:

Great skill is required to coax such a haunting, bluesy sound out of two pieces of horsehair. We learned that this song, and others he played later, was composed by Abu Ar-Hail himself.

Now, music began to happen freely in Al-Kaabneh. Our visiting musician, Mohammed Abu-Khater, began to play a song that Abu Ar-Hail recognized, and they sang together. Someone grabbed the nearby tabla and began making rhythms with it. The crowd grew, as people arrived from all over the nearby desert. Someone else made a rhythm with a tambourine, and a salt-shaker. A traditional improvised Bedouin musical instrument was brought in: a large, stand-up coffee grinder, with a big stick and a hollow base which, when knocked and stirred together, produces a satisfying beat.

When there was a pause in the action, we would play back brief excerpts from what had been recorded, and people nodded and smiled.

Soleiman al-Najadeh, brother of the head of the Village Council, ran off to fetch a book of traditional songs which he remembered from his parents. When he returned, we discovered that he has a clear, soulful voice, like an Arabic Van Morrison. He and Abu-Khater recorded many songs together.

All of this music was recorded unrehearsed, with only one take. Imposing the artificial discipline of a professional recording studio on this process might have interrupted what was happening with the people and the re-discovery of their music.

To hear a short 23-second sample of Moustafa Soliman's singing, click one of these links:

Without prompting from us, after we left Al-Kaabneh that night a group of young men from the village got together. They used a cassette unit to record some traditional Bedouin chants and marching songs. This happened late at night, in the quiet darkness, out of sight and hearing of the crowds we had seen during the day.

We heard this powerful, joyous rhythmic music the next day, and wanted to make a high-quality digital recording...but we had to settle for the cassette they made themselves. The men were shy about performing in public; most of them are teachers in the school, and didn't want to perform in front of their students. This music forms part of the Al-Kaabneh music collection, filtered and cleaned up in the digital editing process, and though it shows the technical limitations of its origins on a cassette, the energy comes through.

Another day of recording in the village was scheduled, but a tragic accident prevented it. In nearby Hebron, an accident at a small lighter manufacturer led to a huge gas explosion, which killed eight women outright; several of them were related to people from Al-Kaabneh, so there was a long pause to grieve and support these families, and music was finished for the moment in the village.

We were able to quickly schedule an alternate recording session, with students of Abu-Khater, at his apartment in south Jerusalem, and several tracks of this traditional Palestinian music made their way into our final collection.

In all, we recorded 35 tracks in Al-Kaabneh and Jerusalem, and selected the top 20 pieces for inclusion in the first Greenstar World Music collection, titled "Speak Together." You can order this complete CD now, which includes images and detailed liner notes on each song.

Or you can download any of the individual songs immediately, for free. Go to this link to see details:

The final, enduring image we took away from the Al-Kaabneh sessions was the pride that the people now showed in their music. They were eager to tell us where the songs came from, all about the instruments used, to help us name and translate the songs, and were very clear with us about which songs are truly ancient, traditional Bedouin desert songs, and which are more modern, Palestinian or Arabic in character.

As we were packing up, one teenager from the village took the rebaba off by himself, to a corner where no one was watching, and began haltingly to create some sounds with it.

Learn More! On the Web Basic Introduction to Bedouin Culture http://www.reiterreisen.com/africa/bedouin.htm Bedouins in the United Arab Emirates: http://www.ecssr.ac.ae/Land/music.html Recommended books from Amazon.com Bedouin Life in the Egyptian Wilderness by Joseph J. Hobbs, Leo A. Tregenza (Designer) $13.95 Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society by Lila Abu-Lughod $18.95 Review International Journal of Middle East Studies "A valuable contribution in many areas, giving us new dimensions of nomadic and Arab culture, poetry, women, and gender roles and a fresh way of looking at the interrelatedness of the ideology and politics of sentiment. An outstanding anthropological ethnography of the Bedouin of the Egyptian desert, as well as an unusually skillful analysis of gender and social structure as it is expressed through womens poetic discourse.