Rockhunter, Issue 31, 6 February 2007
Al’Ud dunnit: Al-Andalus, Africa, sufis, bards and blues
Bardman
Abu l-Hasan, or Ali Ibn Nafi, nicknamed Ziryab, lived from c. 789 to 857 (although he lived according to a different time-rhythm). He was a liberated African slave who first strummed his ‘ud at court in Baghdad in the time of Haroun al-Rashid of 1,001 Nights fame. He had to leave Baghdad when he got to hot for them to handle and moved to Córdoba, in Al-Andalus, where he became a bard and boozer. He made himself so popular in Córdoba that people started imitating his manners and fashion sense — even his hairstyles — and he established a school of music that influenced the players and bards of the region for at least two generations after him.
Ziryab mix up the Andalusian music traditions of North Africa and the Middle East and the Arab poetic traditions of qasidah, mwashah and zajal. His distinctive ‘ud stylings paved the way for the passionate intermingling of songs, tunes and dances of Persia and Mesopotamia that later, mixed with Gypsy influence, evolved into the famed Spanish flamenco. And it’s fair to say that his musical-melodical influence was felt further south in what’s now Western Africa.
The nickname, Ziryab, means ‘gold finder’. With his emphasis on cultural syntheses of oral traditions, and on the importance of personal style, it’s probably fair to say that he was considered something of an alchemist, or finder of gold, in a time of great alchemical explorations. It is significant that the Gold Finder played alchemical guitar left-handed in an area that had already known cultural explorations based on Druidic notions of transmutation and memory.
With the rise of Al-Andalus, the court of Córdoba overtook nearby Seville, with its bishoprick, as the regional cultural centre. Isidore of Seville, originally from Cartagena on the African coast of Iberia, was bishop of Seville from c.600. Isidore was a Christianised Visigoth - a culture that stretched from the Western part of the Frankish lands to Southern Iberia. In his Dark Ages philological masterpiece, Etymologiae, Isidore notes: “[T]he use of letters was invented in order to remember things. For things are fettered by letters in order that they may not escape through forgetfulness […] letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear.”
Whether Isidore was replaying his Visigothic roots in recalling the cultural power of transmutation can be fought about elsewhere. Let me just cite this famous passage from The Red Book of Hergest, attributed to Taliesin. Caridwen chases Gwion Bach, who changes shape all the time. Caridwen catches him in a leather bag and throws him in the sea. Gwyddno, the son of Elphin, Taliesin’s master, finds the bag with Taliesin inside. The Bards were no strangers to the praxis of transmutation. And it is worthy of note that in another story about Taliesin the place where a cow is sacrificed affords rest to Yssadawr, the deified patriarch (Yssadawr translates as ‘consumer’, or ’sacrificer’). This link between the Welsh Yssadawr and the Spanish Isidore of Seville is most significant, as it connects two ideas of change employed virtually contemporaneously.
Everybody got they own thing. And concentrating on transmutation through the collective realisation of personal style is Ziryab’s thing. But where Ziryab, with his freestyle Sufic-bardic roots susses the internal-conversational, even anticlerical, methodology of getting the song across, Isidore brandishes the political tool of secret memory-working (generically, Druidic, in that it was a modus operandi of the Keltoi) but redeploys it to establish the world of letters — truly, the world of the clerics — and thereby written literature, rather than oral culture, as the way forward. Continuity and change. Affectivity and effect. Transmutation of tradition. From druidism to sufism. From Visigothic to Moorish. A local brew.
Nevertheless, both men understand that literal transmutation lies at the heart of cultural production: one thing becomes another, whether it’s a melody from one tradition played on the instrument of another, or the understanding that unitary letters invented to aid tribal rhetoric during the wandering and settlement of the various peoples formerly known as Keltoi combine, somewhat surprisingly to spell out — and perhaps, even more surprisingly, effectively atomize — the Word of God.
By now you’ll have guessed that I’m venturing into the last bastion of the music journalistic scoundrel: the origin of the blues. Well, make no mistake, I’m not going to get into an argument about which is the more authentic, oral or written culture. That’s not important right now. Neither is it a matter of assigning a particular location of origin for something that is and was multivalent and multifarious. So what if I said Al-Andalus was the home of the blues?
If we accept as gospel what some American Muslims have noticed about the similarity of, say, the cadences of work songs like “Levee Camp Holler” and the call to prayer, then, yes, it’s easy to say that the blues is the cultural heritage of Muslim slaves, whether sung or played on the guitar. However, although historical revisionism is history, cultural separatism is just stupid. Lest us not forget that the search for the pure sound that defines a people, were it used in Al-Andalus 1,100 years or so ago, would have ruled out the mix-up inventions of Muslim slaves like Ziryab, whose famous ‘ud styling changed the perception of music even more in its remembrance than within earshot.
On a slight diversion, according to various newspapers reports rehashing promotional information from guitar retailers, guitar sales are going through the roof. More people are buying them than ever before, and it’s possible that more are being bought now than during the First Beat Boom.
Of course, only the tiniest percentage of guitars sold will ever be used to play a tune all the way through. Most of these instruments will be chucked in a cupboard by the kids they’ve been presented to and forgotten once they’ve understood that practising is tedious and takes up time that could be better spent quaffing bottles of sweetened alcohol and taking pictures of their mates with camera phones and showing them immediately how they look.
Six-string mediocrity onslaught? Don’t blame Ziryab, he didn’t invent the blues.
I’m gone.
Ed.
Edit: Recent genetic research shows similarities between Y chromosome types found in Somalia, Oman, Egypt and Iraq and, albeit at low frequencies, in France, Spain, Portugal and Britain. So the historical links between the middle east and Iberia and between Iberia and Britain become more tenable.
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