Photo courtesy of the artist.

Trumpet player, santur player, composer and singer Amir ElSaffar has been creating a unique combination of jazz and traditional Iraqui maqam with his band, Two Rivers, for over ten years. While ElSaffar has played at The Jazz Gallery several times over the years, Two Rivers will make their Gallery debut on Thursday, with Ole Mathisen (tenor saxophone), Tareq Abboushi (buzuq), Zafer Tawil (oud), Carlo DeRosa (bass), and Tomas Fujiwara (drums). We spoke with ElSaffar about maqam, jazz, and his experiences playing music in and of the Middle East; here are excerpts from that conversation.

The Jazz Gallery: How would you describe your musical background?

Amir ElSaffar: There’s a lot to that question. My main training as a trumpet player was in classical music and in jazz music; I was playing both simultaneously throughout my teens, and I studied classical trumpet in school and played in the Civic Orchestra in Chicago, which was a great training orchestra for the Chicago Symphony. I was very much also interested in improvisation and jazz, and blues, and rhythm and blues, and I played in many different bands in Chicago, my hometown coming from different styles. Basically any situation that the trumpet could be a part of, I was playing in.

Then I  moved to New York, and I started to specialize more in finding my own voice, and my own way of jazz improvisation. Eventually that led me to Arabic music, and to maqam music, and then I went to Iraq in 2002 and spent most of that year learning a tradition called the maqam. Just before the war started, I left Iraq and traveled all over the Middle East and Europe, studying with different teachers, learning Iraqi music and Arabic music in general, understanding the modal music of the Middle East. After another five or six years I started to come up with ways of combining jazz and maqam and different musical languages.

TJG: What about jazz and maqam made you feel that they worked together?

AE: I was commissioned to write something, and I wasn’t really sure that they made sense together at the beginning. It felt like two very different words, and I had to find the link between the two. Once I started writing, it began to make sense, and I started to understand how these two musical systems are actually very much related, and coming from one root, one source. I started to later understand Coltrane’s music in terms of, not that he was consciously drawing on maqam music, but there is a sensibility that’s common. Some of Miles’s music as well, his modal music. Duke Ellington was drawing on Middle Eastern influences, Don Cherry, Dave Brubeck, of course, there’s a lot of examples in jazz history, and kind of a fascination and a connection with music of the Middle East. But I think I went a step deeper, in terms of really understanding what Middle Eastern music was about, and then finding ways of combining. I should say deeper on the Middle Eastern side, not necessarily deeper on the jazz side, but yeah.

TJG: How do you see the two as informing each other?

AE: Well, the tonal system of maqam music is based on the Greek modes, which are in fact Babylonian in origin, and it’s the same source, they both draw on the same melodic source; Western music and Western harmony kind of stems from this, and if you go further back, there’s sort of a pentatonic basis that you find in music from Africa as well as east Asia and southeast Asia. So that’s one aspect of it, but there’s also the fact that many of the African slaves that came to the Americas were Muslim. The documentation of musical practices of the slaves, there weren’t many people who were writing down what was going on or documenting activities, but historians are starting to piece it together, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists. It’s now understood that there was a call to prayer, for instance, and there were people reciting Qu’ran, people coming from Africa. So one can surmise that there was maqam, because maqam melodies and these modes are very compatible for Qu’ranic recitation, for call to prayer and other Islamic rituals. So there may have been an historic precedent. Also the instruments that slaves brought and eventually became part of American culture, like the banjo, the tambourine, and other percussion and even string instruments, similar to the violin, also have a basis or connection to the Middle East.

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Album art courtesy of Greenleaf Records.

Over the past two decades, alto saxophonist Greg Ward has built himself a strong reputation as a ferocious improviser and thoughtful, multifaceted composer. He’s released acclaimed albums with both his Chicago-based group Fitted Shards and his New York trio Phonic Juggernaut. In 2014, Ward was a Jazz Gallery Residency Commission recipient, creating a multimedia work inspired by the sculptor Preston Jackson.

Ward’s newest project—Touch My Beloved’s Thought—is a taut and impassioned reimagining of Charles Mingus’s seminal 1963 recording, The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady. Ward was commissioned by The Jazz Institute of Chicago to create the work alongside choreography by Onye Ozuzu; the full production was premiered at Millennium Park in Chicago last year. This Friday, July 8th, marks the release of the project in recorded form on Greenleaf Music, and The Jazz Gallery is proud to welcome Ward and his ensemble 10 Tongues to our stage that evening. We caught up with Ward this week by phone to hear about how he put his own stamp on this Mingus masterpiece, as well as his experiences working with dance.

The Jazz Gallery: When was the first time you heard The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady?

Greg Ward: It was before we decided to do this project, in October of 2014. Drummer Mike Reed was asked to do it originally and he told me about it, so I decided to check out the record.

TJG: That’s interesting, because when I was going through school, Black Saint was one of those records that I felt you had to know.

GW: Yeah [laughs]. I’m someone who likes to listen to something over and over and over and over, because I feel that the better I become as a musician, the more I find in the intricacies of amazing music. That keeps me from listening to a lot of things. I feel very behind myself as a listener!

TJG: What really struck you when you heard the album for the first time?

GW: The orchestration was the first thing that hit me because it was so lush. You have like contrabass trombone, and just a really rich sounding band filling it out. I just noticed immediately that this wasn’t your typical head chart kind of piece. There weren’t necessarily tunes. It had a narrative, a longer form. That struck me immediately. As the piece unfolded, I was really struck how it featured alto sax. Initially, when I thought that Mike Reed was going to do something with this project and I play with him so much, I was like, “All right! I gotta be in there!”

TJG: When you took over the project, how did you decide on doing your own freer interpretation of the piece, rather than a transcription, or something that hews closer to the original performance?

GW: I felt like some of special moments on the recording were a bit by chance, or via overdubs. Some of the material clearly feels like mistakes. If you listen really closely, you can hear Mingus counting off the band and then stopping them, and then a couple of seconds later hear them start again. I don’t think you can really pull that off through a transcription or straight arrangement. So I thought what would be more effective and could really move people was to do something of my own, using some of the themes or just the orchestrational feel as jumping-off points.

TJG: I feel it can be a real psychological challenge to make one’s own version of a legendary piece. Did you feel pressure to live up to the original and how did that affect how you worked out the project?

GW: I wanted to do my research because I didn’t have the benefit of this being a monumental work in my upbringing in music. I read liner notes, I read different things on the internet, I watched the Mingus documentary [Triumph of the Underdog], just all these things to get inside  of what was happening during the recording. It was very important to me that I not mess this up. When I read that this piece is hailed as one of the great orchestrational triumphs in all of jazz, I was like, “Oh no!” It was something that I really took seriously. It was important to me that the people who love that record felt fulfilled and that I could look back on it and say that I did the best I could on it. I hold myself to a high standard in that regard. A lot of people who’ve seen the live show or heard the record feel the inspiration from The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, and Mingus’s life and work in general. I’m happy about that.

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