Reem Kelani

This is a review of a Reem Kelani gig I saw at a festival last August. Reem Kelani is a Palestinian singer who sings a mix of songs from Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora. Her father comes from Jenin, and her mother from Nazareth. She has an incredible vocal range, and her vocal style incorporates Arabic chanting and ululations as well as conventional singing. I really enjoyed this music, which was a new kind of sound for me, as it’s not a style of music I’m familiar with. As well as loving the music in its own right, the concert was interesting because Kelani talked quite a bit about the origins and meanings of many of the songs.

There seemed to be a certain formlessness to some of the music, which left a lot of freedom for the different musicians to breathe within the structure of the songs. Kelani on vocals was backed by a bass clarinet, Egyptian violin, drums, and double bass (which was both plucked and played with a bow), but the first number was backed only with syncopated handclaps. This first song was a wedding song from Acre on the Mediterranean, and is about the bride taking the mickey out of her new husband’s family. Her family are saying that they will make their new son-in-law a shepherd or an Arabian king depending on how he treats their daughter. The song is in 6/4 time, which is a very old Palestinian rhythm, apparently.

Next was a song from Gallilee originating from the period of Ottoman rule. It is a slow, sad song, sung by the women when the men are going off to fight in a war. The music is based around a drone in E flat, I think it was – this was the tonic, and Kelani invited the audience to hum the tonic. The singing is in the tradition of the Greek orthodox church, and comes from the influence of Byzantine chanting.

The next song was about a group of women crossing the desert who are refused a lift by a convoy of caravans. They show their resilience by singing to the drivers. The tempo here was a bit faster, with the percussion more in the foreground, with Kelani playing a kind of bodhrán. She clearly still has a love and enthusiasm for this music. It was clear that she was enjoying herself on stage, dancing and communicating with her sidemen.

The next song was the highlight of the concert for me. It was called ‘Baker’s Dozen’ because of the time signature, which is a cycle of thirteen beats. Kelani described it as 12+1 beats, but to me it sounded like 3 measures of 3/4 time followed by a measure of 4/4 time. The song began with a double bass solo and then went into the 13 beat rhythm. This time signature comes from a folk tradition common to Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

In this tradition, even in the middle of a happy song like this one, there is a middle section where people sing of a longing for their homeland. In this way, even a wedding song can become a song of resistance (according to Kelani). This section takes the form of a dialogue between the vocalist and an instrumentalist (in this case, the bass clarinet). The singing is similar to the Spanish ‘deep singing’/canta chondo, apparently – this was an influence that the Arab influence introduced to Spain. (Kelani compared this to a scene in a Bollywood movie, where people can start singing and dancing in the middle of a battle scene, saying that this kind of mix of emotions was part of a similar tradition.)

Kelani was a mine of information, and the music itself was excellent. Very evocative. They finished up with a more conventional Western song, for which they were joined on stage by a guitar-slinging Christian minister dude named Garth Hewitt. He’s a campaigner for Palestinian human rights and so forth. This song, which I think is one of Hewitt’s, was called ‘The Death of Trees’, and is about the removal of a million olive trees since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. These trees were sold, destroyed, or replanted in illegal Israeli settlements, and in the song they symbolise the death of a culture. This is all very well, but the music wasn’t a patch on what had gone before. Kelani’s own music really stood out from anything else at the festival, and I bought her debut album, Sprinting Gazelle, on the strength of her performance. Kelani’s vocal range is very impressive, and the instrumentation was great as well. This is great stuff.