Amir ElSaffar didn’t want to leave Baghdad when the war started. The Oak Park native, a jazz trumpeter who was 25 in 2002, had been there studying the urban classical music maqam, but he was getting more than just a musical education. “When I got there, it was like, ‘This is home. This is where I want to be.’ When I think of those first couple of months it’s like when you first fall in love with somebody. Everything is rosy. It was good the way it felt. The thought of ever leaving it or going away was kind of unbearable for me.”
By the time ElSaffar returned to the U.S. in the fall of 2003 he wasn’t feeling particularly patriotic, and musically his blossoming love for maqam was overtaking his longtime interest in jazz. In most Middle Eastern traditions maqam is a set of musical modes, a kind of tuning system, in which compositions are written, but in Iraq maqam is the song itself—a loose melodic and structural kernel performers use as a basis for improvisation. When the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia asked him in 2005 to write a piece combining jazz and maqam, he only accepted because the money was good. “I wasn’t really into it,” he says. “For a long time I was struggling, and then I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do sets—the first will be maqam and the second set will be jazz.’ But it started to come together.”
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Although he’d started listening to music from Iraq, it didn’t fit into his plans as a musician. In 1990 his sister Dena had traveled to Iraq with their father, and ElSaffar says it was a life-changing experience for her. “She came back and started learning to play Arabic music, wanting to learn the language,” he says. She eventually studied ethnomusicology at the University of Indiana and started her own Arabic group, Salaam. ElSaffar took his own trip to Iraq with his father when he was a teenager, and in college he occasionally listened to maqam, but he didn’t think about performing it himself, mainly because the trumpet can’t play the quarter tones that are such an integral part of the music. But then Dena played him some music by the Egyptian trumpeter Samy El Bably, and he heard that it was possible to adapt the instrument to the demands of Arabic scales.
“It was an incredible experience. I never sang in public except when I had a rock band as a kid, and it was like being high. It’s such a direct connection with the audience when you sing, as opposed to when you play the trumpet or any other instrument, because then it’s like you’re meeting in some other realm, like a third world. When you’re singing, especially in Arabic music, because the words are so important, you really make eye contact with people. It’s like speaking, but you’re expressing something so much more powerful.”
No doubt he’ll figure it out: inhabiting two musical worlds simultaneously is what he’s been working toward for years. “I think it ties together my cultural roots,” he says. “I didn’t consciously do it, but looking back it goes back and forth between these poles and it lets me feel both American and Iraqi at the same time.v
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