Julie Lemberger for The New York Times
Qawal Najmuddin Saifuddin & Brothers and Hassan Hakmoun and Friends shared a double bill at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on Saturday. The brothers, from left: Ehtishamuddin Hussain; Zafeeruddin Ahmed; Muhammad Najmuddin (the group’s leader); Saifuddin Mehmood; Mughisuddin; and Naseem Ahmed.
By JON PARELES
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A trans-Islamic jam session, blending ecstatic trance music from Pakistan and Morocco, was the finale of the concert Saturday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The Pakistani group Qawal Najmuddin Saifuddin & Brothers — making its New York City debut — and the New York group of Moroccan Gnawa musicians,Hassan Hakmoun and Friends, shared a double bill, and then performed together. The concert marked the opening of the museum’s dazzling New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.
Qawwali and Gnawa music are Islamic styles that take a visceral path toward celebration of the divine. Like gospel music, though with their own rhythms and messages of praise, both styles flat-out rock. They build from prayerful incantations to handclapping and (for the Gnawas) foot-stamping rhythms; repeated refrains gather momentum as improvisatory vocals curl, rasp and ascend.
Yet their regional differences are clear. Gnawa music, originating from sub-Saharan slaves brought north to Morocco, has a foundation of West African three-against-two rhythms and melodies based on five-note scales. Qawwali’s ingredients are very differently inflected South Asian rhythms and melodic modes. There’s more than one route to mystical joy.
Members of Qawal Najmuddin Saifuddin & Brothers trace their ancestry back to the 13th-century musicians in the very first qawwali group assembled by the poet and composer Amir Khusrau; his songs filled their set, an abridged version of the Sufi ritual called sama (which means “listening”). This generation has abundant vocal gifts. Other qawwali groups that have visited the United States, like the one led by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, usually rely on a commanding lead singer (and sometimes a younger-generation disciple) answered by group call-and-response. Qawal Najmuddin Saifuddin & Brothers revealed four lead-worthy voices, who are indeed brothers: the group’s leader, Muhammad Najmuddin; Ehtishamuddin Hussain, who sustained one startling note for 18 seconds; and the two harmonium players, Saifuddin Mehmood and Zafeeruddin Ahmed. They let their slow improvisations overlap, and as Mughisuddin, on tabla, and Naseem Ahmed, on dhol (cylindrical drum), drove the accelerating rhythms, the singers took increasingly spectacular turns, individual testimonies of passionate devotion.
Mr. Hakmoun’s Gnawa music, more familiar to New Yorkers, gets its propulsion from a lower register. There are stuttering bass lines from his sintir, a traditional Moroccan lute, along with the triple-time clatter of the metal castanets call qraqeb. His set, drawing on his more traditional repertory, was both ritual and spectacle, with band members stepping forward to jump and twirl in their multicolored robes. Mr. Hakmoun’s voice, leaping above the instruments with an untamed edge, was echoed by his percussionists and shadowed by the counterpoint of an oud. The songs had meditative stretches that led, sooner or later, to dancing.
The final team-up of the two groups, with two songs devised for the occasion, was a crosscultural experiment in finding common ground: praising Allah, handclapping, a 4/4 beat, melodies using compatible scales. Mr. Hakmoun’s group started the collaboration, with a sintir line and a major-mode melody. The qawwali musicians returned onstage, and from there it was like a double-exposure: percussion overlapping Asia and Africa, singers from both groups pulling the melodies toward their own idioms. It could sound like qawwali with Gnawa bass lines, or Gnawa music with tabla crossrhythms, with handclapping from both sides. The qawwalis got the last vocal flourishes; by the end the Gnawa musicians were on their feet dancing. It’s probably not a stable fusion, but it was an enthusiastic one.
