Lawrence Peryer: So, you're about two months past the release of the new record. How is everything going?
Marwan Allam: It's been great. We had the release show at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater in New York City on July 9, and the album came out a couple of weeks after that. I released the single first, then the full album. I've been receiving good reviews from journalists and people interested in that style of music. Since I'm independent on the production side, I have to do everything myself. I have the right people to deal with the production and getting the album out where it should be, but I need more time to set that up. I'm dealing with writing music, performing, and production. It sometimes gets overwhelming, though the more we do it, the faster it gets.
Lawrence: Sure, you learn all the processes, steps, and tasks.
Marwan: It gets faster, yes. Before, people didn't really do all the steps—they hired others, which is valid—but now everything is getting really expensive, and musicians need to learn the entrepreneurial side of music. We all have to be composers, arrangers, skilled instrumentalists, and entrepreneurs. You have to complete that side to be a successful musician.
Lawrence: How do you feel about that? Is it something you find any joy in? Is it interesting to you, or is it just drudgery?
Marwan: Honestly, I hadn't been focusing on that side until I faced the reality that I needed to release an album and deal with the market. That's your budget, that's your situation, and you're forced to learn. That's how I'm starting to learn. As a sideman, I know how things work, but it's a completely different experience when you're the band leader. When it's your project, it's very different than being just a musician.
Lawrence: What's the significance of the album's title? Is there a metaphorical significance or literal?
Marwan: It's both metaphoric and symbolic. I grew up in a country with multicultural diversity. We have different ethnicities, but we also have tolerance between modern and old. In the old city, people maintain traditional jobs—tailors, hat makers, traditional clothing makers. When you go to the more modern city, which is connected to the old city, there's this door that used to be part of a castle wall. Though the wall is gone, only the door remains, connecting the two parts. That connection brings me to my roots as a person who grew up in Tunisia speaking three or four languages.
You go to the old city and meet somebody who seems from three centuries ago, doing something by hand with no technology, then you take the subway and see tech people. That kind of modern and old—it's not only talking about it but feeling it inside you. That's something I have to bring into the music I play. I discovered jazz early, maybe when I was fifteen or sixteen, but I was also into traditional North African music. In Tunisia's music schools, we don't have jazz education—just classical or traditional music, which is beautiful.
Lawrence: How did you come across jazz as a young person if it wasn't in the schools?
Marwan: It didn't come right away—it was a discovery. I discovered guitar music first. My brother happened to have a guitar at home that he bought because he thought it was cool. I started noodling with him, though I had no idea what I was doing. Then my mom said, "If you're into guitar, there's a flamenco show in Carthage"—which is the symbolic city of Tunisia, with all the Roman heritage.
Lawrence: That's amazing.
Marwan: I went to see this concert and was mesmerized. I saw the guitar playing flamenco in those bulerías, and they were very close to us, the feeling of flamenco music being very close to North Africa. I was crying—I wanted to be like that. I was fourteen at the time and had no music education before. My mother put me in the Spanish Cultural Center, where they offered guitar lessons, both classical and flamenco. That's how it started.
They taught me to read music a little bit, and I was into anything that sounded good. Then I discovered B.B. King, blues, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan. I was really into blues, so I bought an electric guitar. That's where it started. Then I discovered George Benson—not live, but his music—and Robben Ford.
Lawrence: Sure, yeah.
Marwan: That touch between jazz and blues, the pentatonics—I was like, "What are they doing?" It was so complicated but so good. My ears weren't developed yet; I was coming from a country with no harmony in music. But slowly my ears started to develop, and I began to listen to chord progressions and everything, learning about Western music forms.
We had one guy in Tunisia who was really good at jazz at the time. He was one of the pioneers that everybody went to his house to learn about jazz. He was good.
Lawrence: Wow.
Marwan: I went to ask for a lesson. I knocked on his door—there were no phones. I just asked where he lived and said, "Excuse me, I just want a guitar lesson."
We had a lesson, and he was happy with me, and we became friends. Then he told me, "You know what? You should play bass."
He gave me Jaco Pastorius's CD. Then he gave me a compilation CD with Stanley Clarke, Ron Carter, all the great bass players. I was listening to that CD ten times a day or something—Victor Bailey, all that beautiful electric bass stuff.
Lawrence: Yeah, melodic bass, yeah.
Marwan: So good. Even now, I feel nostalgic about that music. You know Victor Bailey, the bassist, right?
Lawrence: Sure.
Marwan: He has one album called Low Blow.
Lawrence: That's the one, yeah.
Marwan: Every time I listen to that with Lenny White on drums, it's so killing, so good. Wayne Krantz on the guitar.
Lawrence: What do you think he saw that made him suggest you be a bass player? That's so interesting.
Marwan: We were doing a lesson playing chords and playing the bass line at the same time on guitar. So I was at the level of playing chords and then adding the bass. He was like, "Let me explain to you the bass line, the walking, the function." In music, you have to go like four notes in the bar to keep it connected to the chords. I just discovered that with him because before, I was playing the chords, but I didn't know exactly the approach that bass players use to make connections, the techniques.
So we were working on that, and I discovered the function of the bass. He picked up the bass and played for me, and I was like, "Wow, this is so cool and so deep." You discover the function of the instrument. That love, that spark I got when he touched the bass and I saw the difference—then I had to start understanding the swing tradition, playing different swings.
When things started to become more professional, my mentor—his name is Fawzi Chekili, one of the pioneer jazz guitarists—texted me in 2003. He said, "There's a masterclass at the Mediterranean Music Center in Tunisia, up north near the sea. It's a very good music center, and they're having teachers from Belgium—high-level, well-known musicians. They're teaching for one week. Please come, let's hang and check it out. You'll learn a lot." That's where things became decided—okay, I'm going to be a professional musician.
Lawrence: Interesting.
Marwan: It was actually better than school. They came for one week every three months. The progression I had between 2004 and 2008—I think I got everything. They crafted everything for me. In 2008, I got accepted to a conservatory in Holland. But the knowledge I had before—that was it. When I went to school, it wasn't like, "Oh yeah, this is 'Autumn Leaves'"—no, I learned that five years ago.
Lawrence: The overlap between how Arabic music tradition is taught more orally and less through notation, and how there's that strand in jazz of the older player or master musician mentoring and learning by doing or demonstration—I wonder if coming from an Arabic music tradition helped you embrace that modality of learning.
Marwan: Yes, because we don't learn reading music and being mentally prepared to be focused. That level of focus in Western music, we don't have that. We're more emotional. When we play music, it's very emotional, very sensitive, but that emotion kind of distracts from the focus. I struggled with learning to read, and still, I'm an okay reader here in New York, but I'm not a really good sight-reader.
You learn after when you focus, but then you see the steps you had. I didn't understand what was happening when I was young, but you achieve better things—the musicality, the taste, the level of improvising. You bring stuff from everywhere, and you take risks. There are good things to that, and you rely on your ears more than what's in the chart. I learned from many masters in jazz who play by ear. They learned everything by ear, and they rely on the happening of the music through their ears. They organize everything in their head; they don't need a chart. It's a skill to learn, but ideally, you learn both.
Maybe this new generation of musicians has got it all—they kind of match the perfect level now. That's why these kids these days are killing it, like the musicianship and everything. I think it's all together. My generation—I finished school maybe ten, twelve, fifteen years ago—it was okay, but there was still a lack of a few things. In schools in general, all of them. I went to many schools, U.S., Europe. But this generation, I think, is the best.
Lawrence: Incredible.
Marwan: All these prodigies, they're like twenty-five and they play like forty-year-old musicians.
Lawrence: I love hearing that.
Marwan: Yeah, it is really beautiful.
Lawrence: You said something a few minutes ago about the emotional nature of the music. I have just a surface-level understanding of how Arabic music works and how the maqam works, but my understanding is that they're even classified emotionally, right? There's sort of a taxonomy of the maqam based on the emotion it's meant to evoke. Am I saying this correctly?
Marwan: Yes.
Lawrence: Don't be shy about correcting me.
Marwan: Yes, it's very subjective and very clear because it is true. When we study the maqam, we think of it as an emotional state. For instance, there are maqams that express specific emotions, and you have to express them that way. You can't be happy when you're playing certain maqams—the technique, the sensation, everything has to be sad, for instance, or happy.
Lawrence: Yeah, it's like method acting.
Marwan: Or upbeat. Yeah, it's very close to acting. They're very close. So that puts you in an emotional state that you have to be prepared for, and the closer you get, the more music comes out of that maqam. Not only sad—for instance, we have the pentatonic scales that we use for different music, like dance music or African music. Joy, express joy—there are maqams that are meant for specific emotions.
Lawrence: Is the closest analogy in Western music like the way a major or minor key evokes? It seems like it's too simple of a comparison. There's nothing quite as emotionally rich. Is there an analogy you can draw into Western music?
Marwan: I don't know. It is in jazz, yes. But in classical music, it's completely different. The type of emotion they have in classical music is very different than what Arabic music would associate with. When I study classical music, it's "Oh yeah, you see this movement, they go into that, and that slow tempo goes to"—it's beautiful. But the analogy of Arabic music is different than that. It's based on improvisation, the length of the notes, the groove—like repetition through grooves that gets you to a trance mode. That's how it slowly puts you in a specific mode.
Arabic music is very repetitive. It's very melodic, vertical. There's no harmony.
Lawrence: Melody and rhythm.
Marwan: Melody, yeah. Melody and rhythm. Harmonies are within the melody. Like, harmonies, sometimes they have two lines and everything. But we never sing horizontal as in classical music—ah, one, four, or plagal cadence or all the cadences. In Arabic music, we don't have that. We have them after, like you have the melody and then you put harmony on top of it.
Lawrence: Do you know why the music evolved that way? Was it a function of the types of instruments? Was it something to do with the mindset of the people or a belief system? I'm very curious about that.
Marwan: It's essentially the instrumentation. The instruments are not chordal instruments. They play Arabic music usually in single lines. We don't have pianos. Pianos aren't ours. The closest we have is this string instrument called the qanun. It has a lot of strings—it's like a piano without the keys.
They have it in the Balkans. They play it with sticks. That's the only chord instrument they built at the time. But they don't play it as a chord instrument—they don't play chords. That instrument plays melody. So everybody plays melody. And the forms are also different.
You don't have a chord progression or something where everybody improvises after. We improvise over a vamp. We do like a vamp, small place, and music, and then you play on that. There are no chords that go, "Okay, we have to play on this." It's just melody. And everybody remembers the melody.
The forms are very interesting in Arabic music—not only the melodies. The repetition is heavy, but it's never boring. It's like you go and repeat this section, then you go to this section, then to the other section, then back to the first one, then to the second, then to the fourth. There's a nice way of thinking about the forms of music. There are different forms in Andalusian music, in Middle Eastern music, because there are different styles. Where I come from, it's more North African tradition, which is very influenced by Spanish, like Andalus. Very influenced by African music from Mali, from Morocco, Algeria.
Lawrence: Such a crossroads. Tunisia is such a crossroads for hundreds and thousands of years, not even modern history—just everybody came through Tunisia on the way to other parts of Africa and the Middle East or up into Europe. It's so fascinating.
Marwan: That's the concept the album title is dedicated to. Bab Bhar means "The Gate of the Sea"—we're a little bit of everything, basically. We had Maltese, we had Sicilian living there, we had Jews, we had Black—we are everything. And everybody brings their own recipes and food and tradition within a small space.
The food must be so good there. Yes, everybody brings their food, tradition, but it's still Tunisian. It's not like very diverse with drastic changes. Like let's say in the U.S., it's like you walk in another block and you're in a different country. Especially in New York, you walk in a block, it's like, "Wow, this feels different." We don't have that. Tunisia is still one country, but within the country, you feel the history—like the food, the music—and you feel it deep, very deep inside.
Lawrence: Something that's striking to me about the album—and I'm not going to do an injustice to the song names, maybe I'll let you pronounce them—but the first song that opens the album is really a statement to me of what the music on the rest of the record is, and it integrates these various strands and traditions in a very organic way. It's not showy in terms of exoticism, but it feels original. Something I really love is that coda section towards the end of the song where the rhythm really comes in. Those Tunisian rhythms in the Western orchestration really work. Having the trap drum set play those sounds is really effective.
Marwan: Yeah, that was coming initially to the song called "Ajmiya." Ajmiya in Tunisian means foreigner. Ajam in Arabic means foreign, or like ajmiya, foreigner. That song was dedicated to the Black Tunisian community who originally immigrated from Mali, from sub-Saharan countries, and they have their own musical traditions that they brought with them.
Same as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. They name it differently. In Morocco, they have the Gnawa music; Algeria has Diwan; and Tunisia has Stambali—they call it Stambali—but the repertoire is very similar. It's very close, but different. The sound in each country is different. The way of playing qraqeb [percussion instruments], whatever you call them for the rhythms, it's different.
I was trying to imitate the gimbri, the sound of the gimbri on the walking bass and the bass lines. In the intro, I was putting something like shakers that makes the strings sound weird. I put them right under the bridge of the bass. And then I had to change the tuning for the bass in the beginning to just imitate that plucking. The upright bass, I don't play it the same.
Lawrence: And the gimbri is like a simple stringed instrument.
Marwan: It's a three-string instrument. Yeah, it's a bass instrument. That gimbri music and Gnawa music, it's bass music.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Marwan: That's why everybody loves it. It's just bass—that's everything. The rhythm and everything. So I was influenced by that too. That's also part of me. But jazz is also part of me. When you learn jazz for many years, you know what works and doesn't work. You know what's good and fits and is tasteful with this music without breaking the tradition too much or the opposite.
You develop a better taste through the years of how your music can sound good with a touch of modern harmonies. It's like a nice way of putting your heritage into your world. I don't say like, "Oh, this is jazz." Jazz is part of me. I grew up in many places. I studied in Europe. I went to Italy. I went to the Mediterranean sound, you know what I'm saying? Also the New York sound.
I've been mentored by so many great New York musicians through my whole years, even in Tunisia or in Holland where I studied, or even here in New York. I'm still learning a lot from my peers, from my mentors, and along with that, you develop your heritage. You still go back to your music—I still go back every year—and that kind of grows with the personality of who I am at the time.
That's how this idea came for that song. I wanted to keep the groove of it, just keep the meaning of that song. Sometimes jazz musicians put everything they know in one song. It's like, "Oh, killing," and it's just everything. I wanted it to be spacey. As you notice, the song was kind of long. Take a solo, breathe, have fun, and let the groove happen. Let it sit down, because that's how our music is. You don't have like three seconds to go to the next idea and the next information. People don't remember those, you know?
Lawrence: How do your collaborators and the other musicians you worked with on this record react to these influences and your research? How do they find their way in? Did you have to find musicians that were familiar with your traditions?
Marwan: Yes, I was looking for musicians who had similar experience working with similar profiles to mine, who play similar music that I do, and they have that ear. The openness, the willingness to learn attitude. We played a few gigs before recording—we played with that project for maybe a year or two in New York before we recorded, and it was good. Every time we developed something, I would share a few influences and records with musicians to check out, share my influences and the sound that I like.
Yeah, everybody was moving towards that direction and they got what I meant. Also, I didn't really put a lot of restrictions on them because when you put a lot of restrictions on musicians, you tie the music and it's not happening. It's like, "Is that what you want?" That's what I feel like, but do what you feel like. Because when you share your feelings towards that music, that would be more honest. And I wanted the music to sound honest, not only the composition, but just the way you feel, how you fill into the song as an instrumentalist.
Even the studio session was just like the first or second take. We didn't do the whole thing for more than a couple of hours. Read through. No overdubbing. We didn't do a lot of those. We just played right away, no editing, just a few minor things, but just the track as it was played. No other added stuff.
Lawrence: Given all the different experiences and mentors and all your different musical experiences really around the world, what makes you arrive at the jazz quartet as the vehicle for your music?
Marwan: Because it has all the ingredients. You've got rhythm, you've got the bass, you've got the piano, you've got the melody. These are the most important ingredients in any kind of music that you want to do. A jazz quartet can deliver any sound if you do the right instrumentation and the right approach.
Let's say if you have a piano and you want to play microtones or something, you still can—you can add a little keyboard, you can do things to make it happen, but still as a function, it's the piano, or a guitar, or like the chord sound department, you know? And for the percussion, drummers can add a lot of things. Can add sound, touch, can change a lot. So there's no specific sound of like, "Oh, the jazz quartet." There are straight-ahead jazz quartets, modern jazz quartets, fusion jazz quartets, all kinds of jazz quartets.
So I thought, why don't I do something that's not necessarily Middle Eastern, but just different sound? But not very different—slightly different accent, different colors. Just a little bit. As a person, I don't like going for drastic changes. I would take it from where I am and just change things a little bit. They taste good and they're easy to digest, but they feel different.
I'm getting a lot of encouragement towards Arabic music. After the release of the album, people say—I write Arabic music too, like more with old instrumentation and all that stuff, which is great—and these are American musicians, great American musicians who grew up in America. But they play great Arabic music. This is fascinating to me. When I moved here, I wasn't expecting to find really good American Middle Eastern traditional players. And they grew up in America, even though their background is white—how is this possible? I had experience in Europe and they're not good. You still feel it. There is this lack of culture, lack of emotion. But here, they got it.
You know, like you are from a different country, but you play jazz and you've got it. That's what happened here. I had people from Massachusetts, from different places, and they play killing, but they understand.
Lawrence: Do you have a theory why that is? Why American-born players can do it?
Marwan: I think because they see the beauty in Arabic music, and they see the point of it, and just learn it from the root of it, and they stick to that tradition. They get the meaning of that music. Other people just like playing and see it as cool, and that's it. But here, I saw the depth that these musicians have, and they have full understanding of how this music really works, and what should be good for this music.
They spend—they invest their life, dedicate their life to this music. So now I'm considering more collaborating with these profiles of musicians. They have this culture inside their musicianship. For the next albums, I might focus more on the Arabic side, bringing even more Arabic sounds rather than just jazz quartet with a little bit of spices here and there.
Lawrence: That's exciting. I'll look forward to that.
Marwan: Yeah, I'm still trying to be me. I don't like to just say, "Okay, this is the album, I'm gonna mix this and that." I don't like that word—it's just like, be who you are. Because the way I always speak my language, sometimes I add three languages at the same time. When I speak Tunisian, it's like a jump of other languages without me noticing.
Lawrence: Yeah, that's fascinating.
Marwan: So maybe I'm trying to speak my language and let people understand those jumps and go with it. That's the point. And just be honest and have a point out of that. Why are we going there? Why is this going there? And then you have the sound. It's like a story—it has to have meaning. Everything needs to be like, this is the intro, hello, how are you, I'm doing good, this is the problem and this is how we solve the problem, and this is the thing, and thank you for coming by. It can be simple, also like this is composition-wise, you have to think as a composer.
You see the great composers like Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk, they have points, they have tricks, they have games, they have so many ingredients in their music. I was like, why don't I play with my heritage that way?
Lawrence: That's exciting.
Marwan: Yeah, it's like when you think of Wayne Shorter playing Arabic music. What does that sound like? So how do I maybe take those elements of composition and use them in Arabic context? Respecting the forms, respecting this, but breaking rules—respect and break. So that's kind of the game of the composition that I'm doing.
