Palestinian musician Faris Ishaq wants classical music education to be expanded to include more global traditions.
He would also like to see Arabic music better represented in the classical music repertoire – in the same way as jazz has come to include global movements and fusions inspired by the American genre.
"Arabic classical music has a strong heritage, and there are so many innovative musicians in the world,” Ishaq told The National.
This is why the musician, who studied classical trombone in Palestine and global jazz in the US, has turned to the nay, an ancient Palestinian flute.
For years, Ishaq has been refining and experimenting with the nay, an ageless instrument from herding traditions.
Total immersion
His first solo album – Jasad, or "Body" in English – is a nod to the physical efforts it takes him to play this small, rudimentary instrument made of hollowed cane.
Ishaq's latest feat is to engage his listeners with just the nay and a foot-mounted frame drum that he plays alone, in one uncut recording.
Using techniques that he developed himself, he has been able to create multi-layered sounds with his breath and voice as part of his energetic performances. He has been touring Europe, Turkey and Australia before the album's release, culminating in a performance at the London Jazz Festival in November.
Though the nay is often portrayed as having a melancholy sound, Ishaq wants audiences to hear the more rhythmic and energised ways of playing it. A lot of his music is inspired by tashbib, a folk style of improvising by shepherds, and often played at weddings.
His method of slowly crafting music, reworking compositions for what could be more than a year, is perhaps the antithesis of how a lot of music is produced today.
Ishaq recently turned down a “very good” offer from a tech company to feed 100 recordings into a Large Language Model each month. The company’s aim was to have users create their own instant music using AI-generated musical sounds.
Keeping it real
“To me that was insulting. I said no. I will not feed AI with this instrument. I don’t have the right, it is part of my ancestry,” he said.
Jasad's first song, Ard (earth), gives listeners a sense of how the instrument was traditionally played, using a specific style of tashbib. It includes known Palestinian, Iraqi and Jordanian melodies.
“[The song] is about our connection to the surrounding landscape and nature, reflecting on its beauty and being entranced by the beauty of the land,” Ishaq told The National.
The second track is Qabas (spark) or "incense trail" in English. It gets its Arabic name from its simple musical pattern, which is repeated with variations throughout the track.
To this modern minimalism, Ishaq has blended one of the oldest scales in Arabic music, the nakreez maqam. “The first track is earthy, the next one is a bit flamey and spiritual. It transports you to one of the oldest maqams that we have,” he said.
Precious moments
Ishaq’s love of jazz appears in the tracks Fragments and My Favourite Things, which is based on John Coltrane’s own cover of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic from the film The Sound of Music.
Ishaq builds up towards the song over two minutes of improvisation in the track Fragments. “People start hearing the fragmented melody of My Favourite Things building up. Then there is this groovy percussive beat with the nay that I do. In the second loop comes the melody of My Favourite Things,” he said.
While he hopes to have listeners discover the complexities of the nay, he also hopes to elevate the instrument in the classical music tradition. “I am pushing to go to the National Flute Society and present the nay as an instrument that is worth including in major education,” he said.
Born in Bethlehem but now based part-time in Manchester, Ishaq taught himself to play the nay in his late teens, having learnt classical music and the trombone at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Bethlehem.
Over years of experimentation, Ishaq has learnt to play the instrument to achieve the wider range of notes required in jazz and modern Arabic music.
The first step, he said, was to take the nay to a specialist craftsman in Egypt to add two more holes to the instrument. The second, which he refined as a jazz student at Berklee College of Music in Boston, was to manipulate the way he plays to create new notes.
Long time
In an earlier interview with The National, Ishaq rejected the notion that he is “preserving” tashbib as a dying musical genre. Preserving, he explains, has orientalist undertones and is an acknowledgement that your culture is dying, too.
“I don't want to preserve,” he said then. "It's like saying that I'm going to die, and my father is dead and my culture is dead. It’s more that I’m bringing it to life, to celebrate it, to show it."
Rather, he hopes to show the “visionary” culture of Palestinian artists such as himself, who can experiment with tradition while also creating music of international quality.
“I want people to have an authentic Palestinian experience, but also a visionary Palestinian experience,” he said.
