Iranian Motallebi and Iraqi AlHaj forge new musical ground together
As a female Iranian musician raised in the Bahá’í faith, Sahba Motallebi has spent her adult life pushing against barriers and restrictions.
Even as a teenager, doors quickly closed when she joined her first ensemble, Chakaveh, an all-female group dedicated to Persian classical music. Though she was acclaimed as the country’s finest young player on tar, a long-neck four-string lute with a figure-eight shaped body carved from mulberry wood, Motallebi and her bandmates quickly attracted unwanted attention from a government that severely restricts opportunities for women to perform in public.
“We were 17 and 18 years old, we had on hijabs, and were playing traditional music, not even popular music,” Motallebi recalls. “But we played in public, and were stopped from performing after two concerts.”
Based in Orange County for the past decade, Motallebi makes her Bay Area debut as a headliner on Thursday, June 27 with Iraqi oud virtuoso Rahim AlHaj; they form a duo built on mutual esteem and a deep awareness of the bloody history linking their nations. Iran and Iraq fought a long bitter war from 1980-88 that left more than a million casualties.
The conflict had recently ended when AlHaj made his first political statement as an artist by composing “Dasht,” a tune based on a classical Persian scale rather than a classical Arab mode (or maqam). Though the piece won a national award, “it got me in trouble,” he recalls. “‘How dare you?’ But I’ve always thought war was a disaster and advocated for peace.”
While the classical Persian and Arab musical traditions are related, they are different enough that the collaboration between Motallebi and AlHaj requires exquisite musicianship and careful listening. Rather than creating a cultural mashup, they’re engaged in a process of discovery, investigating their kindred musical currents.
“What makes it work is that we’re both versed in improvisation,” Motallebi says. “It’s very beautiful. I’m not repeating what he’s playing, and he’s not going to repeat my Persian ornaments and melodies. We can find common stuff, but totally rooted in our own traditions, like brothers and sisters getting closer and closer.”
Beyond the stark challenges of pursuing a career as a professional musician, Motallebi faced pervasive discrimination for her faith, as Baha’is are considered apostates by the Iranian government. With graduate school closed to her due to her religion, she had to leave her country to pursue her studies.
AlHaj was imprisoned by Saddam Hussein’s government and tortured before he fled to Jordan. Declared a political refugee, he eventually settled in Albuquerque in 2000 and started his long campaign to introduce North American audiences to the oud, the pear-shaped, double-coursed string instrument that’s been a primary musical vehicle throughout North Africa and Western Asia for more than a thousand years (it’s a campaign that’s brought him repeatedly to Freight & Salvage over the years).
He’s recorded numerous albums focusing on the music of Iraq, but AlHaj has also become a master of cross-cultural collaborations. On last year’s “One Sky” (Smithsonian Folkways), he introduced a trio featuring Iranian santur player Sourena Sefati and Palestinian-American percussionist Issa Malluf. And on his magisterial 2010 double album “Little Earth” (Ur Music), AlHaj created settings to record with a truly global array of musicians.
In other words, AlHaj was well prepared for the project with Motallebi, “a ridiculously good, phenomenal musician,” he says. “We’re planning on doing a record together, and I’m composing music for her.”
It’s more than fitting that they first met in a project explicitly designed to break through borders. Grammy Award-winning Cuban-American pianist Arturo O’Farrill brought an international cast of players to the San Diego/Tijuana border to record the 2018 album “Fandango at the Wall (Resilience)”, a musical protest against President Trump’s immigration policies.
Delighted to discover each other, Motallebi and AlHaj took the opportunity to play together informally. “The energy was great between us,” she says. “We decided to do something together, but at first, it was lots of jams and not so serious.”
Still in its discovery phase, the collaboration is a fascinating sonic journey that brings together string instruments with no shared literature and little if any performance precedents. “I’ve played with santur and kamancheh and qanun,” AlHaj says, referencing other classical Persian instruments, “but never with tar. So I’m learning the sound of the instrument, where is the high pitch and the lower pitch, and where is the good maqam where these two beautiful cultures can meet.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
SAHBA MOTALLEBI AND RAHIM ALHAJ
When: 8 p.m. June 28Where: Freight & Salvage, 2020 Addison St., BerkeleyTickets: $30/$34, 510-644-2020, www.thefreight.org