Ya ghazali kayfa 3anni Ab3aduk 2/3 : Farajallah Bayda

[fredlag@noos.fr]

Record Baida 70 (that's all!) is obviously one of the very first records ever made by the company, and supposedly belongs to the "Berlin series".

Random thoughts :

- Imagining Farajallah Baida walking the streets of Berlin on a rainy day of 1907 is in itself quite a stretch of imagination.
- This other rendition of muwashshah Ya ghazali kayfa 3anni ab3aduk has some idiosyncrasies that need to be addressed :
- accent : Farajallah distinctly pronounces "ab3adok" and "qarrabok", not "ab3aduk", and I remember hearing this pronounciation with Lebanese artists who imitate beduin accent. It generally goes along with pronouncing ق as /g/. But why here ?
- *non-metric* aman aman immediatly after the first khana of the muwashshah, as well as the second, and third, with a single seemingly non-metric sentence, and an impressive 'uf 'uf style qafla in higaz. Those sentences break the rythmic structure of the piece. I would tend to think this is not exactly a muwashshah in the mind of the singer. But are there other examples of a metric songs interrupted in this way ?
- the tempo in both 78rpm renditions is much slower than modern versions of this song, allowing for much more ornamentals.


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Other random thoughts :
- Does anybody read ? I specified, concerning the Muhammad al-3ashiq recording, that the sada version was in a extremely sorry state and could only be of interest for experts. And in spite of this, almost everyone who downloaded the hearable version also downloaded the sada one. Puzzling. Or just large hard disk and space for useless files that will never be listened to.
- This seems to be the case of the filtered version too, as a matter of fact...
- I will never understand the shami section.

[Najib]

His Aman is breathtaking!

I don't see any reason why he did this dok (not douk) at the end. It does not even sound bedouin at all. It sounds so fake!

The tempo is close to Sabah Fakhri's tempo.

I don't know if someone else uses this Nim Hisar note (La bemol) instead of Husseyni in the dok ending that he sings.

[zbader]

There is no reason to use (ok) instead of (uk). It resembels nothing but itself, i.e. not bedouian at all. Maybe he wanted to sound differently. The tempo is closer to what Lattakian people used to use when singing it; little slower than the Aleppo version (please, not Sabah Fakhri). I have few recordings of old people from Lattakia, I will search for an example and post it for comparisn.
His voice is amazing in beauty and power.

[3amr]

I also think the "ok" instead of "uk" has no significance as far as I can tell.

Sometimes, the "ok" ending or "on" instead of "uk" and "un", and so on, are used in iraqi maqam singing, but first of all, they're never this clear and pure as a vowel (there is more u sound left), and second of all they're used to get certain ornaments out, or a way of manoeuvring the voice that is completely irrelevant for this type of singing.

Also, during the aman, I could swear I was listening to turkish gazel, and not a lebanese singer. I think this way of interrupting the rythm part to introduce non rythmic extemporizations or so could have something to do with either the piece itself, or some turkish musical form or influence of some sort.

I remember that Mary Jubran stops after each verse and does a mawwal or 3ataba between each bit and the other, thus effectively interrupting the meter completely, even more so than what we have here. (could this be a "karabatak muwashah" of some sort?)