Syrian band brings music of Aleppo to Berlin

Instead of bombs there were beats. Guitars took over for guns, and there were cheers, not screams. Still, Aleppo was never far from the minds of the band Musiqana and the crowd at its record-release concert in Berlin. “I didn’t know if I should cry or be happy,” said Syrian-born Samaa Hijazi, a 20-year-old medical student who has been in Germany about five years. “I was thinking about the times my father sang these songs. I sang them together with my brother and they are all still in Syria.”

Lead vocalist Abdallah Rahhal, 28, is an Aleppo native, and the band’s music is the city’s version of Arabic tarab, a classical Arab form often referred to as “musical euphoria,” with emotional and poetic lyrics. They’ve been working on the five-track, self-produced recording called “The Beautiful One” since the band formed last January, but almost called off the release party, saying it didn’t feel right to celebrate and dance while the humanitarian disaster in and around Aleppo continued.

In the end, they decided it was better to go ahead with the performance on Dec. 18, bringing their tarab, known to most in the Arab world, to a European audience.

“Every day there is tragedy, and every day we play music,” Damascene guitar player Adel Sabawi said.

“We came here not to make the people happy but we have a message. It is true that we are displaced, but we have music and we have traditional music and we try to bring it here.”

The five band members are all recent arrivals, part of a wave of hundreds of thousands who have made their way to Germany over the past two years.

They met at an event called “refugees in concert,” and have since played more than two-dozen concerts as a ensemble, the largest one with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra before an audience of 1,500.

The CD-release concert drew a mix of Germans and Syrians to the Delphi, a 1920s-era silent film cinema in eastern Berlin, later converted to a vegetable warehouse. Many Germans had come to learn more about the Syrian culture of the migrants that are living next to them.

Rahhal said the last 12 months has provided the band the opportunity to “tell the German people about our culture, about our music, about how we make parties.”

He says he also hopes interacting with his German hosts will help them see him and his bandmates as something other than refugees.

“Refugee, that’s not my name, and it is not my work,” he said. “I’m a singer. I’m a Syrian man but the problem is that my situation is that I’m a refugee. It is only the situation.”