Sufi Jazz

By Carmel Wroth - North Gate News - Berkeley,CA,USA

Saturday, October 21, 2006

"Salam alaikum! Do you want to hear some jazz?" This was Moroccan immigrant Yassir Chadly's first introduction to American jazz.

A black Muslim security guard at San Francisco's Keystone Corner jazz club hailed him off the street with the characteristic Muslim greeting, and invited him to a new musical world.

The year was 1977 and Chadly had been in the U.S. less than a year, waiting tables and playing Moroccan music in a cafe. Growing up in Morocco, Chadly had only heard jazz in cartoons. When he heard the real thing, he became an instant fan. He started listening to the jazz greats like Art Blakey, Wynton Marsalis, and the Jazz Messengers, who frequented Keystone in the late 1970s.
Soon he was playing with Bay Area jazz musicians, and he developed a skill for mixing North African sounds with jazz. He has composed for the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and performed with Phillip Glass.

In 1991 Chadly became the imam of an Oakland mosque, but he didn't stop making music. In fact, last year he co-founded a band, Mo' Rockin' Project, with jazz trumpeter Khalil Shaheen. Chadly said he wants his music to spread understanding and acceptance of Muslims and show audiences there's more to Muslim culture than fanaticism.
Chadly said he also makes music to counteract the puritanical voices of extremism that would restrict music.

As a child in Casablanca, Chadly would follow street musician around town learning the songs they played. He crafted his first musical instrument from a plastic gas can, a broomstick, and some fishing line. Soon he mastered several traditional North African instruments, including the Arabic lute, or oud, the African fretless banjo, and the gimbri, the bass lute of the Gnawa tribes.
When he first started to appreciate jazz, Chadly's only reservation was that the melodies tended to be European in origin. He felt jazz could use the spice of North African melody. He said he wanted to "dive into the jazz ocean and bring up to the surface these melodies."

On Mo' Rockin' Project's new CD, Sahaba, Shaheen's bright trumpet sound glides into an exotic backdrop of Chadly's throaty Arabic vocals, and melodic strumming. In one track, Muslim rapper Tyson offers a spoken word interlude: "I swim in an ocean of sound…from the shores of Morocco, to the streets that gave birth to the jazz and funk of Oaktown." Another track explodes with piano and drums and then resonates with the eerie cry of the Muslim call to prayer.

Chadly said the Muslim extremists teach that all kinds of music are bad for the soul, and try to ban it. As a tolerant Sufi Muslim, he objects to people who try to impose their own views on everyone around them.

Chadly came to his role as a Muslim religious leader through another American pastime popular in San Francisco: the spiritual quest. Living in the Haight-Ashbury, he enjoyed what he calls "the cafeteria of spirituality." As he studied with Hindu gurus and tried out Buddhist mantras, he said "there was always that part of myself that was knocking, saying ‘remember me?'"

Finally he listened to that call and returned to his childhood faith in the Sufi traditions of Islam.

He said Sufism was satisfying to him because, like jazz, there's a little bit of everything in it.
Chadly explained that Naqshbandi, the name of his Sufi order, means to chisel the heart, to carve out imperfections so only God remains. He said music is the chiseling of sound to bring out beauty.

"Muslims who say music is forbidden they take ugliest examples to prove that it is bad for soul. In the end, they throw out the baby with bath water," he said.

Over the door of his mosque, on Martin Luther King Junior Way in Oakland, is a sign with the name of the mosque and the words, "where everyone is welcome." Chadly's mosque welcomes a diverse congregation, including many converts. In a broader sense, he hopes to convert Americans, not to his religion, but to an appreciation of the beauty of his culture, and the humanity of their Muslim compatriots.