Serene Assir dances to Egyptian beats and hip hop all at once A hip hop band. The assignment seemed -- how can I put this? -- dull. How much fusion can a journalist-cum-musician be expected to take? Don't get me wrong, the principle is laudable. Ours is the generation of mixing, after all. Done well, fusion music outsmarts other forms by sheer virtue of picking up the best of everyone's art, crossing boundaries and escaping time. It stands the test of technique and lifts the soul to places unreachable when confined by matters as mundane and outdated as form, genre, origin and name. But most of the time, let's be honest, fusion lands both listeners and performers in a bad spot -- a degree or two out from something good, potent. Fusion is such a good idea it's hard to do, let alone do well. And the disappointment of not quite making it is much more painful than failing absolutely in something not worth believing in in the first place. But Saturday night at the Sawi Centre was different. Let's rephrase that -- it was magic. Hip hop band from Washington DC Opus Akoben and Intissar Abdel-Fattah's troupe of Egyptian musicians came together to hold a workshop, open to musicians from all walks of life, followed by a concert by the American artists. The workshop was alternative in the best sense -- it combined seemingly disparate forms and, based on solid musicianship, the participants created surprising and cohesive improvisations. While hip hop started off as an exclusively urban phenomenon, hailing from the multicultural, marginalised slums of US cities in the wake of the civil rights movement the Egyptian sounds heard at the workshop were ancient expressions originating in the countryside. Look a little deeper into the two basic components of the workshop -- hip hop and Egyptian folk -- and you find that fusion didn't stop there. Abdel-Fattah's group is itself unique, combining musicians, rhythms and sounds from all corners of Egypt's traditional sound map. "The troupe brings together musical forms from all over Egypt, ranging from Upper Egyptian to Nubian to sounds with origins in the Delta," Abdel-Fattah told Al-Ahram Weekly. And while Opus Akoben may originate in Washington DC the band members' African and Jamaican roots emerge strongly in their music, as did influences as wide-ranging as Latin, reggae and jazz. In effect, the workshop was not about two forms, but rather about breaking down form to create sound and rhythm. The effect was wild. While numerous percussionists, including several duf and tabla players, drummer Jay Nichols, and Abdel-Fattah on the darbuka, built up a full, energetic foundation as a base for improvisation, audience and participants alike entered a trance achievable only through pronounced, perfect rhythm. Just as the frequency of sound faded and the rhythm became silence, as it were, melody broke in in the form of an Upper Egyptian muzmar. The unnameable rhythmic patterns -- for they were Nubian, African, global, organic all at once -- suddenly became Egyptian. Until, that is, Carl Walker (aka Kokayi) took the microphone and sang improvised lines of soul, then followed them with rapping. Next up was the nay and back we were in Egypt, but by this point it did not matter any more where we were. What mattered was the music. And it just became more and more uplifting as the participants shook off their fear of discovery. The astounding confrontation between the urban and the rural, the sheer magnitude of the feat, secured foremost by the percussionists' command of beat stability and change, and the beauty of the melodic interventions rendered the result electric in its synergy. And it was a workshop, in that participating musicians learned from each other on the spot. At one point the Egyptian vocalist and the US rapper exchanged lines, with the rhythm still beating away, and Arabic improvisations were transformed into soul in an instant. The entire purpose of the venture, as described by Abdel-Fattah, was to promote cultural dialogue and understanding through the universal language of music. "We work for peace," he told the Weekly. "We have travelled with our music to 17 countries, including, on our latest trip, South Korea. We plan a similar project in the US soon, hopefully visiting several states to carry our message of peace and international, human understanding." And it worked beautifully, if we are to judge from the reactions of Opus Akobe band members. Arriving in Egypt following a Middle East tour that took them to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, they "really liked it," bassist Ezra Greer said. "It's everything -- the rhythms, the people. We came here to play some music, we've found a common language and that's real cool. It gets rid of all the bad stuff, all the news, all the ideas that keep getting pumped into you by politics." The music did not stop there. Opus Akobe went on to perform their own set later in the evening, featuring bass beats so loud the ground shook and conservatism just had to be swept out. The experience was liberating as group co-founder MC and DJ Terence (aka Sub-Z) Nicholson rapped of "energy much older than hip hop". As vocalist Kokayi smoothed the edges of the hard urban sound with soul softness, a balance was struck between hardness and hope, the street and nature. Rhythms transformed themselves constantly from funk to house to the new Latin fad reggaeton, enough to stir up a crowd any time, anywhere. If music is about liberation, then Egyptian and hip hop musicians started something in me that night -- something difficult to describe, though impossible not to feel while dancing on the banks of the Nile. "Sometimes," MC Terence told the Weekly, "something happens and you can't describe it until much later. I think that's what's happened to us musicians tonight. The value of this experience will only become apparent later." If music is about expression freestyle is the way to go. It is this that puts traditional Egyptian and accomplished hip hop artists on the same map -- not geography or name, but the recollection of something described by Ezra and Nichols as "the big beat" -- the original, African beat.
