By Hani Mustafa Ahmed Harfoush sings with the Riff Band, which has quickly established itself as one of the most popular outfits working Cairo's growing pub and club music scene. With the Riff Band we have been seeking to introduce particular types of Western music to our audience. This is especially true with regards to classic and swing Jazz and bossanova. It is a chance to introduce staples from the American, and in particular Latin American, repertoire to the audience. It is really no boast to say we are the only band that presents this kind of music, especially the work of bossanova pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim. Interest in this type of music surfaces every now and again -- Cairo is a cosmopolitan city that embraces many cultures and American music is consequently increasing in popularity. My interest in this type of music goes back to when I was a child, and in particular the four years that I spent in the US between the ages of seven and 10. My interest in music has grown since then. Back in Egypt I moved between Cairo and Luxor, where my father worked. It was in Luxor that I first performed in public, at the age of 17, when my father encouraged me to accompany a performer called Bahaa who was singing in a local hotel. In Cairo I worked to increase my knowledge of music. I studied choral music with the Class Cairo Singers, established by Raouf Zaidan and Greig Martin. We performed at first in the British Council. But I did not study music in college. Instead I graduated from the Faculty of Tourism in 1994, training as a tour guide. But the nature of my studies did not distance me from music. At the time I had met a slightly older guitarist called Sherif Mustafa and we rehearsed together, presenting covers of Elvis Presely songs at the end of year concert. I guess that the idea of forming a band had been with me for some time -- music, in the end, is a group art. During my college years I also met a woman, Reem Farid, who played the guitar and we formed a band called 12 Singers. We held performances together, including one at the Ewart Hall in 1991. My relationship with the American University in Cairo (AUC) started at that time and I met Larry Catlin, AUC professor of music, who managed a group of amateurs in the university called the Osiris Singers. I joined them and learned from him the arts of stage performance, including movement and the use of voice. We performed regularly, including in the production of Don Pasquale, directed by Walid Aouni and starring soprano Nevine Allouba and tenor Mohamed Abul-Kheir. I have always been interested in classical music. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago I was singing Schubert compositions with the Cairo Choral Society at All Saints Cathedral. After graduating I worked as an assistant to a professor of Egyptology at AUC, particularly on the excavations of the Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. This was the excavation that revealed the tomb Ramsis II's children. During all this I stayed close to music and learned to play the flute in addition to singing. For a year I performed in Luxor hotels with a flautist, Margret Jong. It was after four years in Luxor that the idea of forming a band once again came to the forefront of my thoughts. And then I began singing at the Cairo Jazz Club with a group of musicians who had formed a band, Riff. Initially, we concentrated on rehearsal and developing a repertoire. We then became known as the Riff Band and set up a web site, www.theriffband.com. We are not in the position to turn professional at the moment, though maybe that will happen in the future. We perform once a week in a nightclub in Cairo and rehearse on another day for two hours. We all hold day jobs and some of us have to be at our desks at eight, the morning following our performance. I think that performances in the opera and other public venues are important but performances in bars and clubs have a different flavour to them. The first is usually tied to a previously agreed upon programme, which limits the room for improvisation. Clubs, on the other hand, are more free and the shape of the performance depends on interaction with the audience. We do not follow a pre-set programme to the letter: it all depends on the audience. Sometimes you need to grab their attention, sometimes not. Sometimes the younger members of the audience do not know the music that we are performing while older members know at least some of the songs from the 1950s and 1960s. There is also a difference between audiences, say, in a club and at a private function. We have performed at private parties, at the Queen's birthday ball at the British Embassy, and at the inauguration of the Dutch Embassy in Cairo. Music requires that you be in a constant state of learning. Whatever you present today has to be developed tomorrow. That is why we have introduced funk music, which is more suitable to the atmosphere of pubs. Creating an atmosphere is one of our roles. Right now I am training to scat, to use the voice as a musical instrument, without words, but with sounds like da da dot dah. It is an art at which the masters of jazz, such as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, excelled.
