Osama Kamal listens to a folk sound that brings a southern voice to the north His voice calls out to you, enchanting and enthralling, haunting and assuring, as if originating from a distant past. Mohamed 's performance at After Eight, the nightclub where he sings every Sunday, is quite a special experience. With his dark complexion and vaguely Pharaonic features, looks just the part... the face that goes with the voice, the indelible memory of field and mountain, mud and river. If one voice can bring together the sadness of the south, the openness of the north, the open fields of the Delta, and the appeal of distant borders, it is 's. Born in 1967, Egypt's year of defeat and agony, has grown up listening to the soulful lyrics of Abdel-Halim Hafez's unforgettable song, "the day is over and the sunset is approaching, creeping up on us from behind the trees, so we get lost on the way, so the moon disappears from our nights." In the following years, with the cheerfulness of the country wrung out of its broken heart, the artists and writers were fired up. The gates of creativity opened as the nation tried to cope with its pain. The echoes can be heard in 's songs today. His art pays homage to the country. His songs distil what is the essence of Egypt, and reverberates with its sweetest dreams as with its bitter misgivings. and his band are not self-promoting individualists. Far from it; it is hard to tell who wrote the lyrics or composed the music. It's all a collective effort. When one member of the band thinks up an idea or suggests a theme, everyone pitches in, adding a note, improvising a little, suggesting a line or two. It is a creative brainstorm of melody, if you may. The band interacts with its location and surroundings, and lets its music grow like a wild child. The band performs in regular places: once a month in the Jazz Club, every week at After Eight, and occasionally at the American University in Cairo, the German University, the Al-Sawy Cultural Wheel, Beit Al-Seheimi and Beit Al-Harrawi, among others. They spread their art as if in a mission, refurbishing the old as they go. Among their most-loved tunes are the folk songs Lamma Galuli (When They Told Me), Habibi Safer (My Lover Has Left), Morabaat (Squares), and Benmil (We Swoon). The latter served as a music score for Khaled Youssef's film Enta Omri (You're My Life), so far 's only foray into cinema. As the band adds new riffs to country tunes, the old suddenly sounds contemporary, a vitality flows all the way to the past, resurrecting it, making it avant-garde. There are melodies from east and west, north and south, and yet the fusion sounds surprisingly local, purely Egyptian. believes that singing is all about people. "The closer I am to people, the more I make my singing theirs. I become an inner voice for my audience, and through me they listen to themselves." A great fan of Naguib Mahfouz's novels and Atef El-Tayeb's films, admires artists who draw inspiration from their homeland. He says that Mahfouz's writing is infused with the air we breathe in the streets of Egypt and its coffee shops and houses. El-Tayeb also found purity in the countryside just as much as in the backstreets of Cairo's old neighbourhood of Boulaq. One of 's favourite films is El-Tayeb's Al-Horoub (The Escape). "The character of Montasser, the man who is permanently running away from authority, is an amazing portrayal of the Egyptian psyche." relates to the southern aspects of El-Tayeb's films because he too came from the south, far south. Born in Aswan, came to Cairo to study, earning a degree in Arabic language in 1993. He still speaks passionately of how his love for folk art and literature deepened in college, thanks to his professor, Ahmed Hajaji, a man he greatly admires. It was Hajaji who introduced to the rich panorama of Egyptian folk legacy. A scion of Arab tribes that came to Egypt centuries ago, is proud of his past. "The tribes of Jaafara, Ababda, and Aqbalat have based their main culture on the skill of speech. For their entire history, the Arabs regarded language as sacred and were addicted to well-turned speech." It is this love for words that gave birth to Kaff, a form of singing popular in Egypt, especially in the south, and the Hegaz. "Kaff exists in more than one area. You hear it in the Arab Peninsula, Sinai, the oases, Al-Wadi Al-Gadid, and with a local variation in Aswan and south Qena," says. Kaff has three distinctive tempos. The softer is called filawi, the moderate tashila, and the fast janzir. admires the best Kaff singers of yesterday, men such as El-Azab El-Isnawi, Sadeq, Abdu Masloub, Zeidan Abu Ghali, Mohamed Belik, and Madani Abu Zorar. He also speaks highly of contemporary Kaff singers: Rashad Abdel-Aal and his son Yasser, Mahmoud Darwish, Suleiman Abu Darwish, Younes Yersi, Makki El-Selwawi, Rabie El-Baraka, Gaber El-Azab, and Mahmoud Abu Saoud. has travelled extensively in areas known for virtuosity in Kaff, and has even sung along with several Nubian Kaff singers. But he is interested in almost all other forms of old singing. He has met and sung with Sira Shaabia (oral history) crooners, as well as the tanboura and semsemia (musical instruments related to the harp) singers in the Suez Canal towns. Unlike Sayed Rekabi, who sings southern country songs without changing them, believing that modernisation would diminish their power, keeps an open and stylistic mind. Fiddling and improvising, he believes that art is a never-ending inspiration. He takes the past and offers it to his generation, adapting it to new taste. For , originality only serves to reinforce legacy.
