EIF: Nai Barghouti and Friends at the Hub
The Hub - 26/08/23
The last Saturday night of the Festival. With time to kill between shows, I take a bain de multitude around central Edinburgh. And what a multitude. Diners emerging replete from restaurants, revellers diving into clubs, drinkers with raised glasses and voices swamping the pavements, culture vultures seeking their next artistic nourishment. At the top of the Royal Mile, entry to the Hub is effectively blocked by a queue of thousands for the Tattoo winding down towards Castle Terrace. I count 15 empty coaches processing past the entrance:
“For the Tattoo audience?” I ask one of the attendants.
“No, sir, for the performers.”
Finally in the Hub, I find a hushed refuge. The performance is in the Main Hall, softly furnished, gently lit; friends chat quietly in the easy atmosphere. The band emerges, the singer Nai comes to the mic. Quietly greeting us, she promises us “music in many moods” and starts to sing. Her voice flows effortlessly, fast and slow, each Arabic syllable crystal clear. Nai is Palestinian, based now in Amsterdam. The musicians encircle the globe by their musical experience and nationalities, Spanish, Afro-Caribbean, German; only one, Khalil Khoury, is Mid-Eastern, playing qanun, a traditional zither-like instrument. Nai announces each song briefly in English, giving little hint of the content. All have varied rhythms but share an air of deep melancholy, whether of lost love or lost land. Just two are more merrily upbeat, when Nai becomes more instrumentalist than singer, in a version of ‘skat’ singing she has developed herself calling it “Naistrumentation”. Each player is given a moment to shine in a solo break, technically impressive but to me, with exception of the qanun, a touch déjà vu, recalling many jazz groups I’ve heard before. At another moment I get a different sense of familiarity - “Surely I know that tune” - as she switches briefly into English for the latter part of ‘Autumn Leaves’. It fits well to the evening’s boundary-crossing intentions: a song by a French poet, with music by a Hungarian composer, made world famous by a hundred American vocalists with English lyrics credited to a drug-addicted trumpeter. But the heart of the show is in the Middle East. She pays tribute to Fairouz and Umm Kulthum, both legends among Arabic vocalists.
The show belongs to Nai’s vocals, both natural and highly skilled. Her diction so precise I half-dream I am understanding the language (I don’t). Her presence, warmer, more at ease than the photo on the website, is friendly and unassuming, simply standing with right hand on the mic, the left occasionally half-raised to emphasise a moment. From Edinburgh’s cosy Hub, her voice carries us out to a beautiful but troubled world.
