For facile or recklessly daring musical minds, “fusion” is just another word for “confusion.” For Brennan Gilmore and his bandmates, however, intelligently mixing together two distinct genres of music creates a potent potion.
Kantara plays “Arab-Appalachian music,” and if that conjures up an image of Mohammed and Jesus dancing a jig on a prayer rug, that’s partly what it’s designed to do. In 2005, Virginia native and guitarist Gilmore, while posted as a foreign service officer in Tunisia, was introduced to Riadh Fehri, a Tunisian musician known for his oud (Middle-Eastern lute) playing and for several cross-genre projects with various international musicians. Gilmore and Fehri started playing together informally, and hanging out and talking in the garden of Fehri’s conservatory while his elderly parents drank tea. “We soon realized,” Gilmore says, “the importance of showing a positive example of Arab-American cooperation, given the current tension between these communities.”
 Kantara brings their blend of Western tunes with a Middle-Eastern bent (or is it vice versa?) to Gravity Lounge on May 27. |
But because music is already the universal language, that angle only begins to tell the story. After Gilmore and Fehri played a few shows together in fall of 2005, the duo expanded when Gilmore invited longtime friends Ann Marie Calhoun (violin), Zack Blatter (bass) and Brian Calhoun (guitar), with whom he collaborated when they were students at UVA, to join in; he also added Lassad Hosni (percussion) and Amel Boukhchina (vocals). As the band began playing throughout the Mediterranean region, they knew they had something: fusion that is beyond mere posturing and even beyond political clout, that—borne aloft on a high dose of musical acumen—revitalizes the concept of originality.
Using examples from Kantara’s self-titled 2006 EP (the band is poised to record a full-length effort at Bobby Read’s Small World Audio studio outside of Charlottesville in the coming weeks), Gilmore lays it all out for the layman:
Sometimes, he says, they’ll play a straight-up Appalachian tune like “Wayfaring Stranger, “ but with a Tunisian rhythm. “As opposed to Appalachian music where often the rhythms are rather simple and uniform, Tunisia’s rhythmic traditions are tremendously varied, and often complex—these can completely change the feel of an otherwise straightforward bluegrass/old-time tune.” Other times, he says, they’ll do the complete opposite—take a Tunisian tune like “Hobbi” and bend it until it’s straightforward.
In another respect, Appalachian music is less simple than its counterpart. “In Malouf music, and much of traditional Arab music,” Gilmore says, “there is little if any harmony—all the instruments and the vocalist play/sing the melody. In Kantara, we’ve taken a lot of those tunes and added chords and harmony—Westernizing them, but through the Appalachian prism.”
And then there are the band’s own compositions, which are as challenging to describe as they must be to play. In these tunes, Gilmore says, “the fusion is less adding one part Tunisian, one part Appalachian, but rather through a mix of influences from the start, less immediately recognizable as either Arabic or Appalachian in nature.”
If you need to hear the music to believe it (or even if you don’t), check out the band’s show at the Gravity Lounge on Sunday, May 27 ($5 for kids, $15 for adults; 7pm).