Omar Khorshid - 1974 - Rhythms from the Orient

Omar Khorshid

1974

Rhythms from the Orient

01. Raqset El Fadaa

02. Guitar El Chark

03. Takassim Sanat Alfeyn

04. Laylet Hob

05. Lama Bada Yatasana

06. Teletya Mahla Nourha

07. Ah Ya Zen

Music for when you want to feel like a snake being charmed out of a pot and the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland at the same time. The other Arabic music I like is of deeper musical interest, less novelty than this IMO, but you can't have a well-rounded music collection without at least one dose of psychedelic bellydance. Actually, I'm not hearing Arabic quarter tones in here, and seeing as this is listed as “Omar Khorshid And His Guitar” on my copy I'm gonna hazard there aren't any. So this isn't especially Arabic music anyway, at least not in terms of the tuning. The scale may be exotic, but it's still something you could easily play on your guitar at home. Guitars and synths doing this psychedelic thing feels more like 60's music than anything traditionally Arabic, just IMO.

Released in 1974 in various markets as بص شوف … عمر بيعمل إيه (Look, What is Omar Doing?) and Giant + Guitar, Omar Khorshid’s finest album was probably most widely heard under the title Rhythms from the Orient, a generic title attached to a generic sleeve featuring a pair of dancers dressed in a Harlequin paperback approximation of traditional Eastern finery. (And probably in brownface as well…) His previous recordings had been released in three volumes as Belly Dance with Omar Khorshid and His Magic Guitar, to capitalize on the Western appetite for the exotic. Without meaning to cast aspersions on belly dancing, a respected artform with a history that goes back centuries, marketing an album as groundbreaking as Giant + Guitar as Oriental mood music shows how little comprehension Western music buyers had of sounds outside their milieu. (And also why, even today, it never hurts to take a flier on a random foreign LP with a cheesy cover from the bargain bins: sometimes your finds will blow you away.)

Album cover for international release

Khorshid is credited with essentially introducing the electric guitar to Egyptian and Lebanese music through his work with major composers and bandleaders of the day, and his stated intention in forming his own instrumental band was to demonstrate that “the possibilities of the guitar go far beyond” what these more traditional musicians could comprehend. Consider “Takassim Sanatalfeyn.” If you’ve ever heard Dick Dale’s take on “Misirlou,” you have some sense of the primal rumble it’s possible to achieve using Eastern scales, but Khorshid’s playing is something else altogether. The composition flows from liquid contemplation through passages of extraordinary rigid intensity, his technique impeccable—like a well-provisioned merchant allowing the customer to sample all his wares, on “Takassim Sanatalfeyn” Khorshid gives you a little bit of everything he can do. In a sense, Khorshid was already a known commodity—to go further, he needed the guitar to be proven valid, and so he bent himself wholly to the task.

While Turkish guitarist Erkin Koray would kick off a revolution of his own with Elektronik Türküler, released in the same year, Koray’s acid rock was much more explicitly influenced by Western musicians like Hendrix than Khorshid’s music was. Khorshid knew of rock music (he covered a few standards like “Apache” and “Johnny Guitar” on his first album), but there is always the sense that his use of novel instruments like the electric guitar, electric keyboard, and synthesizer were intended to advance the development of new Eastern music, rather than to pull his country’s arts into the European sphere. It’s the difference between drawing from the vernacular of an oud player to introduce an Arabian scale to an electric guitar, and playing an Arabian scale like Greg Lake would. Khorshid’s recordings of Arabic folk standards are some of the most exciting and fresh-sounding I’ve heard (“Ah Ya Zein” could go on thrice as long without diminishment), and to my mind Giant + Guitar stands among the best instrumental albums of all time.