Literal origin of the Shaabi (Sha’bi) in Egyptian Arabic: Of the common people.
Could Adaweya, a plumber by trade in the 1970's, know that his songs with political undertones would help his popularity cross over from the common people’s Shaabi music to the popular establishment and the more socially elite? This musique, once called “City Beledy”, is what anthropologists today label “Shaabi”.
His musique is especially noteworthy for having a great percussion section. His voice has a sound unlike other singers, a very raw unrefined quality to it.
Most Shaabi singers seem to have this quality. Also, his music had an untraditional sound sometimes using a trumpet. adaweya used a blend of traditional instruments and modern instruments and sounds. He used traditional instruments such as the nai, violin, kanun, riq, large cymbals and tabla. additionally, he introduced the keyboard, saxophone, trumpet and the accordion.
This blend of the old and the new instruments is typical of the Shaabi sound.
Today everyone knows Ahmad Adaweya for his songs, lifestyle, scandals and notoriety. He’s not known for his good looks or his suave style. He’s actually rather short and heavy-set with coarse blow-dried hair and very gaudy suits. He was born in a hara [ghetto, barrio] in the mid 1940s in a working class area on the outskirts of Maadi [a district in Cairo], but he spent time on [and eventually moved to] Mohamed Ali Street [a famous district known for where performers lived and networked]. Adaweya worked as a waiter in a café where he started presenting his popular mawaweel [pl. of mawwal] or folk songs. By the end of the 1960s, he was a singer at high-class wedding celebrations. In the early 1970s, he was singing along the Pyramids Road and selling audio-cassettes of his music.
Where once he was known as a master plumber, he had now become a master of Saltana.
What exactly is Saltana? Nothing is exact in Egypt. The word evokes derogatory connotations of a drugged state. This is how people perceived Adaweya, whether he was awake or asleep. To get Saltana takes time—in performance, sometimes hours. If Tarab is ecstatic joy, then Saltana is the ecstasy of creation. Time passes, and you don’t feel it.
The performer becomes musically self-absorbed and experiences concentrated and intense musical sensations. The musician or singer will get high from music. He may also be already high on a substance such as hashish. Many cheikhs, singers, musicians and composers were known to get high in order to achieve Saltana.
In an interview from Al Ahram, the Egyptian newspaper, Adaweya says:
“I am a saltangi. Saltana is my thing—I can sing, and alternate between different maqamat [pl. of maqam—a set of musical notes with traditions defining relationships between them, certain melodic patterns and certain moods.] This is Saltana. It’s all in the maqam. Adaweya experiences this in his mawaweel. In the mawwal the lyrics can make Saltana. The creative state of Saltana can bring on Tarab—or the feeling of ecstasy.
In the interview, Adaweya says further, “I have achieved [Saltana] after a tough and tempestuous life. I have basically seen the depth of the pits when I started from the very bottom of the ladder.” Ahmed Adaweya has literally scraped the rocks with his bare hands as a plumber. “It is my singing experience in mulids [festivals for saints and holy men] and tents that founded my entire career. My own talent combined with such a life has qualified me for the equivalent of a Ph.D. in music. I never studied music, except through feeling, listening and a tough life. Many musicians have reached top academic degrees in music, but they do not have Saltana; they turn to someone like me and seek my experience in Saltana. The mawwal is my game. I sing all maqamat in the mawwal. This is history. I am a whole history. I am king of Saltana.”
An Egyptian once said of Adaweya: “Ahmed, your voice is full of suffering. It is the voice of an orphan. When you sing the mawwal, I feel so blue as to be on the verge of tears. I feel like your voice.”
The mawwal is usually sung poetry –qasida—or a narrative that can precede a song. A typical Shaabi mawwal can include the following words: “love, wine, whiskey, suffering, falling in love, allusions to different fruits, being without love, torture, meddling nosey people, drugs, anguish, complaints, oh sleepless nights, wounds, patience, oh my eye, love, poverty, shame, bad luck, tears and blood, tired of all this…” It is lyrical and one might consider it the vocal version of a taqsim—musical improvisation of one instrument that can move from one maqam to another. Ahmed Adaweya would sing the mawwal in colloquial Egyptian accompanied by a fellahi rhythm and a nai response. This use of percussion and nai during a lamenting poetic narrative of love, including sexual innuendos, and complaints of social or political conditions is what makes Adaweya’s mawaweel distinctly Shaabi.
Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz said of the singer: “What is so wrong with Adaweya? He is a genuine son of the people, a true offspring of the Egyptian hara."
Adaweya is the sole true influence of an entire generation of Shaabi singers such as Hassan el Asmar, Hakim, Magdi Talaat, Abdel Basset Hamouda, Hamdi Batchan, Saad el Soghayer and Shabaan Abdel Rahim.
By the late 1980s, there were three categories of Egyptian singers:
1. Those who tried to maintain their national identity with tarab-oriented traditional music.
2. Westernized singers who resorted to western musical melodies.
3. Those who supported Adaweya’s’ Shaabi musical trend.
Shaabi is always considered the music of the working class people such as Adaweya. The Egyptian media–radio and television–do not officially recognize Shaabi music as an art form. They feel it is an insult and a shame to their culture, and therefore, it has a subaltern status. Rather like how the Egyptian people do not recognize raqs sharqi [or as we often say “the Belly dance”] as a respectable art form. However, Egypt’s common people are many and numerous, urban and rural, and the Shaabi music was able to not only survive but to achieve also great success through what is known now as the cassette culture.
It’s been 40 years since Adaweya began his singing career. He has acquired true legitimacy. He has acquired fame outside his neighborhood, outside of his country, and throughout the world. He was able to finally have his songs aired along side Egypt’s favorite singers such as Om Kalsoum and Abdel Halim.
Shaabi has been with us for approximately 50 years–first as a rural and mulid-based music and then due to the audiocassette machine, it became an expanded international phenomenon. At this point in time, it seems fitting that anthropologists, musicologists and ethnologists are now giving this “new” music a category and label for the first time in it’s history! Shaabi has been granted a value with classification and notification. Shaabi music has been assured a future in whatever way it shifts and changes. Additionally, this same cassette-based record and re-record culture continues to grow and thrive in Egypt. ~ source
homely plumber turned mystic mawwal saltangi shaabi superstar. encroyable & punk as fuk. percussion is off the chain & peep those cazals he's roccan. brother adaweya's on a good one. 320k
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