A stage swathed with oriental rugs. On it a tambourine, a tape deck, a table lamp, a silicone-sleeved glass water bottle, an electric guitar, an amp and a suitcase. Harmonies: racial, religious, cultural and, of course, musical resonating across centuries. A hero who’s fashion-forward, swell at cooking and handy with a lute. “The fifth string is the soul,” announces Ronnie Malley, finessing an oud as the lights come up on Silk Road Rising’s “Ziryab, The Songbird of Andalusia,” which is as multifarious and miscellaneous as its titular polymath could desire.
Written and performed by Malley, “Ziryab” is part biography of the ninth-century Iraqi turned-Cordoban-court-entertainer otherwise known as Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Nafi; part autobiographical account of Malley’s experience as a Palestinian-American Muslim growing up in Chicago; part nostalgic history of the peaceful coexistence of Christians, Muslims and Jews in the flourishing of the seven centuries of Moorish reign of Andalusia; and part ethnomusicology lesson that playfully points out echoes of medieval Arabic music in late-twentieth-century heavy metal guitar solos.
The collage makes sense the way “One Thousand and One Nights” does: one tantalizing association at a time. Malley leavens a potentially death-riddled mystery with an insouciant approach to anecdotes that anchors his performance in the earth of Chicago’s standup roots. His memories of fending off the racial obtuseness of his Midwestern peers salts a paean to an utopian past with the grit of contemporaneity.
“Music is how I experience the divine,” he says. The oud, as he points out, evolved into the Greek laouto, the Cuban laùd and the guitar, is the pivot on which the piece as well as all its plays and players turn. In a brisk ninety minutes, Malley is a one-man band of remarkable ingenuity, moving through accents and centuries with agility while tossing off riffs from Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’Mine” and Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan.” He sings the Hafiz ode, “I see the moon in the face of my beloved,” and transforms from emir to courtier to slave just as the chameleonic Ziryab doubtless would have done a millennium ago. Chronicling the life of the refugee, exile, wanderer and idealist, “Ziryab” makes Malley a medium for cultural resolution then and now. (Irene Hsiao)
MEMORIES OF A TIME BEFORE PEOPLE HAD ALWAYS FOUGHT EACH OTHER - CHICAGO CRITIC
Recently Silk Road Rising, a theatre company devoted to telling the stories of people of Asian and Middle Eastern heritage, has focused on short runs of one-person shows which directly allow people to challenge narratives about themselves. Their latest, Ziryab, the Songbird of Andalusia, is a combination of dramatic lecture and musical presentation, performed by local musician Ronnie Malley, on the subject of an eighth-century polymath whose life proves that many of today’s “ancient” conflicts are not really eternal. Malley’s musicianship is superb, and his interweaving of his own life with the story of Ziryab’s, as well as his highly-informative discourse on the medieval master’s legacy, make an enlightening performance.
Malley starts off the show as himself, and switches between his and his subject’s stories throughout the show. Growing up on Chicago’s south side, Malley experienced his Palestinian heritage as mainly one of music. His family had their own band, which director Anna C. Bahow and set/projections designer Yeaji Kim beautifully illustrate with carpets typical of the family’s performance spaces. Malley himself is proficient on the oud, which produces a lovely sound that is both Spanish and Arab, as well as related instruments. But in Chicago’s highly diverse music scene, he was exposed to styles and instruments from all over the world, and developed a wide range of tastes. It was disappointing, then, that his merely being of Palestinian descent would be so divisive. He describes how he felt constant pressure to make political statements, and encountered not only bigotry against himself, but also people who presumed he shared their anti-Semitism. That is why Malley wanted to bring us the story of Abu’l Hesen ‘Elî ibn Nafî, better known as Ziryab, who lived in a time and place of peaceful multicultural blending.
Ziryab was a black man whose career began in Baghdad, where he studied music at the court of Harun al-Rashid, the most famed of the Abbasid caliphs. His modification of the oud brought him the ruler’s praise, but also the murderous jealousy of his teacher, and he fled to the North African city of Kairouan. After writing a song calling the emir there a racist and a war-monger, he was obliged to flee again, and wound up in Cordoba, which was then experiencing what has been remembered as an age of enlightenment, as well as cultural and scientific progress. Malley connects this story with the large number of middle-eastern refugees today, as well as his own family’s expulsion from Israel. But he also demonstrates music’s power to bridge differences between people, while allowing them to express their own circumstances. We also get a basic run-down of Ziryab’s musical theory, with remains influential.
Malley’s performances on the oud and its descendants, the lute and the guitar, certainly drive home his point about music’s universal reach. His singing and playing alone are sufficient reason to see the show, and his tribute to Ziryab, with help from sound director Eric Backus, makes the past come alive. Malley’s description of medieval Baghdad and Cordoba’s has a rosy tint, and by repeatedly citing Maimonides as an example of a Jew who benefited from the same cultural climate as Ziryab, he implies that the Golden Age lasted in Andalusia for much longer than it did. But he does counter the common, simplistic narrative that Iberia was perfect until it was destroyed by the Catholic Church in one fell swoop. As he points out, tolerance actually crumbled due in large part to intra-Muslim and intra-Christian political fighting. But really, that’s a whole different lecture that doesn’t provide as many opportunities to showcase the artistic exchange that was and is very much real. There’s plenty of focus on strife out there, but Silk Road Rising provides an opportunity to see a better side of history, along with it.
In the basement of the Chicago Temple, playwright/actor/musician Ronnie Malley displays his electric affinity for and considerable fluency in a dozen musical tongues. In 75 minutes this Chicago performer takes us back to the ninth century and deep into our own. On Yeaji Kim’s magic-carpet set, strewn with exotic musical instruments and illustrated by evocative projections and video, Ziryab: The Songbird of Andalusia is a welcome, multi-cultural world premiere from Silk Road Rising. Malley’s labor of love testifies to the power of art to make us at home wherever.
Malley, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a Palestinian-American family who refused to feel like exiles, is steeped in global music. Pursuing its sources from Morocco to Iraq, this splendid singer melds regional styles in a stunning showcase where harmony is literal. Along the way he regales us with Arabic poetry, legends and songs that reprise the golden age of Islamic Iberia.
Malley centers this contagious nostalgia among the wonders of Al-Andalus. Southern Spain, of course, is where the mosque of Córdoba, Seville’s magnificent Christian/Islamic Giralda tower, and the palace and gardens of the Alhambra in Granada still proclaim a glorious culture lost in 1491 to Ferdinand and Isabella (Aragon and Castile). For seven centuries Andalusia wasn’t just an architectural wonderland of arabesque filigree and tiled shrines. It saw a diverse Semitic realm of mutual admiration. Here Jewish, Islamic and Christian scholars and artists could learn and create together, a comingling of cultures that has seldom happened since. As Malley says, it’s more important to be good neighbors than good Jews, Arabs or Christians.
Malley fixes his musical evolution to the memory of the great Abu I-Hasan, known as Ziryab (“Nightingale” or “Blackbird” to his Spanish devotes). He was a former slave who lived and worked in Iraq, northern Africa and finally medieval Spain. Ziryab (789-857) was an omni-talented avatar, composing, playing the oud, writing poetry, teaching, and inspiring to today. He proved invaluable to every court where he was preferred–the Abbasids in Baghdad and the castle of Abd ar-Rahman II of the Umayyads in Córdoba. This maker of an astounding 10,000 songs was a master of many trades, gifted in cooking, fashion, weather prediction, botany, geography and astronomy.
But mostly music, as Malley traces his influence through the instruments he plays — dulcimer, lute, even electric guitar, and the moods he conjures with engaging virtuosity. Malley richly regales us with songs that are both time trips and travelogues. His avocation is as religious as artistic. It links him in tolerance to the Abrahamic god of three religions and countless cultures. Malley connects us too. The result is wonderful.