"I like Minneapolis," the Iraqi oud player Rahim al Haj told an audience at the Walker Art Center on a recent blustery February evening. "It's a very progressive town. I can curse Bush and nobody will call the FBI." Cursing George W. Bush may seem benign these days, but for an Iraqi who has only recently gained his American citizenship, it still counts as truth to power—a variety of dissent that has marked the two-time Grammy nominee his entire life.
Al Haj had to flee Iraq in 1991 after years of public opposition to Saddam Hussein's brutal and blundering regime. He was tortured in Hussein’s prisons, and after his second sentence his mother sold what valuables she had and bought him a new identity. He left Baghdad, his country, and his family on a fake passport. His epic refugee's journey took him to Syria, then to Jordan, and finally to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his United Nations settlement counselor tried to talk him into the wisdom of flipping burgers at a fast food joint. He wasn’t having it. He got right to the work of establishing himself in America (as he had already in the Middle East and Europe) as a virtuoso musician and storyteller. He still lives in Albuquerque with his wife, Syrian journalist Nada Kherbik.
Just as he resisted Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad, he became an early and very public opponent of George W. Bush’s war to finish the dictator. When I first met Rahim in 2002, his English was elementary at best but still he was taking every opportunity to tell stories about Iraq, speak out against the war, and play the beautiful compositions he was writing about the place he had such desperate affection for.
At the Walker in Minneapolis, Rahim was premiering a collaborative work, commissioned by the Walker and also featuring jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and violist Eyvind Kang. The three were performing their Baghdad/Seattle Suite, a genre-bending composition so quiet it could be interrupted by a whisper, though nobody in the Walker's McGuire Theater dared. The musicians will record their suite later this year and I'll be sure to blog about it when it's released. If you want to know more about Rahim, watch him perform, listen to his music, and read about his life at the Smithsonian Folkways website. Or watch this bit of footage from the recording sessions of his album When the Soul is Settled: Music of Iraq:
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Image by Douglas Kent Hall.