House of Tarab

House of Tarab, 2007

As reviewed by Johonna Gamble

     There is always a bit of excitement when I open my mailbox to find a new CD or DVD waiting for me.  This time though it came with a bit of hesitancy.  Not because I didn’t know what was in the package, but because this was the first CD I’d received to review that I hadn’t paid for.  Don’t think I didn’t try.  I really did.  Erik Brown, the tabla player, wouldn’t accept any payment and wrote, “It’s on us….Your brilliant review will bring more sales.”  Well, I don’t know if the review will be brilliant, but the CD is excellent!

     For many a dancer who joined this dance in the era of phonograph records and tapes, this is a flashback to those wonderful full dance sets and delicious accompanying music that could be mixed down for your own routines.  For the newer dancer, who aren’t familiar with some of those albums, let me spend a moment walking down nostalgia lane.  For while I am not old enough to have actually experienced what follows, many of my teachers have spoken of the many albums from the late 60’s and early 70’s.  Often they would include a 10 minute or more set of songs that made a ‘dance set’ and were usually labeled as such.  Albums like George Abdo’s The Joy of Bellydancing, or Bellydancing with George Abdo, most of the Strictly Bellydancing volumes by Eddie ‘the Sheik’ Kochak, and ones like La Danse Orientale by John Bilezikjian (by the way, it also features a blue door with a rounded arch on the cover and for many a dancer it was simply known as ‘the blue door’ album) not only brought Arabic music to the masses, they made it easier for the working bellydancer to have music for her dance gigs.  Instead of popping in a CD our grand-bellydancer would take her trusty album and portable phonograph or tape to tape reel player and have her ‘band in a box’. 

     Back to the here and now….This album pays homage to those older albums from its cover, as I mentioned before, and to the original writers of the music from the 40’s thru the 60’s. With a long set of music that includes seven songs with delightful tabla and oud taqsims followed by five other songs including beautiful solos for the nay and violin, this CD has it all.  Easy continuity makes a fabulous 20-plus minute set just popped into the machine, or fluidity if you want to mix your own set of music.  With skilled musicians, this albums beauty is not only in the choice of songs, but the soft respect to the music and the instruments. While I would have liked to have had a few solo voice tracks, the group vocals are rich, clear and understandable.

     The sound quality is great compared to my older CD’s.  This is a decided improvement.  For while the music is excellent on my older CD’s, they were engineered to sound like, or are, live recordings so it is like you were in a large hall or club with the musicians so there is ‘space’ in the recordings for the room and it’s acoustics.  Today’s recordings for the most part, either don’t have this so it sounds like you are in your own private world with your headphones having a direct line into the sound recording booth, or they engineer a bit of ‘space’ in to give you an ‘I’m right next to the musician’ feel.  Very different, acoustically speaking, for dancing in an already crowded room where it becomes especially important when the older tracks have to run at a different volume from your newer to accommodate that extra empty sound.  Not so with this album.  They left some ‘space’ so it has that next the musician sound giving it a full clarity but not so much that it is lost in a room full of people.

     I really enjoyed listening to this album repeatedly.  I took it to work at the YMCA one night and had another fitness instructor, who has danced many forms over many years, poke her hear in and say, “now that’s the music I remember from when I bellydanced” as she proceeded to do a step hip walk across the floor....followed by “can you burn me a copy of that one?”  An odd compliment, but very appropriate to this CD, which takes some older songs and breaths new life into them in these recordings.  I easily recommend House of Tarab as a new classic for any dancer’s music collection.  http://www.houseoftarab.com/