Kinan Azmeh CityBand

Just Like Family

Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand Makes Some New Friends

Thomas May

The internationally acclaimed clarinetist, composer, and improviser Kinan Azmeh became a familiar and frequent presence at the Pierre Boulez Saal during its inaugural season. Yet with each return, the Syrian artist has appeared in a changing guise: whether focusing on his own instrument (including opposite fellow clarinetist Jörg Widmann) or performing with longstanding musical partner Dinuk Wijeratne at the keyboard, or as part of Hewar, the composer-performer collective founded in Damascus.

Azmeh has additionally served as a co-curator for the Arabic Music Days last year, when he introduced his New York-based quartet, the Kinan Azmeh CityBand. For his first appearances this season at the Pierre Boulez Saal, Azmeh forms yet another new ensemble as CityBand shares the stage with three guest artists—Wu Wei on sheng, Bodek Janke on percussion, and Florian Weber on piano—in backto-back concerts.

“Having two nights in Berlin at the same venue suggested a great opportunity to invite guests to perform with CityBand,” Azmeh said in an interview from his home base in Brooklyn earlier this month, pointing out that “the symbolism of the Pierre Boulez Saal itself” encourages a sense of risk-taking, as well as an intimate exchange with the audience and fellow performers. “All of us are composers, improvisers, and collaborators by nature. So instead of for just one night only, we can expand the family to include three more members in a longer-lived collaboration.”

The four members of the “family” in question, CityBand, first started collaborating little by little in what Azmeh describes as a kind of “chain reaction” that led, without premeditated design, to the formation of the quartet. As a recent graduate of New York’s Juilliard School, Azmeh was trying to come to terms with the conflicting feelings of exploring a burgeoning career in his adoptive new city and homesickness for his native Damascus, where he had started playing clarinet as a young boy.

“It was around 2005, and I was approached by a friend who had just opened a new café on the Lower East Side, Epistrophy [named after the jazz classic by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke]. He was putting together a music festival and asked me to ‘come and bring your band!’ I didn’t have a band then, but only friends I knew I liked playing with, like [guitarist] Kyle Sanna. We decided it would be nice to have a drummer join us, and Kyle knew John Hadfield. So we actually started out with our first gig as a trio.” That in turn led to inviting bassist Josh Myers to join the group—and CityBand was born.

“I always find choosing names for bands quite interesting,” Azmeh says. His ensemble Hewar, an expression of his abiding ties to Damascus, takes its name from the Arab word for dialogue. “Hewar is based on the noble idea of communicating through the instruments.” CityBand as a name is similarly direct: “I wanted something to express the strong urban feeling of New York—a connection to the city.”

In 2013 CityBand released its album Elastic City, which, despite a remarkable stylistic eclecticism that embraces flamenco, jazz, and klezmer alongside traditional Syrian idioms, conveys the ensemble’s unique energy and spirit. If Elastic City forms a kind of core repertoire, the model is more akin to the tremendous variety associated with jazz standards. Ever fond of metaphors, Azmeh compares the given material to a skeleton. “It allows lots of room for the individual artists to flesh out—just like what is expected in a jazz setting.” That process becomes possible because each player contributes a unique personalty.

Referring to his rapport with Kyle Sanna, Azmeh depicts the guitarist as “a very thoughtful musician who is not interested in mere flashy playing. We’ve been playing since the beginning of the quartet. Every time before we go out to do a concert, we say: ‘Let’s try to play it without repeating any of the solo ideas that we’ve had before.’ Sometimes we surprise each other. This is actually what makes us say good things together as a quartet. We have been learning from each other over the years, so there’s lots of contribution. And having the guest artists join us in Berlin takes these pieces into a new direction. I don’t tell them, ‘I want you to sound like this.’ I ask them to do what they like to do.”

Another favorite metaphor is that of the family—a term that crops up frequently when Azmeh describes the dynamics and aesthetic of CityBand. The ensemble is at heart a surrogate family. Inviting guest artists to perform with the group, in turn, is “very close to what it would be if you bring people home to play with your family in Damascus”— which has not been possible over these past several years because of the strife and turmoil in his native Syria. “We have been playing as a quartet for so long now that we can predict what the others are going to do. But there is always something fresh when you bring somebody new on the stage.”

Azmeh already introduced Bodek Janke at last December’s Arabic Music Days, when he stepped in for Hadfield as drummer with CityBand. He says he’s been a fan of Wu Wei’s playing and was eager for a chance to collaborate, and he was likewise impressed when he encountered the Osnabrückbased Florian Weber and his keyboard artistry. “I got to tour with him in the United States and the Netherlands and consider him one of my favorite jazz pianists,” Azmeh observes.

Along with material from Elastic City, some new pieces by Azmeh and colleagues written in the five years since the album’s release are likely to be heard. “It all depends on how successful it is when we try rehearsals,” according to the clarinet virtuoso. “We meet on the morning of the first show and see what happens. The band will play a few things on its own and for the second half will be joined by everybody else. Then the second show will have new ideas based on the first show.” There’s a special, incomparable energy to being able to experiment in real time “while having an audience watching you.”

Wedding, an ode to raucous, infectious joy that is perhaps Azmeh’s most frequently performed composition, might for example inspire a duet between his clarinet and Wu Wei’s sheng (a mouth organ and one of the most ancient of Chinese instruments). “When exploring my music with a new formation, I’m more interested in a fresher perspective from my colleagues who are journeying with us for the first time,” he explains. The result “brings into focus how pieces can change form and speed”—even essential character—“by changing some instrumentation, which also means changing personalities.” But the most exciting aspect of this sort of collaboration is that “there is no safety net, other than a band that has played together for many years. We all listen more than we play! So even if a piece reaches a full stopping point, we know how to get it going again.” For Azmeh, “the definition of a good band” lies in that conviction that nothing can ultimately derail them. Augmented by CityBand’s three guest artists, “we are seven onstage. If six of us die, one person could still carry out the concert on his own. I trust the individuals in this group to do this. That’s where the fun is.”

Increasingly, Azmeh has been invited to write music for more formally organized ensembles such as classical orchestras or chamber groups. One piece CityBand toured with last year was the fourth movement of a composition for clarinet and cello that he premiered with Yo-Yo Ma (with whom he frequently performs as a member of the Silk Road Ensemble). “This movement has a life of its own now for the band,” he explains.

This coming February, the Seattle Symphony will give the world premiere of Azmeh’s new Clarinet Concerto (in which he will play the solo part). Already, he plans to experiment with some of the Concerto’s themes during CityBand gigs. Such boundary crossing “helps me tremendously to prepare for playing the Concerto with the orchestra when we premiere it. I will get a feeling for when things work in the group and when they don’t.”

As a composer, Azmeh points out that these creative overlappings give him “a crazy amount of information that I can use.” Another example is a piece he’s working on called Syrian Dances, which is inspired largely by Bartók’s Romanian Dances. “I am trying to bring some more attention to these folk tunes from home without being direct about it, by presenting them in a new way. They are not exactly arrangements of scenic folk tunes but pieces inspired by them.”

With CityBand, “the luxury of not having a pre-set program has been a great lab for me to write music for these other kinds of ensembles.” Yet for all the versatility of his multiple identities, Azmeh views his work with CityBand as consistent with a core philosophy: “I do see these projects as a continuum, whether I’m writing for the Seattle Symphony or for a film or playing the Mozart Concerto. It’s all about listening to people—and to the instruments, to what people and instruments have to say. Maybe the most important thing is having the pleasure of doing so. People forget that what the word ‘pleasure’ refers to is a noble sentiment: having a great time, especially when it’s about meeting new friends onstage.”