Kuwait: Sea Songs from the Arabian Gulf by Hamid Bin Hussein Sea Band (review)

At one time merchant seamen from today’s Arabian/Persian Gulf states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar sang aboard ship while working and for their own evening entertainments during six-month winter voyages to ports in the far reaches of the Arabian Sea. Kuwaiti voyagers were accompanied by professional singers and often instrumentalists. The crew sang drones and responsorial phrases and clapped and stamped their feet in rhythm and syncopation.

Then in the hot summer months many of the same men sailed to offshore oyster beds as crew or even to dive for a share of the haul of rare and precious pearls.

[M]ost pearl diving boats were manned with musician-crewmen that included a solo singer, but sometimes 2–3 singers called nahhāmīn, sing. nahhām. There was also a drummer who performed on the large double-headed barrel membranophone, the ṭabl baḥrī, i.e., “sea drum.” … A third man would play a pair of small hand cymbals known as ṭwysāt [Kuwait, lit. lids] or tus/tasat that are linked together with a long cotton chord.

(6)

They, singer(s) and instrumentalist, performed all day long in a constant effort to keep the morale of the laborers from flagging or to pray for divine protection and favor. There was no time whatsoever at sea for entertainment/recreation on the summer pearling journeys to the oyster beds. The author explains that the workday was 16 hours of continuous work in blistering heat followed by utter exhaustion at night. (Readers from temperate climes might pause to consider that 54C°/129.3F° was the recorded high temperature in Kuwait on July 23, 2016; see Shaikh 2016.)

The genre of sea songs as a whole is called fijirī.¹ While there had been land-based songs dealing with hull caulking, boat launchings, and so on, with the rise of a global market for cultured pearls and the discovery of oil in the region in the 1930s, the Gulf merchant and pearling fleets slowly dwindled away until all of fijirī had come ashore. When the Kuwaiti maritime industry was active, all-night entertainments were held in a seafarers’ community hall (dīwāniyah) after a ship’s safe return to port, but these days the performances are held as cultural heritage celebrations ranging from dīwāniyahs to weddings to concert halls.

The recordings reviewed here were made by Urkevich between 2006 and 2012, with two exceptions: the opening excerpt of the uniquely Kuwaiti imjailisī is from the 1960s (track 1), and the hasawi was recorded in 1970 (track 5). All performances are by the Hamid Bin Hussein Sea Band, a gathering begun informally in the 1940s by an assistant captain and formalized in 1952. Hamid’s son Mohammad leads the group today, with the principal nahhām being Mohammad’s brother Khalid Bin Hussein. Their offspring, the grandsons of the founder, are active in the Sea Band, joining in local, regional, and international performances.

The album’s content is bipartite, with separation of recreation and work songs. Urkevich says each element of “true sea-song” (12) has a characteristic rhythmic mode or meter.

Recreation Songs

1. (1). Imjailisī (often performed at weddings, unique to Kuwait and without meter)

2. (2). ‘Adsānī (characteristically prayer-like lyrics, in a slow 16/4)

3. (3). Ḥaddādī (12/4)

4. (4). Imkhālif/Imkhōlfī (8/4)

5. (5). Ḥasāwī (6/4)

Work Songs

1. (6). Sanginī, a blessing in three movements that followed work; respectively, a 64-beat pattern, a uniquely Kuwaiti 16-beat khammārī rhythm, and a short 16-beat closing

2. (7). Dawwārī, lit. “capstan,” a song for heaving the main anchor cable or hauling a boat ashore, in a 12-beat pattern...