By Allan Kaval
PARIS – It is a cold December night in Paris. Parisian world music aficionados and members of France’s Kurdish community will soon gather in front of the Café de la Danse - one of the famous concert halls of the French capital city.
Inside, seven musicians are going through the last sound checks. They speak to each other in a mix of Sorani, Persian, Turkish and English.
Together, they form the Kurdish music ensemble “Nishtiman,” Kurdish for “homeland.”
“Our aim is to build awareness about Kurdish musical tradition among the foreign public. It is the first time that a European label, “Accord croisés,” commits to promote Kurdish music as a whole” said Hussein Hajar Zahawy - the famous daf drum player from Khanaqin and artistic director of the project, which is sponsored by the Rudaw Media Network.
“For the first time a Kurdish professional ensemble works towards offering a musical journey across the Greater Kurdistan” asserted Zahawy.
In order to reflect the cultural wealth and diversity of the Kurdish world, Zahawy and his long-time friend Sorhab Pournazeri - a tambur and kamancheh virtuoso from Kermanshah - have recruited musicians from different parts of Kurdistan.
Our aim is to build awareness about Kurdish musical tradition among the foreign public. 
“We want to promote culture, to represent a cultural area that transcends the notion of state. We can’t take into account political borders,” commented Pournazeri.
Goran Kamil - the oud player - is from Sulaimani. Ertan Tekin - who plays the zurna - is a Zaza Kurd from Turkey and the female singer Myriam Ebrahimpour comes from Iranian Kurdistan.
“Sad to say, the war has made it impossible for musicians from Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) to be part of the project,” regrets Pournazeri.
Other than the five Kurds the ensemble is also composed of two French musicians: Robin Vassy - who plays African drums - and Leila Renault - a contrabass player. Their instruments being foreign to Kurdish musical traditions, they bring to the band their own particular touch.
As a composer, Sorhab Pournazeri’s aim was to get different forms and traditions of Kurdish music represented in the line-up.
The musicians started the concert with a composition inspired by sacred Sufi music from the Hal e-Hakh tradition. They then went on to perform more popular tunes – among them love songs and dance melodies.
“We purposefully blended styles, with the intention of giving foreign audiences a nice, broad, general overview of what Kurdish music is. Our ambition is to put Kurdistan on the World music map,” explains Pournazeri.
Until now, and despite the talent of its musicians and singers, Kurdish music lacked recognition outside the Kurdish world and enjoyed only a limited circle of connoisseurs. It was generally regarded as an expression of Persian, Arabic or Turkish music and struggled to obtain a status of its own.
“Nishtiman strives for the recognition of Kurdish musical traditions as one independent national heritage,” stressed Zahawy.
We purposefully blended styles, with the intention of giving foreign audiences a nice, broad, general overview of what Kurdish music is.
But even in the field of music, politics can sometimes play a part.
“Kurdish music suffered from the fact Kurdistan is not represented on the political atlases of the world” he recalled.
For a long time, there was no political entity able to defend Kurdish culture in the international arena. For instance, UNESCO exclusively represents sovereign states – with the notable exception of the Palestinian National Authority - whether they respect their minorities or not. There is no International organization to recognize cross-border cultures like the Kurdish one.
Furthermore, the states in which the Kurds represent a sizeable part of the population would scarcely promote the Kurdish culture domestically. And in some instances, like in Turkey, they would simply prevent Kurdish cultural expression as a whole.
In Turkey, possessing records by Sivan Perwer and other Kurdish singers was illegal. When Turkish “Jandarma” raided remote localities, the villagers would resort to burying their Kurdish music records.
As recently as 1999, famous singer Ahmet Kaya was compelled to leave Turkey, escaping bashing from the media and lawsuits. His crime was to publicly claim his Kurdish origins and to announce that he was going to write a song in Kurdish.
Exile, therefore, was sometimes the best option. It had a significant impact on the development of Kurdish culture.
In this respect the life and background of Zahawy is telling.
Zahawy was born in Khanaqin in 1980 to a politically active family. As a child, he was forced to cross the border to Iran with his relatives in order to escape ethnic cleansing in Iraq. The Zahawys settled in Shiraz and then moved to London in 1990.
There, Zahawy was driven by his passion for rhythm and percussions. He started to learn the daf as a self-taught musician.
Today there are dozens of Kurdish channels airing all over the world. Back in the old days, MED TV was the only one.
Living in Europe allowed young Zahawy access to the Kurdish diaspora cultural network. At the time, the hub of this web of singers, musicians, writers and poets was the first Kurdish TV channel, MED TV.
Located in Denderleeuw - a small town east of Brussels, Belgium - MED TV studios were a meeting point for Kurdish musicians from all over Kurdistan. It was one of the few places where they could get to know each other, exchange ideas and ideals and imagine the rebirth of Kurdish culture.
This is where young Zahawy cut his teeth as a professional daf player in 1996. He was 16 at the time.
“At MED TV, I have had the chance to play with Kurdish musicians from Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Armenia… It was the only place in the world where we had the opportunity to work together, to learn from one another,” recalls Zahawy.
“Today there are dozens of Kurdish channels airing all over the world. Back in the old days, MED TV was the only one. It was our own TV and it was precious. It had a different vibe,” remembers Zahawy.
The nineties were a dark time for the Kurds. However Zahawy and his fellow musicians used the tragedy of exile to enhance their sense of identity and recreate a home away from home.
Things have changed since then. At the beginning of the 21st century the Kurds are more recognized on the international scene. Autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan has become a state-like landmark for Kurds worldwide.
“The time has come to promote Kurdish national music as a movement in its own right and Nishtiman is a first step in this direction,” argued Zahawy.
“Starting to teach Kurdish music in conservatoires in Kurdistan as an academic subject would be a huge advance,” he added.
“When subjected to exile or assimilation, people do not forget their music even if they have lost the use of their mother tongue,” explains Sandrine Alexie, a librarian and expert on Kurdish history and culture from the Insitut Kurde de Paris.
The time has come to promote Kurdish national music as a movement in its own right and Nishtiman is a first step in this direction
Unlike literature, music can mend bridges between all the components of the Kurdish nation. The magic of the voices and instruments can succeed where the heterogeneity of the various dialects and scripts impede the construction of a common culture.
However, as Zahawy and Pournazeri both stressed, it is not a matter of erasing Kurdish musical diversity nor is it a reason to close the gates to influences from the outside.
Indeed, in the world of music, the very notions of “outside” and “inside” are simply irrelevant. Cultural spaces overlap. Traditions intertwine. Instruments and styles travel across long distances and permeate through the ages.
It is no coincidence that Robin Vassy’s African percussions go so well along with Kurdish rhythms.
“Kurdistan belongs to an area of common musical language stretching from southern Spain to India via northern Africa, the Balkans, Greece, Anatolia, the Middle East, the Caucasus and Iran,” reminded Zahawy.
Along the way, one can find similar instruments, similar ways of making music despite an infinite diversity in styles and traditions. This boundless cultural area is at once coherent and diverse.
The promoters of Nishtiman are all but aware of this reality. “It is important to preserve your identity, to know where you come from but also to be able to be versatile,” Zahawy stated.
Therefore, Nishtiman does not appeal to a reclusive sense of identity.
The final part of the show - when three young French-born Kurdish dancers took the stage wearing beautiful non-matching traditional costumes - was worth a thousand words.
It showed that the path to follow should not be one of artificial folklore, fuelled by nostalgia. It should rather be one of transmission of a lively tradition that should be at the same time rooted in history, open to the world and progressive.
