Om Kolthoum - Daleeli Ehtar (1974)

Mentioned this Egyptian singer in the Steve Hillage post the other week, so was very happy to subsequently find one of her albums randomly in a charity shop.  Oum Kalthoum, or apparently most correctly Umm Kulthum - there are in fact dozens of possible romanizations of the Arabic أم كلثوم‎, but I'll stick with Om Kolthoum for this post, as on the CD.  To add just one more name into the mix before moving on to the music, she was born Fāṭima ʾIbrāhīm as-Sayyid al-Baltāǧī just outside El Senbellawein, Egypt, either in December 1898 or possibly as late as 1904, and died in on 3rd February 1975 with around four million Egyptians coming out to see her funeral procession.

One thing I've learned is that it's near impossible for Westerners to conceive of the level of fame and national institution/household name status that Kolthoum achieved in Egypt; anything we can think of, eg Beatles, Elvis, just doesn't cut it.  Starting from state radio broadcasts in the 1930s, her phenomenal vocal range just grew in virtuosity and at her peak in the 1940s-50s was in peerless command of both secular and devotional songs from Egypt's premier composers & poets, at epic concerts where a single song could easily hit the hour mark.  She scaled back song length and her vocal range only slightly as they began to be limited by advancing age.

This CD I've picked up is a reissue from 2002, and the earliest matching release I could find was the LP shown below.  It was issued in 1974 as part of a series, perhaps some sort of career retrospective, so the actual recording may be quite a bit older - the song Daleeli Ehtar ("I am lost [when you are gone]") dates from 1955, and was composed by Riad El Soumbati with lyrics by Ahmed Rami.  Sounding here like it came from a radio broadcast, Daleeli Ehtar is, stylistically and tonally, a Maqam Kurd, a song of longing popular in Kurdish tradition; the Middle-Eastern maqam system is perhaps comparable to the Indian raga system if only in its range of modes and specific uses.

And what a performance.  Just listen to the rapturous applause between each verse of the 40-minute song, and you can get an inkling of how it must've been for Egyptian concert-goers to be in the presence of their greatest superstar.  The oud-led orchestra gets plenty of chances to shine, as the track rises, falls and builds back up again, but Kolthoum's voice is clearly leading the proceedings.  Spanning multiple octaves and capable of eighth-notes, the improvisations around the notes of the maqam just increase in intricacy, and you can see why she favoured such gargantuan song lengths.  It's stunning to think that this is actually a comparatively brief song of hers (or perhaps it was edited to fit on an LP).  Listen and be amazed.

Daleeli Ehtar, 1974 LP released by Sono Cairo

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