DJ Cheb I has been a regular on San Fransisco�s club scene forever, or so it seems. Sticking together the sounds of Arabic, African & Asian music at his weekly club night. Blending traditional music & dancefloor culture with live musicians, he creates an organic groove like no one else. �Shri Durga�, his debut album brings together classically trained Muslim & Hindu musicians & singers, including the legendary Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, who all do their thing over a complex blend of live drums, Indian tabla & sampled break beats created by the man Cheb i.
With a DJ career spanning three decades, it would be difficult to find a more fascinating DJ than Cheb i Sabbah. Born in Algeria, a great source of his inspiration were his two uncles who were masters of the Malouf style, also known as Andalusian music. Cheb i describes himself as a 'hajji', a musical pilgrim of the spirit. His name is another reference to his pilgrimage: Cheb is a nickname used by Algerian rai singers; Sabbah means 'morning', but the link is actually to Hassan i Sabbah, the Persian mystic whose legendary library is rumoured to be the largest in the world.
His love of Hindustani music started in Paris in 1964 when he first discovered The Dagar Brothers, one of the last great groups of singers in the dhrupad style. It was around this time his DJ career began spinning American soul 45's in the Parisian discotheques (where the name 'disco' originates). Even at this early date, Cheb i and his fellow DJs were classifying songs not by genre or even nationality but by tempo.
This idea of a musical collage grew out of Cheb i Sabbah's lifelong interest in theatre and in 1968, he'd hooked up with Julian Beck and Judith Malina's ground-breaking theatre troupe, The Living Theatre, constructing soundtracks from records that were cued very precisely to theatrical movements. He associated his method with Brion Gysin (who would write texts, cut them up and then recombine them), adapting his cut-up technique to sound. The Living Theatre relied heavily on audience participation, easily drawing comparisons with a DJs performance. For Cheb i, Djing is theatre, opening a doorway to another tradition or world, rather than just playing what's cool at the moment.
The Living Theatre took him to various locations around Europe and to the USA, where he formed Tribal Warning Theatre in San Francisco and, by the late '80s, had become a regular on the club scene, supplying Western club audiences from New York to the West Coast with a large dose of musical exotica. Throughout the '90s he's maintained a multifaceted creative life, producing an album for the Sub Rosa label, tracks for Asphodel and Meta and remixes for Triloka and Cleopatra Records. He has also produced and presented world music concerts as part of his exceptional 1002 Nights Live series bringing some of the top Middle Eastern, African and Asian names to San Francisco, including performances by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Bally Sagoo, Abida Parveen, Ustad Sultan Khan and Faizal Hussain.
Another guest at these concerts and a big influence on Cheb i Sabbah was jazz trumpeter and, some may say, the father of 'world music', Don Cherry, who Cheb was privileged to represent as his manager. He learnt from Cherry that to produce music that is foreign to you, you learn by going to the people who live and practice that tradition rather than sampling bits and pieces from their musical heritage.
In 1998, DJ Cheb i Sabbah celebrated his tenth year packing out the dancefloor at his weekly world music night at Nickies in San Francisco and continues to work with 1002 Nights on his latest project, 'A Night On The Ganges'. He recently travelled to India, receiving overwhelming responses from clubs in Mumbai and various Goa nightspots and is currently working on an album with the Sufi musicians of North Africa. |
