In London’s Jazz Cafe, the sound of Egyptian legend Umm Kulthum’s track Alf Leila Wleila is reverberating round an environment of anticipation. Fragments of sunshine are reflecting off the Camden venue’s rotating disco ball—lighting up the faces of an intimate crowd who’re ready, drinks in hand, for Berlin document label Habibi Funk’s first reside music present to start out.
It’s late August and this numerous group of music lovers doesn’t appear solely positive what they’re in for. However when Lebanese musician Charif Megarbane and his band takes the stage, the gang loosens up. Tall and floppy-haired, Megarbane delights viewers members with multi-instrumental songs from his new album Marzipan, which was launched in July by Habibi Funk. “Hopefully you respect all of it and thanks once more for coming,” Megarbane says, to cheers, as he warms up the gang.
Lately, world curiosity in Arabic music has surged. TikTok and Instagram have helped a brand new wave of Arab expertise akin to Saint Levant, Issam Alnajjar, and Wegz attain tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Events akin to Beirut Groove Collective, Laylit, and DJ Nooriyah’s Center of Nowhere often promote out in London, New York, and different Western metropolises. All of this has even prompted the Worldwide Federation of the Phonographic Trade, the worldwide physique for recorded music, to launch in November the primary ever regional MENA music chart.
Habibi Funk, which formally launched in 2015 by German producer Jannis Stürtz, is one in every of a small handful of Western labels to play a job within the rising world recognition of Arabic music. Stürtz has additionally constructed a prolific DJ presence, internet hosting bought out events and acting at festivals below the Habibi Funk identify, which helps extra unlikely younger listeners to have interaction with Arabic music, in some circumstances for the primary time.
“I discovered Habibi Funk on Spotify this yr. There’s one track I’m obsessive about in the intervening time, it’s referred to as Badala Zamana,” Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, a 29-year-old English attendee who got here alone to see Megarbane carry out, says between songs. Her entry level to the label was through Turkish music performed at Worldwide Competition within the southeast of France this summer time, which led her to reach at Arabic music by extension. Any assumption that Habibi Funk solely serves Arab diaspora communities was shortly debunked by Gilsenan-McMahon, and a fast look at everybody else within the room.
“That’s the cool factor with Habibi Funk, they’ve such a diverse viewers,” Megarbane tells TIME the morning after his Jazz Cafe debut. “The truth that it wasn’t solely Arabs, I used to be shocked.”
Megarbane first met Stürtz just a few years in the past when the producer got here to his new residence in Lisbon, Portugal to current a documentary. He gave Stürtz a vinyl copy of his music, and the pair ultimately determined to work collectively on Marzipan, Habibi Funk’s first full-length up to date launch. He says he was drawn to the label’s physique of labor; the label began out with a give attention to re-issuing uncommon—and generally forgotten—Arabic data from the Sixties to Eighties. That features Musique Originale De Movies by broadly recognized Algerian film composer Ahmed Malik, and The King Of Sudanese Jazz by Sharhabil Ahmed, in addition to numerous compilation albums.
“Even a number of the Lebanese music they put out, some individuals didn’t understand it as a result of it wasn’t effectively distributed,” Megarbane says. “You’ve gotten this German label introducing you to the flowers in your individual again backyard.”
Stürtz says his introduction to Arabic music was purely happenstance. He was working as a tour supervisor at Jakarta Data, the Berlin-based umbrella label that now homes Habibi Funk, when he accompanied one in every of their musicians to a music competition in Rabat, Morocco, in 2012. “I randomly walked the streets of Casablanca and got here throughout this tremendous tiny store with damaged electronics,” Stürtz says, including that the restore store was as soon as a preferred document retailer that went out of enterprise however retained its music assortment. It was right here that he picked up a document by funk artist Fadoul, who credited James Brown on the reverse of the document.
“I acquired residence and was very excited after I heard the track. He’s principally a Moroccan man who was closely influenced by American rock and funk, and created his personal tackle it,” Stürtz says. This expertise led Stürtz on a hunt to find out about extra Arab artists. The journey birthed Habibi Funk as we all know it, a enterprise that has put out 26 releases thus far.
However Stürtz is eager to level out that he’s conscious of his obligations as an outsider, at a time of rising concern round cultural appropriation. “As a European label, coping with music from outdoors my tradition, and being a visitor to that tradition, which is an trade that has traditionally been dominated by exploitation… we ensure that how we work together with the artists and contracts doesn’t fall into this lure.”
For Stürtz, he says which means placing cash the place his mouth is. Each Habibi Funk reissue divides its earnings 50-50 between the label and the artist (or their residing kin who consented to the discharge). Main labels typically take as much as 80% of income from a document deal, with the remaining divided between the artist and different collaborators. Stürtz additionally notes that lots of labels within the Center East personal huge quantities of licensing rights, so it could be simple to create re-issued data with out the approval of the artist. However he says Habibi Funk has little interest in working on this manner. “It’s very easy to criticize and zoom in on one small factor,” Megarbane says, “however so long as it’s achieved in an moral method… it’s an trade.”
Moreover, Stürtz has additionally realized to navigate the road between allyship and saviorism. He calls European border insurance policies a “fascist mess” and is important of Israel’s therapy of Palestinians. He has additionally used the label to fundraise for charities that present humanitarian aid within the area. The label raised virtually $20,000 price of gross sales in 48 hours to assist victims of the 2020 Beirut port explosion that killed 218 individuals. All proceeds from a launch final month will go towards floods in Libya that claimed hundreds of lives.
However what makes Habibi Funk distinctive is that it options Arab artists who proudly present that music has at all times been a two-way cultural trade. Saif Abu Bakr—one other artist who collaborated with Habibi Funk on a re-issue of the the album Jazz, Jazz, Jazz, which was recorded in 1980 with the Sudanese rock and roll band The Scorpions—as soon as performed alongside American Soul legend James Brown throughout his 1978 efficiency in Kuwait. “James Brown stated, ‘Wow, I simply can’t consider it, individuals on this a part of the world know my songs’,” Abu Bakr remembers. Abu Bakr, who was an admirer of The Scorpions earlier than he first performed with the band when he was 18 years previous, says he was formed by Japanese and Western music alike—and that Ethiopian, Somali, and Eritrean music have impressed him simply as a lot as listening to Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett.
Stürtz reached out to Abu Bakr 35 years after Jazz, Jazz, Jazz got here out. “We have been shocked,” Abu Bakr says. “A few of his feedback stated this music truly got here earlier than its time. He stated if it was achieved now, it could have been way more recognized.”
The identical goes for Lebanese musician Rogér Fakhr, a singer-songwriter who featured on a Habibi Funk fundraising compilation for the Beirut port explosion, in addition to his album High quality Anway, a uncommon English language reissue. “We have been getting this mixture of tradition in our heads rising up in our late teenagers and early 20s and Lebanon itself was a mix of Western and Arabic Babylons. You walked down the road and also you had the smells of meshwi, and falafel, and Arabic music was blaring from the radios,” he says, referring to the late Sixties and early Seventies. However, Fakhr provides, the youth in cosmopolitan Beirut was additionally extra targeted on the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix.
Whether or not it’s the simple affect of American singer songwriters on Fakhr’s life, the Italian movie scores that encourage Megarbane, or the borrowing of the Hindi language within the chorus on Badala Zamana, by Algerian musician Zohara, these songs can virtually by no means be solely Arabic in isolation. “We’re desirous about musicians who took one thing that got here from the skin, and tried to translate it into their native context,” Stürtz says. Greater than something, Habibi Funk is a time capsule that gathers one of the best that music as soon as needed to provide, and releases it again into in the present day’s world.
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