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I had this heritage that I wasn't really digging into. I pulled the dotar down from the wall and started playing. I've always sung in Persian but I thought I'd be about 50-years-old when I recorded in Persian. -Haale |
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Photo of Haale by Aarona Pichinson
You Need Nothing But What's Inside
You address yourself to me so that I may read you, but I am nothing to you except this address; in your eyes I am the substitute for nothing, for no figure (hardly that of the mother); for you I am neither a body nor even an object (and I couldn't care less: I am not the one whose soul demands recognition), but merely a field, a vessel for expansion. –Roland Barthes
 Haale |
The massively influential French critic (and partial papa to semiotics) quoted above might well have been talking about the listeners potential relationship to Haale's work, which is undeniably a "vessel for expansion" if ever there was one. This music offers a gateway to something far deeper than casual background accompaniment. Theirs is a door of perception swinging wide, and while many of us might not understand every word, the underlying meaning – and "the pleasure of foreign tongues" as Barthes once put it – is evident. Haale calls out to the universe, and by gum she might just get a response if she keeps it up like No Ceiling and the band's intense, almost ritual concerts, which seem hell-bent on shattering barriers and preconceptions at every turn.
This is a band for Obama's America - earthy and lofty, inclusive but also celebratory of personal history. As the political landscape continues to shake up, ripples throughout the culture will be felt, and music has long been a telegraph service for things to come.
"The dollar is down, the economy is crumbling and all these horrible wars. I think [if elected] McCain will attack Iran. It's so disturbing," says Haale, who faces the challenge of getting Persian art and culture across to a country that's more backwards than ever in its general attitudes towards the Middle East. So often, Americans forget that Baghdad is the seat of civilization, the place where written language and mathematics got their first real foothold. "I remember when the Patti Smith album Trampin' came out, and it had this song ["Radio Baghdad"] where she says, 'We discovered the zero and we mean nothing to you!' She's howling and it's powerful and amazing and true. It's incredible the disrespect for life and culture and history."
Haale is also very much a child of Rumi.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened
Don't open the door to the study and begin reading
Take down a musical instrument
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground
-Rumi
"I was in the pine forests of France staying with this instrument builder and his wife at their house way, way out there. It was wonderful, jumping in and out of brooks and doing these vocalizations in the woods. On my eleventh night there, I saw this instrument on the wall called a dotar that I hadn't seen the previous ten nights, which was kind of a metaphor for my life. I had this heritage that I wasn't really digging into. I pulled the dotar down from the wall and started playing. I've always sung in Persian but I thought I'd be about 50-years-old when I recorded in Persian [laughs]. When I had the dotar in my hands, I thought, 'This is it.' The instrument builder was a very sweet man, and at the train station he put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Find your sound.' It was such a dramatic moment! I got on the train with tears in my eyes," says Haale. "When I got back to New York, I got a setar and I started singing some of the songs I'd heard growing up, slowly incorporating them into sets, here and there. Then, the task became weaving things together."
"It became a journey of just being myself, really. The truth is I really am of these two places," continues Haale. "It became this natural thing that I had to do. Even though 9/11 happened and suddenly there was this whole anti-Middle Eastern sentiment happening, it was something I felt I had to do. I'd felt it at different points growing up, too, but it became a choice of being real or not."
Here's a glimpse of Haale performing at the Numoon Festival in Rotterdam last year.
Haale tour dates available here...
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