Peter Holslin smashed a dude’s oud once.
I haven’t done drugs in years, but if somebody offered me some qat right now, I’d chew on that shit in a heartbeat. A plant indigenous to the Horn of Africa and Arabian Peninsula, qat (also spelled khat) has been a cornerstone to certain circles of African and Arab social life for generations. Much in the same way that my fellow Americans bond over the passing of the spliff or the sipping of a cold brew, some people in Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen like to spend their afternoons hanging out, conducting business and talking politics, all the while savoring the stimulant juices of the freshest qat leaves.
“Qat is not just a narcotic—it’s an arbiter of disputes, and a conduit for community discussions,” notes Chris Menist, an NGO consultant and record hunter, who’s put together a wonderful compilation in which the shiny green leaf plays a key role. Qat, Coffee & Qambus: Raw 45s from Yemen, which came out last month on Dust to Digital, offers the kind of entrancing soundtrack you might expect to hear during a lengthy qat chew in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. The comp’s nine tracks—all retrieved off of 45 singles pulled from cluttered thrift shops around Sana’a—find oud players plucking out soulful, lilting licks on that Middle Eastern lute, to accompany words of love and longing from various raspy-voiced singers.
The songs on Qat, Coffee & Qambus were all recorded in the ’60s and ’70s, but they sound like they could be a hundred years old or one week. Following a poetic tradition that dates back many generations, the singers take the lead, unspooling rustic melodies that set the pace for the oud to follow. The songs are filled out with minimal percussion—handclaps, well-worn drums, and metal shakers—it helps make for a warm, relaxed vibe. But if everything on here is raw, the comp’s best track, “Ya Mun Dakhal Bahr Al-Hawa [Hey, Who Enters the Sea of Passion?],” also hums with magic. As singer Fatimah Al-Zaelaeyah takes her voice into the upper registers, a percussionist taps fingers lightly against a copper tray called a “sahn suhasi,” conjuring a circular, gong-like rhythm that’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Qat aside, the title of this compilation is a tad bit misleading: As Menist writes in the liner notes, the qambus—a Yemeni lute that was popular up until the early 20th century—has been replaced in more recent years by the oud, and is apparently nowhere to be found on this comp. Still, Menist has clearly done his homework; he even tried qat while listening to these tunes, to see if he could get into a Yemeni mindset. “I can’t say that happened,” he writes in the aforementioned Guardian article of his qat-chewing experience, “but I did experience a dual feeling of being entirely relaxed yet entirely alert for the duration.” If that doesn’t sound like a good time, I don’t know what does.
