WESTERN FRONT – Don’t Let Me Be Lost to You: Early 20th Century Near Eastern Musics in New York City

A black-and-white photo of a man and a woman seated in the corner of a club. The man wears a suit and plays the lute. The woman wears a fascinator and a long-sleeved dress, and plays the tambourine.

At the height of immigration to the United States 100 years ago, a wave of people from the collapsing Ottoman Empire settled in the U.S. At the same time, the burgeoning record industry in and around New York City radically hastened the dissemination of musical cultures and documented thousands of performances by performers from present-day Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Greece within the U.S. And then, for a half-century, those recordings were neglected. Who were these musicians? Where did they go? How did their work affect America?

Ian Nagoski’s talk-and-record-listening event illuminates a world-within-a-world of a musical culture as it developed over two generations, reveling in the specific and presenting little-heard masterpieces. It is an exploration of the details of artistic expressions of immigrants and the social realities of a “nation of immigrants” and its ambivalences concerning who matters and who gets remembered.

The talk is presented in conjunction with Nadah El Shazly’s concert at Western Front.

A photograph of the label of a vinyl record. The label is pink and features at the top a small image of a woman, naked from the waist up, posing next to a hookah pipe. Flanking the image on each side is text that reads "Oriental Record" in large letters, with delicate drawings of domed buildings and palm trees underneath. Text on the bottom of the label reads "No. 101" and "Price $1.00", as well as "Anadol Kourd Hevasi – Kosrof Malool" in English and Arabic script.

About the Speaker

Ian Nagoski is a music researcher and record producer in Baltimore, Maryland. For more than a decade, he has produced dozens of reissues of early twentieth century recordings in languages other than English for labels including Dust-to-Digital, Tompkins Square, his own Canary Records, and others.

Acknowledgement

Presented with the support of the Government of Canada and SOCAN Foundation.

Orchestra in a Turkish nightclub on Allen Street, New York (1942). Courtesy the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Orchestra in a Turkish nightclub on Allen Street, New York (1942). Courtesy the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Kosrof Malool, Anadol Kourd Hevasi (1912), Oriental Records.

Kosrof Malool, Anadol Kourd Hevasi (1912), Oriental Records.

Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.

We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.