Season of Arabic culture coming to the heart of London

After a decade of bringing Middle Eastern musicians to London’s stages, producer Khaled Ziada is looking forward to unveiling one of his other skills: cooking.

Next Sunday in the City of London, Ziada has organised an evening of storytelling with the London-based Palestinian playwright Elias Matar. Ziada will also cook Palestinian dishes for the audience to tuck into between stories. "It's my other passion," he told The National.

The event is one of a series celebrating Arabic culture, marking 10 years since Ziada set up Marsm, a music production company bringing pop, rock and classical music from the Middle East to the UK and Europe.

"People say we bring Arabic music to the UK" he said. "But I say we present music from the Arab world: we bring indie, rock, hip-hop, classical and soufi musicians.

It was Ziada who brought Lebanese singer-songwriter Marcel Khalife and rock band Mashrou3 Leila to major venues such as London’s Barbican and the Jazz Cafe.

"When we started we were a very small team," he said. "We believed at the time that Arabic culture needed a bigger presence in London. It's been a beautiful connection between us, the band and young audiences."

He was most recently involved as a co-organiser of Together for Palestine – the largest musical fund-raiser for Palestine in the UK to date, which raised more than £1.5 million in tickets sales, merchandising and donations in one night alone.

In the coming months he will organise the European tour for Palestinian composer and pianist Faraj Suleiman, among others.

Most of this season's events will focus on community, with dabke workshops and poetry evenings, culminating in a performance by Le Trio Joubran at the Barbican in November.

"It's the first time we've been invited to create an Arabic culture programme with the City of London," Ziada said. "We don't want it presented only to Arabic-speaking communities but to bring it to others, too."

Lebanese singer Sura launched the festival last week with an evening of traditional Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian folk songs, including by icons such as Lebanese singers Fairouz and Najah Salam, Syrian tenor Sabah Fakhri.

Accompanying her was a 12-piece contemporary band arranged by the Egyptian producer and jazz guitarist Ziad Hashim. There were also soloists on Middle Eastern instruments, including Sura’s brother Nahi on the oud, as well as the sounds of the nay (a flute) and the violin.

Sura unveiled three of her own songs for the first time, drawn from themes in “our daily lives”. She said: “The idea for the songs just come to me when I’m doing something or thinking about something."

In Yasmeen Al Sham she sang: “My love the jasmine of Damascus, and all that is beautiful these days, I saw his eyes in that dream, before he saw mine.”

Co-written with Nahi, the siblings combine her love of catchy melodies with his classical training in Arabic music and maqam. “He’s classical trained in the maqam and I’m the crazy one,” she said.

Sura moved to the UK during Lebanon’s financial crisis in 2020 – leaving her home like many of her friends and contemporaries. She trained as an opera singer at the Lebanese Conservatory, but she had not sung for five years until she met Ziada, who convinced her to take part in a show last year.

Through Marsm, she quickly became immersed in the city's musical community, allowing her to develop her concert this week.

Ziada has been inspired by music from streets of Cairo, Tunis and Damascus. “The only thing I could do in London was to bring these beautiful sounds to the diaspora here,” he said.

Since then, he has seen the audience for his events grow from beyond the diaspora.

But the rising cost of travel, including visas to the UK, is one of their main obstacles. Ziada estimates that costs have gone up by 30 per cent since the pandemic. “We have to put the prices of our tickets up and the audiences notice that,” he said.

Their next challenge is to grow the audience of contemporary music from the Arab world in other major cities in the UK. "It's difficult because the community is much smaller," he said. "You have to find new challenges in your work."