Synopsis
If you really want to get to know the musical life of Cairo, you shouldn't go to the opera, but you have to crawl down to the bottom, into the belly of Cairo, and that's the nightclubs," said the Egyptian film music composer Rageh Daoud. A week later, at half past three in the morning, we admire the arts of the legendary belly dancer Luzy, who - accompanied by a forty-piece orchestra - charges 30,000 pounds for a performance, about 15,000 DM - not counting the sums thrown over her by a specially set money spotlight."If you really want to get to know the music of Cairo," said Georges Kazazian, Egyptian composer of Armenian descent, "you have to go down town, down town literally, below the city where the poorest of the poor live.
2 million people live in Cairo's cemetery, the city of the dead. Once a week, in a large square, people dance here, not for pleasure, but to approach God in the intoxication of music and movement.
If you want to make a living from music in Cairo, you have to go to Europe," says Khaled Shokry, a young composer of avant-garde classical music who cannot find enough buyers for his art in Egypt. Pop music, yes, in the hotels for the tourists. Folk music, perhaps. But I would starve here with new music.
In addition to the 109-minute long version made for Bayerischer Rundfunk, you can also listen to a 25-minute collage of sound recordings from Cairo that I put together for SDR. I also produced a 59-minute compilation for Bayerischer Rundfunk of two different recordings of Sufi music that I made after Friday prayers behind the Al Aksa Mosque and in the Cairo cemetery.
Sendemanuskript
Protokolle der Tonaufnahmen
