Afghanistan’s Past and Future in His Strings

On Nov. 13, 2001, Kabul’s Radio Afghanistan went back on the air after nearly a decade of restriction and repression. The first musical selection? “My Sweetheart Kabul.”

Aziz Herawi may not have a clue what “My Sweetheart Kabul” sounds like, but as far as he’s concerned, the broadcast had to have been a critical success.

It signaled the end of the Taliban, and an era in his home country he calls “the worst for Afghan musicians. Many were in prison; many were either beaten up or had their instruments destroyed or stolen.”

Herawi--a native of Herat, Afghanistan; son of a Sunni cleric; former moujahedeen commander; and a musician in exile for more than a decade--will bring some of his hopes for a remade Afghanistan to the Skirball Cultural Center tonight in a program called “Visions of New Afghanistan.” Backed by a tabla player, he’ll present traditional lute music on the long-necked dutar and Afghanistan’s national instrument, the rebab--short-necked, with three or four strings for playing, as many as 15 resonating strings, and a double-chambered goatskin-topped body.

A resident of Northern California since the late 1980s, Herawi plays music that, like his hometown, is a crossroads blend. His lute-playing incorporates Persian music, classical Hindustani ragas and talas, and the folk forms and rhythms of the Afghan mountains.

These days, Herawi, 56, plays primarily in the Afghan expatriate community, concentrating on connecting younger artists with their roots and their homeland. In addition he has recorded for the Arhoolie label and for Latitudes/Music of the World.

But he also occasionally performs before a wider audience. In the early ‘90s, the New York Times covered an appearance: His playing, wrote critic Peter Watrous, “was about abandon and ecstasy, with intense sections of improvising, always grounded in a galloping rhythm, giving way to delicate, airy moments.”

It’s “natural” music, Herawi says, speaking through a translator, “from the heart and soul.”

Vaus Aslaun, head of Virtual Nation, Inc., a support group for Afghan immigrants in the U.S., who arranged for tonight’s performance, says Herawi’s music “represents the deep roots of Afghanistan, transcending ethnic, linguistic and trivial boundaries.”

Herawi’s experience of the ruinous effect of decades of war and internal unrest in his home country dates to well before the Taliban.

He was born into a well-to-do family of mullahs in Herat, near the northwestern border with Iran, and a career as a musician was hardly what was expected of him. His father, deeply conservative, allowed his children to hear the news on the radio but turned it off before music could be heard, believing that it caused people to “dance and lose control of themselves,” Herawi remembers.

But he found himself irresistibly drawn to music from the first moment he experienced it.

“When I was 7 years old, my father and I were invited to a village to stay overnight,” he recalls. “While he was meeting with the local dignitaries, I heard an amazing sound. It came from a shepherd on top of a roof playing the dutar.

“I bought his dutar. I had one of the family assistants wrap it in a blanket, take it back home and hide it in the woods by the barn. Then, when my father was sleeping, I went out alone in the dark to play it every night.”

Despite his father’s attempts to shield him, Herawi’s first teacher was the radio. With its arrival in Afghanistan in the ‘40s, it had become one of the country’s principal modernizing forces. He heard Indian classical music and Pushtun folk songs, even American pop. By listening, Herawi not only learned songs and musical forms, he also found some support for his desire to become a musical artist--a profession primarily associated at the time with lower social classes.

“Out of respect for my father, I had to hide my playing,” he says. But when he was still a young man his father died, and Herawi moved his passion into the open.

“I invited well-known Ustads [master musicians] from India and other regions to learn from and to play with. Because what drove me to music was my God-given love for it. When I am holding one of my instruments--especially the rebab--it is like I am holding onto the universe.”

By the time he was in his 20s, Herawi had become a prominent performer, playing before the king, Zaher Shah, with Afghan pop artist Ahmad Zahir, and recording and playing concerts in Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and other Central Asian countries.

But his career was curtailed during the Soviet occupation, which began in 1979. That year, the Soviets bombed Herat and Soviet-backed troops arrived to round up local leaders. Herawi, in a stroke of good fortune, was away at the time, practicing with musician friends, and he barely escaped.

“Most of my family members were killed or missing,” he recalls, “so I went to the mountains, sometimes on horseback, sometimes by foot. Risk was everywhere, from the Soviets as well as from [Soviet-sponsored local tribal forces]. The risk was death and death was common.”

At that point, music was already starting to disappear from day-to-day Afghan life. Traditionally, music accompanied virtually every private and public Afghan ceremony, with the exception of funerals. Since death was, as Herawi notes, common in those war-torn years, less and less music was heard, out of respect for the mourning survivors.

For Herawi, too, living in the mountains with the moujahedeen, music was forgotten.

“I was not happy, and that is why I did not play for over five years,” he says. “It did not feel right, since the country was at war and my family members were killed. I was given the opportunity to lead 1,500 men. And, as a commander, my mind was in the war, not music, at the time.”

As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, he, like thousands of others, slipped away to Pakistan. “It was the only route to escape,” he says. Fans among the refugees, who remembered his music from the old days in Herat, urged him to pick up his instruments again. He also located a remnant of his family, whose resources enabled him to emigrate to the Bay Area, where a sizable Afghan community has put down American roots.

Now, says Aslaun, Herawi is something of a leader in that community, his music a link to pre-Taliban Afghan culture. Imagine, suggests Aslaun, “Frank Sinatra, in another country, playing for American expatriates.”

Concerts like the one at the Skirball, says Herawi, are opportunities to connect others to the crossroads culture he remembers, and to an Afghanistan that is far removed from the one on television screens worldwide.

“Any culture connects with music,” he says. “It is universal; even animals understand or resonate with harmony. Americans or other cultures that are not too familiar with traditional Afghan music can instantly feel its force, because it transcends all borders and all cultures, music from the heart of Asia.”

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Aziz Herawi, “Visions of a New Afghanistan,” Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A., tonight, 7 p.m., $15-$21. (323) 655-8587.

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Don Heckman writes about world music for The Times.