Arts & Culture
Winds of Exchange: Simon Shaheen’s Zafir at Bailey
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Something special happened last Friday at Bailey Hall — where master violinist, oud player, and composer Simon Shaheen and his ensemble presented their program, Zafir — before a single melody was played. As the musicians were tuning, Shaheen’s brother and fellow oudist Najib asked that the house lights be turned up. “We can love you better this way,” he quipped to the audience, a statement which, after a smattering of laughter, sank in as deeply as any of the music that followed. “No one ever does that,” Shaheen told me when I remarked on it after the show, and by those words closed a circle that I will remember most from among the evening’s plethora of conceptual shapes. None of this is meant to imply that what transpired was any less moving; only that the heartfelt fluidity of it was all the clearer in being so prefaced.