Ishtar

--- February 15, 2007 -- AARON JENTZEN -- Pittsburgh City Paper


Live review: Ishtar and Mandrake Project

Belly-dancing music rules.

Mandrake Project has to be the only band in Club Café's history to cram seven members and two full drum kits onto the tiny stage. Which meant last Saturday's show was something I had to see. Mandrake's long, late-night set started with a bang and ended with a final, crushing crescendo as Rick Nelson shredded on a viola and violin simultaneously. The low-key jazzier numbers in the middle of the set seemed to kill some of the momentum (no reflection upon accomplished saxophonist Darnell Anderson), though with another drink or two in me I wouldn't have minded.

The real surprise, though, was opener Ishtar: Belly-dancing music rules. Even though patrons seemed to assume it was just background music, the quartet and the two sinuous belly-dancers created a heady atmosphere that eventually ensnared the chatty crowd. Accompanied by doumbek and other percussion, Melissa Murphey's clarinet and Jeff Chmielarski's fretless bass wove intricate modal patterns from the exotic time signatures and melodies.
- Pittsburgh City Paper

Thursday, July 10, 2008 5:45 AM EDT
Belly dancing and Mediterranean folk music aren’t typically attributed to Somerset County.

Boswell native Melissa Murphey said her Pittsburgh-based band, Ishtar, will bring a spice to Somerfest that residents wouldn’t normally experience.

“We’re not breaking any boundaries except that we play this music in the United States,” she said of the group, which formed in 2006 and utilizes traditional Middle Eastern songs.

Murphey is no stranger to the festival. As a former clarinetist for the North Star band and the Allegheny Heartland Regional Band, she performed in several Somerfest parades before graduating college and moving to Pittsburgh.

Now returning to the county, she said she hopes others are as impressed by the exotic sounds as she was.

“I didn’t know the clarinet could be played that way,” she said.

After hearing Mediterranean music at a Pittsburgh Renaissance festival in 2001, Murphey said, she was inspired to pick up her instrument again.

“I actually quit playing in 1991 because I didn’t think there was an outlet for me,” she said.

Murphey added that she is excited to revisit Somerfest, which will be her first outdoor festival with Ishtar. The band is scheduled to play at 4:40 p.m. July 19.

“I got my musical start at Jennerstown elementary school. The last time I was at Somerfest, there wasn’t even a lawn stage.”

- Daily American

The clarinet had never sounded so cool when Melissa Murphey heard a band mixing its sound with Middle Eastern "gypsy" music. The self-proclaimed former "high school band dork" who played clarinet liked what she heard so much that she rounded up three people and started the belly-rock band Ishtar. The band added a fifth member, on electric guitar, last year to round out its sound. "We're not taking away from the music," Murphey said. "We're making it available to the Eastern ear."

Question: What is belly rock?

Answer: It's classic belly dance music with a twist. An electric guitarist puts the rock in belly rock.

Q: How did you first get started playing clarinet?

A: Representatives from the only music store in the area came to my elementary school (in Butler County) and gave the entire fifth-grade class an exam to see if we were musically inclined. They sent home each student with a permission slip, and my mom sent me to school the next day with a note that said she wanted me to play the flute. The guy from the music store said my mouth wasn't shaped right for the flute and gave me a clarinet.

Q: And from there, how did you start Ishtar?

A: I played clarinet for years but completely stopped playing after high school. I went to college, got a job and life got in the way. I worked at Sam Goody in Oakland selling other people's music. But one summer I was at Pennsic, which is like a big renaissance festival, at Cooper's Lake Campground in Butler. I heard an all-male band playing with these women dancing, and there was a clarinet in the band. Once you're out of school, the outlet for clarinet playing is limited, so when I heard them I said I wanted to be in a band that plays that.

Q: What makes Ishtar different from classic Middle Eastern bands?

A: We play traditional belly dance songs with three-fifths traditional instruments. Two-fifths of the instruments -- the bass and electric guitar -- are nontraditional. It makes it fresh and different. It's something the average Pittsburgher has never heard before.

Q: How do you make the music sound good while staying true to the original music?

A: It's really trial and error. Middle Eastern music is not chord driven. It's a melody, and it's played in unison. The variety of instruments and how they're played are what give the music a fuller sound. Some songs that didn't look like they'd work have worked for us, while others looked great on paper but don't sound good when we actually play them.

Q: Is there a reason why you decided to call the sound "classic belly dance rock" or "belly rock?"

A: "Middle Eastern music" is a very serious sounding phrase. In this day and age, it carries with it a negative connotation and feels a little ominous sounding, especially since 9/11. "Belly rock" gets people asking questions and wondering what kind of music it is. There aren't too many catch-all phrases to describe our music. People will tend to lump you in with whatever they define you as.

Q: Do you always have a belly dancer at your performances?

A: Not always. I like the band to stand on its own. We usually play a mix of songs that give dancers the opportunity to dance, but sometimes the place we're playing is dark and the dancer wouldn't stand out. Sometimes our songs change tempo too often to make them good for dancers, and some of our songs are just too long to have someone to dance to.

- Pittsburgh Trib p.m.

BY MANNY THEINER

December 18, 2008

Middle-Eastern tropes such as hookahs, henna and harems made an impression on American pop culture back during '50s exotica. And when "world beat" appeared in the '80s, it presaged a rapidly shrinking globe, as indicated today by the thousands of Arabic pop videos anyone can find on YouTube, rip to an mp3, and DJ the next night at Brillobox.

But Ishtar's obsession with pan-Levantine melodies isn't based on mere dabbling. Though this disc is a collection of standards rather than originals, it shows both knowledge of the material and skilled technique, as well as reverence for an era many overlook -- the '60s and '70s, when countries such as Turkey and Lebanon were heavily influenced by Western pop and rock forms.

There are myriad facets to this multiculti band, and on its MySpace page, Ishtar mentions iconic if obscure influences, like Turkish psych-rocker Erkin Koray and prog adventurers Mogollar. Rob Metil's reverbed guitar borrows heavily from the surf style of Lebanese-American Dick Dale, whose '60s classic "Misirlou" (performed on this CD, though differently than the Pulp Fiction version) comes straight from a Greek rebetiko song. Darbuka drummer Mark DeFilippo keeps the beat going like Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy, while the group spins out Arabic classics "Nassam Alayna Al Hawa" and "Enta Omri."

Meanwhile, clarinetist Melissa Murphey's wailing emerges as much from klezmer masters such as Naftule Brandwein as it does from Armenian reedists like Souren Baronian. In fact, Ishtar's rendition of "Garoon Garoon" sounds more like a Hassidic niggun than it does a product of its Armenian origins, plus they do both Uzi Hitman's Israeli chestnut "Noladati L'Shalom" and the Ladino melody for the Hebrew "Hine Ma Tov." (Which is good for the Jews.)

What we have here is a bunch of non-Middle Easterners playing almost as authentically as if they'd been discovered inside a hamam in Istanbul -- or, for that matter, a Greek nightclub in New England. Some fundamentalists might hurl accusations of cultural poaching, but who cares? That's nobody's business but the Turks. - City Paper

Best underground band:

1st Ishtar

2nd Gramsci Melodic

3rd Triggers
- Pittsburgh City Paper

At first glance, Your Inner Vagabond coffeehouse in Lawrenceville, which celebrates its first anniversary this weekend, seems unstuck in time.

Walk past the counter display of sumptuous pastries into a chamber of resplendent divans and ottomans, and you may feel transported back to the 16th century, when "Kivahans" first opened throughout the Middle East, centuries before coffee appeared in Europe.

It almost feels like a creative anachronism. Not surprising, since proprietors A. J. Schaffer and Andrew Watson conceived of YIV while at PENNSIC War, an annual medieval reenactment gathering near Slippery Rock, sponsored by none other than ... the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Meanwhile, Pittsburgher Melissa Murphey came away from PENNSIC -- where she ran into Watson and Schaffer with their coffeehouse aspirations -- inspired to play Middle Eastern music, and she picked up the clarinet.

Murphey had performed around town with a bellydance group called Khafif.

"They had four musicians and four dancers, and while I enjoyed playing with them, being in such a large, expensive group that only played special events, I wasn't getting out enough."

With an urge to perform more often, Murphey conceived of a smaller ensemble that could grace venues without bellydancers. Thus, Ishtar was born, and her first recruit was Mark DeFilippo, who came from a rock and heavy metal background and was happy to learn the ways of the darbouka, the classic Middle Eastern hand drum that makes all kinds of percussive sounds without the burden of lugging around an entire kit. Mark's wife Beth, a bellydancer herself, switched to a Middle Eastern version of the tambourine (called a riqq) to join the band. "She taught herself to play it by watching videos," marvels Murphey.

Augmenting Ishtar's bottom end was Murphey's boyfriend, Jeff Chmielarski, whose houseful of electric basses was suddenly put to good use ("he did it first as a favor to me, and then decided it wasn't bad"), and rounding out the membership was guitarist Rob Metil, whose Stratocaster tone gives the group's debut CD, "Bellyrock," its unique psychedelic vibe, like walking into a Turkish nightclub from the '60s.

That's no accident, according to Murphey, whose interest in bellydance lore led her to discover Radio Bastet, a vast online resource. "This West Coast woman inherited hundreds of bellydance LPs from her mother, and she started doing podcasts with them. Some of the music was psychedelic, and I found that there was this large movement in the '60s and '70s called Anatolian rock [which included artists such as Mogollar and Erkin Koray]. I fell in love with the fusion of folk songs with electric instruments."

Metil had been playing in a Irish band called Molly and the Crowd, and knew his way around a lot of world music with his PhD in ethnomusicology, having done graduate work in the Balkans. "When I turned him on to the Turkish music, he thought it was great [that] he could turn the reverb up to 11. Dick Dale was the big person to fuse Middle Eastern melody with surf rock in the '60s with 'Miserlou,' adapted from a Greek [rembetika] tune, [and] he's half Lebanese. The music uses some of the same minor keys and modal systems [called maqams] as surf tunes. Rob is a big fan of surf bands like Laika & The Cosmonauts, so it took little effort for him to take it out of one context into another."

But previous to the 2008 founding of Your Inner Vagabond, there was still the problem of where a "bellyrock" band could play -- in local dives, on bills between punk and alt-country? And how could a cogent scene develop in pursuit of the music? Murphey solved the problem by inventing Jalsah (derived from the Arabic word for sitting), a quarterly event where musicians could gather and learn how to play in Middle Eastern styles.

"It started with me and a local drummer named Nick Ragheb," recalls Murphey. "We happened to be at a Fourth of July party, and we found that we both had Middle Eastern music in common but didn't know each other. He had already made plans to move to Istanbul, so we said we should have a big jam session party. We wanted to meet other people who were interested, so we came up with a concept that was just about Middle Eastern music."

The Jalsah was somewhat different than to what local bellydancers were accustomed. "The bellydance scene in Pittsburgh is usually recorded music. So we decided to make this event all live music, and invited everybody to partcipiate so we could all play together. My band already had 10 or 15 songs in our repertoire by then. Nick had all these drummer friends; we told our friends about it, and they told theirs. We ended up with six or seven drummers, a girl who played flute, and Phat Man Dee brought her cello and sang. The first [Jalsah] was in September 2006 at the Union Project -- it was very loose. We played for a while and then everyone mingled and the drummers did their own thing."

After getting her feet wet organizing a couple of events, Murphey began bringing Jalsahs to other cities. But it was impractical to travel all the way to New England, shake hands with the owner of a Middle Eastern restaurant, and hope that he would check their Myspace page. So instead, she plunged into the online hippie-friendly social network called Tribe.net and used regional contacts to set up the Middle Eastern jam sessions, taking the Jalsahs as far as Charleston, S.C. "("my dad was there") and Washington, D.C. She was often assisted by Carmine Guida of the New York band Djinn, whom she met outside of Philadelphia at a bellydance camp called Folktours.

"In other cities, there's always a friend with a darbouka or a djembe. So I would say, how about I bring my band Ishtar, or my friend Carmine, and we can go lead a Jalsah in your town? I would teach the songs, Carmine would teach the rhythms, and we could open up more people to understanding the music. Pittsburgh still has the biggest Jalsah, but we had one in Boston two years ago that had 70 people -- the woman who did the legwork got the word out to bellydancers. A fan of jam bands may not have any interest in sitting down and eating a kebab, so we try to do these in community centers or open spaces where there's no specific ethnicity involved."

While Nick was gone in Turkey, the responsibility for continuing Jalsah fell squarely on Murphey, and it became a largely participatory event.

"Nick said don't let this die, keep it going. So now we're up to Jalsah X, and it's become a big gathering, not a performance [but rather] a giant jam session where we sit down all night and play without stopping, squeezing as many musicians and drummers as we can onstage. It's good for bellydancers, because it gives them a chance to try out their moves without having to perform."

If you're familiar with what Ishtar normally plays, you'll know the songs, but if not, Murphey makes sure to bring along plenty of sheet music scored for every possible instrument. "We have people who just come to watch everything -- they just like listening to the joyful noise as we cycle through all of these songs. My band will be there to play, but we'll give people a chance to do an improvisational part in the middle.

"It may not sound perfect, but it gives them a chance to try. The instrumentation may be strange -- once we had three saxophones show up, and another time three violins. We don't turn anyone away as long as they can make their instrument go, and are willing to try this music."

However, those expecting original compositions won't get it from either Ishtar or the Jalsah. The "Bellyrock" CD contains Turkish chestnuts from the bellydance craze of the '50s or even older, with an occasional Armenian, Arabic or Jewish strain thrown in for good measure.

"That's partially because I can't write a song," says Murphey, "but as I look for folk music from the Mediterranean, I realize that we're dusting it off and bringing it to new ears. I don't have to write a tune because I have a list of 30 I still want to learn, and 35 I already know. The best hooks and catchy riffs have already been written."

After finding a temporary home in the South Side's Zenith restaurant, Murphey was happy to move the Jalsahs to Your Inner Vagabond. "It's a bigger space, the food's already there so we don't have to worry about getting it catered, and they have a PA system and a stage."

She adds that there's a core group of Jalsah fanatics who keep showing up because they can't play along with the band during Ishtar's regular shows at other venues ("they want to have fun so this is where we all get together and everybody can jump onstage"). Ishtar has established itself in other situations: they've played rock clubs such as Howler's, Bloomfield Bridge Tavern and the Rex Theatre as well as at Middle Eastern restaurant Khalil's, and now have a regular gig at the Istanbul Grille with bellydancer Janim. They've also played for the Turkish-American Student Association ("the majority of our songs are Turkish because Arabs don't use the clarinet as much"), and the Jewish community hired them for events. "We played at the South Side Works for one of the Jewish-Israeli Film Festival movies, and in East Liberty for the Middle East Peace Initiative. It's a group of Jews and Arabs working together to promote peace and exchange ideas."

With everyone in the band engaged in full-time jobs, from Metil's adjunct professorship at Pitt to DeFilippo's dual life as a construction worker and chiropractor, Ishtar sings a common Pittsburgh refrain of being unable to tour beyond a handful of weekend Jalsah trips. But after exposure at Harrisburg's Millenium Music Conference ("we were pasted between a singer-songwriter and an alternative rock band"), Murphey has plugged the band into the national bellydance community and gone in search of festivals ranging from the surf-rock mecca Twangstock in Long Island to the Johnstown Folk Festival. Though it's hard to pigeonhole Ishtar due to their unique musical approach, it's also clear that they can take advantage of a wide diversity of opportunities and venues if they can find the time to do so.

For now, though, Murphey and Co. are content being conductors of the organized chaos that is the charm of the Jalsah. "I'm glad that I have the chance to play, and half the time there's someone there applauding. If I get to meet other bands out of the deal, that's good, too. It'd be nice to get paid some real money, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm just happy I can play this music and occasionally sell a couple CDs."

Manny Theiner is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.
- Post-Gazette

.....If you're into something a little more exotic this Valentine's weekend, definitely check out the unique lineup at Suba, the fab tapas bar above Mangia Qui in Harrisburg. At 10 p.m., Pittsburgh's Ishtar will take the stage.

Recently voted best underground band in Pittsburgh, Ishtar combines elements of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean music with surf rock to create "BellyRock." It's loads of fun, and it made me hungry for falafel. Hit them up on MySpace.....

- The Patriot-News

...If you are looking for a more indie underground beat, stick around for Ishtar. The Pittsburgh fivesome blends Middle Eastern and Mediterranean tunes to reflect the popular sounds of bellydancing nightclubs of the mid-twentieth century (what they call BellyRock).... - Pennlive.com