Word Power

For her sixth album, Algerian-born Souad Massi dove into her heritage to rework some classic Arabic poems into a modern music setting. Its title, El Mutakallimûn, loosely translates as "masters of the word," or "masters of speech" and reflects Massi's desire to highlight some of the higher aspects of that culture and heritage, in a time when some of its most vocal and visible members spend a lot more time and energy destroying than building.

In an interview about the album, Massi said:

I just wanted to give people the opportunity to discover the beauty of the Arab culture. We are not barbarians or uncivilized people. The Arab-Muslim world has produced great works in science, philosophy, mathematics, medicine and poetry, but it all seems forgotten now.

She focuses on the Arab-Andalusian poets of the era in which modern-day Spain was occupied by Muslim forces, and sets the poems to the kinds of polyglot musical influences that have always appealed to her. Elements of her native Algerian music mix with Spanish and Arabic instrumentation -- as in "El Khaylou Wa el Laylou"-- and sometimes back away for straightforward folk sounds and influences from everywhere else as well. "Lastou Adri" could have stepped off Paul Simon's Graceland, and "Hadari" calls up Caribbean images with island guitars. "Saimtou" is a straightforward pop ballad and "El Houriya" is a country and western stroll across the plains.

Lyrically, Massi chose poems that dealt with resistance to tyranny, political and cultural, and the celebration of freedom. She was struck by the influence that Martin Luther King, Jr,'s speeches had on the civil rights movement and in bringing about change in the U.S., and wondered if the powerful words which Arabic-speaking peoples inherited could world something similar in their lives. In different interviews about the album she reflects on what she sees as the tyranny under which those people live. Her own history, which involved several years living in France because a woman fronting a rock band didn't go over well in Algiers, involves that kind of resistance and fuels her work. Her voice is the same fine instrument it has been through her career and makes the songs a pleasure to listen to even for those who don't speak any Arabic and have to rely on translations to know what she's singing.

That last points to the only real downside of El Mutakallimûn, which is that iTunes doesn't include any kind of translations or booklets with the download. But that's a knock on Apple rather than Massi or El Mutakallimûn, which is worth the listen for how it sounds as much as what it says.