MUSCAT’S underground music scene
featuring Smoke on the Water and Fire in the Sky
“The locals would just turn up with garlic sauce and khubz. These were very loose jams, and they worked�/p>

TWANGS THROUGH THE NIGHT
Welcome to the jam

It was 4am and the last electric twangs were bouncing off the hills behind the dark Sheraton Oman Hotel. Chances are you weren’t there, and never heard about the rock show held through the night at a relatively anonymous address, keyboards and wires wedged in between a lit swimming pool and the shell of a half-constructed building. Welcome to Muscat’s underground jam scene, a movement that started in a penthouse in Hamriya and got so big organisers called the last session ‘The Mother of all Jams: Smoke on the Water� promising ‘The Grandmother of all Jams: Fire in the Sky�when the weather improves. Jam sessions headed to apartments and backyards after the hotels shut them down after legalities got in the way of what were hugely popular weekly programmes. More importantly, this was the only avenue for local talent �amateur musicians �to perform in public and get together with professional players. Jam sessions are typically informal improvisations among a loose group of musicians who get together and play, sometimes against each other, to practise or to learn new skills �more trial than performance. Unknown to most, Muscat sports a surprising number of talented musicians who play at home or among friends, all the while holding day-jobs that give no hint of their hobby. Try imagining someone who plays acid rock through a Thursday night, and then sits through a Saturday morning office meeting in a business suit. Among the key players in the fledgling underground scene are advertising managers, business development directors, members of the military and software developers. Who would have known?
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LOOSE JAM
The long and short of local talent

“There is just no place for local musicians to play,�says Murli Pillai, who grew up with jazz, rock and blues, “so we started jamming in my apartment, where a handful of friends would gather once a month. We’d insulate the floor with blankets so the neighbours wouldn’t mind. The locals would just turn up with garlic sauce and khubz. These were very loose jams, and they worked.�They worked so well, in fact, that the numbers of musicians coming over grew until the house was filled with up to 17 people a night. Jamming needed a new venue. The loose jam was coming undone. And that’s how ‘The Mother of all Jams: Smoke on the Water�came about. “We needed to get a lot more focused, so we invited musicians and gave them a 15-minute window. But maybe we mixed too much together. Maybe we need to have separate jam sessions for heavy metal and the blues and jazz. Of course, there are a lot of other musicians playing a lot of other music �but we don’t know them.� Where is all this outpouring of music coming from? The Arabic world is particularly keyed in, and many in this region drift towards Flamenco, a preference with possible roots in the Moorish presence in Spain. They start with the Spanish guitar, sitting by their cars late at night, and it is only natural that a lot of them graduate to rock and even metal, which seems universally understood by the young across cultures.

GENERATIONS
Jazz, blues, rock, metal

Why metal? “Metal is aggression,�says Vinod, one of the organisers of the jam. “When I was a teenager, there were only two ways to vent my anger: cricket and music. Heavy metal takes me to another planet, and I love the fact that it is a collective effort, from the bands to the fans. I want to belong to that, to be a part of the cult. Perhaps the world was happier in the Sixties, and that’s why we had the hippies and rock and roll. But the Nineties were a decade of turmoil, and metal captures this mood. Metal is rooted in the reality of today.� Vinod insists that metal is about a cohesive effort, while the blues is more individualistic, and at this point a fight breaks out across the table, over the bowls of wafers, bottles and cans �the jammers exploding over the superiority of each one’s music, and why the jazz and the blues is superior to metal. Of course, whatever the outcome and interpretation, it just might have a bit of truth in it. Blues greats like B B King typically sang intensely personal songs, and while his duet with Eric Clapton isn’t his most classic, it sums up the mood pretty well: “I stepped out of Mississippi when I was ten years old,/ With a suit cut sharp as a razor and a heart made of gold./ I had a guitar hanging just about waist high,/ And I'm gonna play this thing until the day I die.�

The blues can be traced all the way back to the first African Americans, who worked on their owner’s fields, tended their homes and looked after their children. As the workers toiled, they sang traditional African folk songs. By the mid 1800s these became what we now call African spirituals and in the 1900s were replaced by Gospel music. It was their sorrow that led to a raw new music �the blues �that sung of work, love, poverty and the hardships they faced in a world barely removed from slavery. The worker in the cotton field would sing, “I’m gonna leave you, baby, and I won’t be comin�back no more.�It wasn’t his wife he was talking about. In time, the blues turned urban with the new electric guitar, studios and record labels. Moving on is a frequent theme in the blues, and just as they talk of it in their lyrics, the genre itself has led to other types of music, following a changing world. That new scene, according to people like Vinod, is embodied by the music at Wacken Open Air, the largest metal festival in the world, where he camped “Woodstock-style.� Whatever your philosophy, watch out for the next session, planned for after the summer. ‘The Grandmother of all Jams: Fire in the Sky�already promises to hit harder. It is also expected to draw many more musicians, and listeners. So many, in fact, that George Thomas of the Sheraton, who helped organise the first outdoor jam session at the pool side of the hotel staff quarters, says that the venue might have to be shifted. Where it will be and what form it will take is being planned now. And everyone’s invited.