All Maryem Tollar wanted to do after high school was make a living through music. When she told her father, he forbade her.
She joined a Toronto-based Arabic singing group in protest – a decision that would change her life. It renewed her interest in her cultural heritage, connected her with her future husband, and led her to form the world music ensemble Al Qahwa in 2016. Through the release of the ensemble’s fourth album Weyn Allah, she hopes to use music to bring her newfound feelings of freedom and belonging to the world.
Between two worlds
Throughout her childhood and early into her adult life, Maryem felt caught between two worlds. She only spent a year in her birthplace of Cairo before her parents, Mohamed and Nadia Hassan, decided to move the family to Canada in 1969. This transition came with some difficulties for the young Maryem.
“Growing up in Canada, I felt like I didn’t quite belong. People told me I wasn’t a real Canadian because I wasn’t born here, so sometimes I would lie and say I was,” she says. “I kind of resisted my Arabic background; I wanted to belong so badly.”
Maryem Tollar (Photo by Cathy Ord)
But the move back to Cairo in grade eight, interrupted by a brief sojourn in Qatar for grades nine and ten, wouldn’t prove any more fruitful. She felt constricted by Muslim expectations for girls and women: her brothers could “do whatever they wanted” while she stayed almost entirely at school. Though that included international trips to see New York Broadway shows and British theatrical performances, she never found a desire to identify with her Arab and Egyptian culture.
That feeling was only amplified by her parents’ treatment of music. Nadia welcomed her daughter’s interest in singing, going out of her way to attend every performance. But when Maryem was five and her older brother Ahmed Hassan dropped out of science to pursue music full-time, her parents disapproved. He quickly moved out, and Maryem never felt she would be allowed to play music professionally under their watch.
“By the end of high school, all I wanted to do was perform, and I finally had the courage to tell my parents. And my dad forbid me, but by then I was old enough and brave enough to say ‘That’s fine, but I’m still going to do it.’”
With no reason to stay in Egypt after a graduation ceremony at the pyramids, she immigrated to Halifax, but struggled to call it home. Ottawa was also a bust. It’s only when she made it to Toronto that she found exactly what she needed: “The first thing I noticed was ‘Hey, I’m not the only beige person.’” She would often walk onto a streetcar and hear everyone speaking different languages, or find out that her university peers have homes overseas. “Everybody’s from somewhere else and we all belong here.”
Her rebellious side grew more when Ahmed came knocking: he needed a singer for small studio recordings and Maryem was happy to help out her brother. One of his projects in 1993 was Sable/Sand, an abstract three-movement symphony set in the Arab desert produced by Toronto choreography company Dancemakers. He needed to find an Arabic singer, and he wanted it to be Maryem.
She said yes. Ahmed arranged Arabic singing lessons for her, and her two worlds finally converged.
Reconnection, romance, and the riqq
Maryem already knew how to speak in Arabic when Ahmed approached her with the idea, but she was lost when it came to singing: “On a piano the smallest interval is a semi-tone, but in Arabic music they have these notes in some scales that are in between the semi-tones. I couldn’t even hear them at first, let alone try to sing them.”
Ahmed organized the first few months of lessons at a local church with George Sawa. He’s a master of many musical worlds, from Italian dance songs to mystical Ottoman court performances, and he’s an expert on the qanun, an Arabic harp that lies flat on the player’s lap. For Maryem’s purposes at the time, however, Sawa was an Egyptian ethnomusicologist and Arabic singer whose interest in Sufi devotional love songs would eventually rub off on her.
Roula Said (Photo by Alaina Osborne)
“Up until then, all the Arabic people I met were very conservative and wanted their kids to be engineers and doctors. They were not open to things like musicians seem to be,” Maryem says. “I found an Arabic community through music lessons that I could relate with and be comfortable with, and after a year, I kind of found a way to love my background.”
The church wasn’t wheelchair accessible, which made it difficult for Ahmed to accompany them on account of his multiple sclerosis. Lessons eventually moved into his apartment, which brought Maryem closer to Al Qahwa’s founding members: Ernie Tollar, Naghmeh Farahmand, and Demetri Petsalakis. She also became friends with Roula Said, now a regular guest singer and dancer at their concerts. Said says meeting Maryem was like finding the sister she never had.
“It was a pretty instantaneous bond,” she says. “In those days, we were the only Arab downtown artists, so meeting each other was like ‘Oh! Here’s another weird and wonderful person with a wacky sense of humour in for living the life of an artist.’”
In 1996, Maryem got a grant to play with Al-Turath Ensemble in Aleppo, where she decided to take up the Middle Eastern tambourine, also called the riqq. Said, unable to resist the opportunity to travel with Maryem, joined the trip and picked up the qanun. Their love for Sufi devotional love songs only got stronger the more they learned on this trip.
The lessons helped Maryem deepen her relationship with Ernie, her soon-to-be husband. They first met when Strobe Records president Ron Allen, who had put together an Indo-world fusion ensemble, invited the two of them to jam. They only had a chance to briefly introduce themselves on the first night before they all launched into a three-hour session. This revealed some differences in their musical interests.
“I was probably more of a jazz-head. It’s where my roots were,” Ernie says, clarifying that Maryem’s roots were from all over. “But when you start to work with people, you start to find where your music is compatible, and I think that’s a big part of learning to collaborate.”
They went to coffee shops together on breaks at future sessions, and eventually Ernie joined Sawa’s lessons. Their marriage is now in its 26th year; they had their first child in 2001.
Ernie gets philosophical when talking about his feelings for his wife. Believing that the concept of happily-ever-after is too definite and that relationships are a journey, he says he falls in love with Maryem “each new day.”
He’s much more direct when it comes to their musical compatibility. He’s watched her improve over the last 30 years, and she’s helped him improve his instrumentation in turn. He’s heard her sing for so long that he’s become “overly familiar” with the power and tonal strengths of her voice, making him able to tune his playing to her needs. But she still gives him enough flexibility to play authentically.
Ernie Tollar (Photo by Von Tiedemann)
“There’s a fairly well-known idiom in jazz: You hire musicians to do what they do,” Ernie says. “And sometimes the less you have to say, the better.”
He calls Maryem a living musical encyclopedia, after her ability to pinpoint the origin of even the most obscure melodies. Yet she claims Ernie has the better ear: “He could tell during lessons that I wasn’t singing the notes correctly, but I would get mad like, “I’m Egyptian, I should know!’” Maryem says with a laugh.
Ahmed succumbed to his multiple sclerosis in 2011, but the connections he facilitated continue to stay with Maryem: Said says there’s much more of an Arabic music presence in Toronto now than there was in the 1990s, but she can’t resist coming back to play with the ensemble. The world music is only a small part of what makes Al Qahwa unique, she says. It’s about the joy she gets from playing with part of such a unified group, Maryem’s generosity and sweet heart, and the ensemble’s grand vision to help listeners explore the world through the universal language of song.
Travelling the world with Al Qahwa
Much like with Maryem herself, Al Qahwa’s journey starts in two places.
Their first album, The Coffee House, is rooted in Middle Eastern coffee house culture. It bundles together ten traditional Iraqi, Egyptian, and Syrian songs, including three from Maryem’s studies with Al-Turath Ensemble member Mahmoud Faris. It was produced alongside Tales of Two Cities: The Leipzig-Damascus Coffee House, which is how the ensemble got its name – “al qahwa” is Arabic for “the coffee house.”
“In the Middle East, just like in Germany, there was quite a lot of coffee house culture. People would come to hear different kinds of music, poetry, and news of the day, and we thought it was a great name,” Maryem says. “The hilarious thing is I’m not a coffee drinker. I like tea.”
Yet the album is heavily grounded in Canada. The show was put on in 2016 by the Canadian Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, which originally hired Maryem after composer Christos Hatzis saw her perform at Ahmed’s production of Fourteen Remembered. Al Qahwa also recorded The Coffee House in Toronto-based ZappaCat Studios – or, as founding ensemble member Demetri Petsalakis would call it, his home.
“We recorded that album in two days,” Petsalakis says. “We all came here and just played. It’s a very honest record.”
Tafelmusik puts on primarily Baroque shows, so Al Qahwa’s Arabic music was new for the orchestra’s regulars, Maryem says. She adds that the project allowed the audience to experience a genre they may never have considered listening to otherwise.
Waleed Abdulhamid (Photo by Cathy Ord)
“People really liked it, and when there were Arabic people in the audience, they were very happy because a lot of the songs were traditional or classic. Depending on the nature of the song, you could see them singing along or clapping,” she says.
Weyn Allah brings that vision a step further. Save for one track, its songs are entirely original – a first for the ensemble – with most being composed by Maryem. She collaborated heavily with the other band members to incorporate their various cultures, and she offered them opportunities to create personalized instrumental interludes. The album has since been nominated for an Oliver Schroer Pushing the Boundaries Award as part of the 2024 Canadian Folk Music Awards.
Petsalakis says the interludes were only loosely composed before everyone came into the studio to record – Ernie used his jazz expertise to help them improvise in an attempt to capture a raw and intimate sound. Petsalakis’s track, Little Moments, is an attempt to create a “little moment between songs to journey through places.”
The ensemble’s bassist and percussionist, Waleed Abdulhamid, says the album feels like it travels from Sudan to Saskatchewan, and from Greece to the Middle East. “It’s almost like you’re touring the world for free with music,” he says. He wanted to include his own musical background on the album as well, so he incorporated African rhythms into his interlude, Hard Life (Maisha Magamu).
Maryem wrote most of the lyrics to reflect on modern social issues, including racism, environmental collapse, and war. She says she’s already played a lot of music that’s reflects on life, including some songs she learned from her uncle, but that reflection has taken on a new meaning with her own original music. Her purpose as a musician now is to create a better world for her kids – to raise them in the environment she wishes she had when she was young: “I try to support whatever they are interested in, whether it’s music or not. I think a lot about what’s happening to the world because of them, and I want the world to be a nice place for them.”
Al Qahwa
alqahwa.ca
