Jethro Tull at Byblos
Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull front man, sings in Byblos. (NOW Lebanon)
I didn’t really know what to expect as I walked into the Byblos amphitheater, hovering as it does on stilts over the calm evening Mediterranean. Lebanon is not the first place one would look to find a thriving Jethro Tull fan base. Ian Anderson, the band’s flutist-front man, is 61 years old and before the Lebanese Civil War was even over, the band was releasing a “20 Years of Jethro Tull” retrospective.
As we sat and waited for the set to begin, a most mysterious omen shot through the overcast sky – too low and bright to be a shooting star, too high and horizontal to be a firework. As I searched for a deeper meaning of this sign, fireworks from countless weddings sparkling here and there over the gorgeous Jbeil hills distracted me. I soaked up the beautiful scene, Crusader castle and ruins behind the stage, Mediterranean Sea behind me. A note on Mr. Anderson’s flute – that famous, unmistakable flute – drew me out of my daydream and triggered memories of childhood I didn’t even know I had. He began to play.
Jethro Tull has always been about Mr. Anderson’s flute playing. As the band progressed through its set, he attacked his little steel tube with his lungs and his voice and his tongue and his whole body, contorting and hurling around with a nymph-like energy that did not betray his old age. The little paunch that protruded from behind his vest reminded the audience that this was 2009, not 1967, but little else did. Anderson’s voice sounded a bit strained, but no music ever sounds like its recorded album – especially forty years on. The sound we know him best for, his flute playing, sounded as energetic and exciting as it did when he first became famous, which is no small feat. The songs in which his flute didn’t feature prominently fell a little flat, but luckily they were infrequent.
“Now for something more recent,” he said, “from...1969.” The crowd laughed appreciatively. He transitioned from one song to another, interspersing his playing with a few jokes, playful like the band’s lyrics. Before beginning his famous jazzy take of Bach’s “Bourée”, Anderson noted that “you can never really kill a completely good piece of music.” Indeed, maybe that is why Jethro Tull still sounds so good: there has always been something strange and uniquely good about Jethro Tull’s music. At times a cross between rock and roll and Medieval court music (literally so, as Anderson pointed out before playing “Pastime with Good Company,” which he attributed to King Henry VII), the band is hard to pigeonhole. Just when you begin to think you know where a song is going, the band switches direction and hits a couple of power chords or a pummeling flute solo and enters a whole new genre of music.
Was the audience at Byblos composed of Jethro Tull diehards? Probably not. Aside from the requisite and electrifying final song, “Aqualung,” Jethro Tull’s most famous single, the crowd was decidedly calm, enjoying the relaxation of being at the concert in beautiful Byblos as much as they were enjoying the music itself. I’d venture a guess that they were more like me: my point of reference of the band comes from my Father, whose cassettes and, later, CDs, sent Anderson’s piping through my childhood home as he hammered nails and fixed things. And so my understanding of their music – learned from childhood proximity, no avid listening – is probably like that of most of the crowd. Jethro Tull is famous because it has made unique music that sticks with you, and this concert was no exception.
(This is the original version of an article that was published on NOW Lebanon on July 20, 2009.)
A Beirut night
Begins like this:
Travel to Zico House, an artist's collective on Spears Street. There, an event combining freestyle rap with freestyle drawing is going on. Watch for a bit, have a drink, then leave.
Travel to Gemmayzeh, where you have another drink at a rooftop bar with a retracting cylindrical ceiling. Note that they have repositioned the bar so that the retracting roof is now over your head. Leave.
Walk across the still-to-be-completed downtown area to the "Egg" or "Dome," the bombed out cinema in the center of the city. Recently, it has been hired out to various events, including the electronic concert during Fete de la Musique. This evening, it is hired out for a(nother) Michael Jackson event.
Inside, about twenty people stood around in a vast spherical space, still haggard from the old days when men peered from the air vents to snipe at what was once the war's front line. Chunks of the ceiling were missing, as were all of the seats, and here and there on the stuccoed ceiling little holes and chunks were missing, from who knows what sort of damage.
They were playing DVDs of Michael Jackson music videos very loudly, and the effect was sort of overwhelming. His videos are entrancing and even more so on a gigantic silver screen. The falsetto reverberated in the vast, empty space, and the apocalyptic feeling of this half-destroyed, half-resuscitated cinema was further enhanced.
Click through to see the full versions of these photos until I figure out how to do an HTML scroll frame.
- A panorama of the Beirut dome, an old cinema that was destroyed during the civil war.
(In this photo, you'll see on the left some barriers used to separate the construction area from the street, a bombed out church [this is all looking south], the rebuilt areas of downtown [west], the Dome, and the Hariri mosque [north].)
Inside the dome
Inside, you see the view from the screen.
“Fete de la Musique” starts off a rocking Beirut summer
Rapper Malikah dishes rhythm at Martyr’s Square at Beirut’s Fete de la Musique.
The Lebanese tend to be cautious before being optimistic. Take this month's parliamentary elections: everyone expected everyone else to be in the streets fighting over the votes, and so they stayed home. The result? No violence, but also empty restaurants.
Good news here is also tempered with caution. Once a top world tourist destination, Beirut has worked on regaining that mantle since the end of the civil war in 1991. Downtown has been rebuilt by Solidere, but it is routinely criticized for being comatose and Disneylike. Occasional spasms of political violence have emptied the city and downtown’s wide pedestrian-only streets, leaving only a few Sukleen men (metaphorical tumbleweeds) to remind visitors of how barren it looks when abandoned.
But Beirut has always bounced back. Last summer was largely successful, and May’s events faded from the collective psyche as normalcy seemed to settle over the city. And this year, after being named the top destination for 2009 by the New York Times, Beirut breathed a deliberately soft sigh of relief, wondering if for the first time in years its summer would be free of the events that have in the past so quickly turned lives upside down. It’s difficult to forget that the last time a summer was going as swimmingly, Israel attacked and scuttled much more than just the lucrative summer tourists.
So far, this young summer has passed – ominously, luckily, unexpectedly – calmly. And last night, summer’s first and longest day, the solstice, Beirut played host to an international music festival that demonstrated that the country is well on its way to having a perfect summer. Fete de la Musique, an international music festival organized through France’s Culture Ministry, was enough of a success that I am willing to go out on a limb and call this summer for Lebanon and for Beirut.