Thoughts at Fannu

credit: Mirah Ally

Upstairs at Jazz Café, some musicians are on stage playing a jazzy cover of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”. It is mid-morning and the mood couldn’t have been brighter at this session of Fannugedharin. The bass is groovy, the keyboard runs executed deftly, the drums are muted and at times unsteady, but one can forgive that. At least I can. To bear witness to a gathering such as this, where one of the great art forms of the twentieth century is being interpreted in a city dragged into modernity fifty years ago…that’s really something.

It takes me back to around the year 2000 when a music and performing arts school opened for the first time in Male, the SALAAM school.

The person with access to the school’s jam room was a friend of mine. He would give us twice the amount of time for every hour we bought. I think it was about 200 Rufiyaa an hour, a considerable sum back then. You could have coffee at Raan’baa for seven bucks per cup. But If I found three more people who could chip in a fifty each, we were good: I was lucky if that happened twice a month. However, practice rooms in the capital were rare, and access to them even more so. My friends and I were grateful for what we had.

credit: Mirah Ally

One of the big bands at the time was Illsight, whose Pearl Jam covers at the ‘Hafthaa Nimmun’ shows in the Harbour area caught the attention of certain people, myself included. I used to see Illsight’s band leader Thaatha at SALAAM sipping instant coffee with my friend. Thaatha was something of a celebrity for us, though I didn’t particularly like Illsight. It was mostly because they dared to cover grunge – I felt like it should be us who did that. But as a drummer of an as-yet-unnamed metal band who aspired to play grunge, I was fed up with the music of my bandmates. I wanted something slower and more expressive.

Meanwhile, my bandmates idolised Megadeth and Sepultura, and their local equivalent called Tumour. That band had one of the best guitarists of our time, Soffe, and also one of the Maldives’ finest drummers, Ibbe (the elder brother of the legendary Uchchu of Naaba). Ibbe was the long-time drummer of Fasy Live. (Check out Soffe’s band ‘Habeysmalan’ perform Ganduvaru Vagu here, thanks artisound).

So, we were destined to go our separate ways. A few days after our breakup I remember hanging out at SALAAM school and feeling lost and morose. I was a complete buzzkill. I didn’t have enough money to rent out the jam room to practice drumming either, all I had to my name was fifty bucks.

But then Thaatha showed up. When he knew that I played the drums Thaatha convinced my friend to let us jam for an hour for the fifty bucks I had.

So now I was there behind the kit, with this man whose taste aligned with mine. Thaatha started the simple, single-string riff of Vehtuneemaa, perhaps the band’s most famous song. The jam had begun. And I channelled – unsteadily and clumsily – the spirit of Illsight’s drummer Aabu, Dave Grohl of Nirvana, Dave Krusen and Dave Abbruzzese of Pearl Jam, and Sean Kinney of Alice in Chains in a mad frenzy. The hour flashed past much too quickly, and my friend ended up loaning us an extra half hour, which too was spent in feverish intensity. At the end, Thaatha and I had agreed to meet up again, exchanging (landline) numbers.

It was the last time I saw him. Soon, SALAAM school shut down as well.

credit: Mirah Ally

In our twenties, the love for grunge gave way to a spirited break from white-music – an obsession with jazz in all its forms. The wilder, the better – the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, the crazy solos of Coltrane on “A Love Supreme”, the mind-bending atonality and percussiveness of Cecil Taylor. We went to extremes before beginning the journey home. On our way back, we discovered the non-western jazz of India and Ethiopia, and in our thirties, moved on to the Sub-Saharan blues of Bombino and Tinariwen.

Now the band on stage are jazzing up MJ’s “Leave Me Alone”. The bass is incredible, lots of interesting little flourishes. The closest we came to this, that I can recall, were those performances of the late great Fuloo Nashid, with his band performing tracks off his solo album ‘Bird in Flight.’ Jazz is a sign of musical sophistication, not just anyone can play it (not to demean other musical forms). To have something that could pass for half-decent jazz in a café in Male today, that is a great privilege. We’ve come a long way since 2000.