Cheb i. Sabbeh, like the vast a majority of Algerian Jews, fled the land of his birth in 1962. But not many Algerian Jews ended up like him in California, spinning discs. He tells his story to the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California. (With thanks: Shelomo)
"The thick, black vinyl discs were hot to the touch in the repressive, North African sun. But the sound they made was just so — cool.
"Cheb i. Sabbeh remembers those days, when the sound of Andalusian music echoed around the concrete walls in the Jewish quarter of his hometown of Constantine, Algeria. Sometimes a neighbor pulled a radio or turntable out into the street and sometimes there was even a band. The men played and the women danced.
"Those were good times, and he smiles at the memory.
"It was not to last.
"Sabbeh, a San Francisco DJ and record producer for the past 20-odd years, is an easy man to spot. On the day of our interview, the 60-year-old walked into the café bundled tightly in a green coat — he was battling a cold — that clashed with his maroon pants and chartreuse boots. His long salt-and-pepper hair was bundled into a topknot, and bright gold earrings dangled from both lobes.
"Sabbeh was born Haïm El Baz, the only surviving child of a secretary mother and a father who stained furniture to the desired wood tone (his stage name roughly translates from Arabic as “young man of the sunshine,” a humorously self-applied moniker for a man who spins records until four or five every morning).
"As Jews in Algeria, Sabbeh’s family found itself caught in the middle between Muslim revolutionaries and right-wing French colonists. As a teenager, Sabbeh remembers days when bullets soared through the neighborhood and car bombs exploded nearby. Someone — he’s not sure who — put razor blades in the community’s food.
"In 1960, the beloved Jewish musician Cheb Raymond was assassinated.
“This was a signal things were finished for us in Algeria,” he recalls. “Maybe it was time to go.”
"Two years later, clutching a mattress and a few small boxes, his family fled to Paris after France ceded its former territory to Islamic revolutionaries after a horrifically bloody war. Other than a hitchhiking jaunt across North Africa in 1968, Sabbeh never returned to the nation of his birth."
Hear some of Cheb i Sabbeh's productions and remixes here (with thanks: Women's Lens)
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