BBC pays surprising tribute to al-Kuwaity brothers

Welcome, even surprising, article on the BBC website by Tim Franks about the al-Kuwaity brothers, one of the most famous musical duos of the Arab world - in the centenary year of Saleh al-Kuwaity's birth. But the piece (and some of the comments) tend to downplay the pre-Israel antisemitism which caused the Al-Kuwaitys to flee Iraq, along with almost the entire Jewish community. Another flaw is that it makes an equivalence between the rejection they encountered in Israel, on the one hand, and that of the Arab world on the other. To have an Arab country name a street after the brothers is still unthinkable.

South Tel Aviv has a newly named street. As of just over two weeks ago, just off Bossem Street, you can now find Rechov Ha'achim al-Kuvaiti, or al-Kuwaiti Brothers Street.

On one corner, there is a handsome, white modernist villa. Opposite, there is a large, run-down apartment block. Many of the residents were not delighted that their street had been given a new, apparently Arabic name.

The Tel Aviv municipality had, though, decided to bestow posthumous recognition on two of its least celebrated residents.

Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaiti had lived close by to their eponymous street, after they had joined the mass emigration of Jews from Iraq to Israel in 1951.

Theirs were lives of triumph and dejection. They had been the toast of Baghdad, in the words of Saleh's son Shlomo, "the national composers of Iraq, and the founders of Iraqi modern music".

In their pomp, the emir of Kuwait would visit the al-Kuwaiti family home, every six weeks, to listen to the brothers perform.

When Shlomo's oldest brother was born, his father called him Sabah, after the emir's family name.

The emir attended Sabah's circumcision, bringing with him a gold case, filled with gold coins.

But the establishment of the new Jewish state in 1948 brought in its wake a surge in anti-Semitism in Iraq. It reached a point where the al-Kuwaitis decided to move to Israel.

It was then that the brothers began to feel the slow crush of disillusion.

"My father," recalls Shlomo, "suffered twice." The first rejection was that of Israel, which in 1951 had little time for the al-Kuwaitis' music.

"His music was considered the music of the enemy," says Shlomo. "So immediately, they put his music in a ghetto. Instead of the concert hall, my father and his brother had to play weddings and barmitzvahs and family fiestas, with people eating and drinking... and not listening."

The second blow came from inside Iraq. Shlomo claims as much as 90% of Iraq's modern popular music was written by his father.

The new Iraqi regime "couldn't erase the music, because everyone was singing it. But the regime started to call it traditional music. They didn't mention his name. They sometimes forced another composer to take the credit".

Daoud Kuwaiti, Shlomo Kuwaiti and Dudu Tassa, who is now re-interpreting his grandfather's works

Daoud al-Kuwaiti died in 1976; his brother, Saleh, Shlomo's father, died, at the age of 78, in 1986. They were so dejected that they forbade their children from playing music themselves.

"We wanted to learn," says Shlomo. "They didn't allow us."

But now Daoud's grandson, Dudu, has broken the brothers' order. Dudu, 32, is a musician. He was born, three months after Daoud's death.

Only at the age of 15 did he begin to approach his grandfather's music. It was, he says, shockingly different: "They even invented certain scales that didn't exist at the time."

Dudu has now started to take their tunes, and re-interpret them.

"These days, songs last three or four minutes. Theirs are much longer and more complex and more serpentine," Dudu told me in his spartan Tel Aviv bed-sit.

He has produced three songs based on the brothers' music and has plans for an entire album.

Shlomo says there has been a new reckoning across the Middle East. He and his family sent discs of the brothers' music "through London to Arab countries".

It was, he says, a "revolution", as people realised that these "traditional" tunes were in fact the work of the al-Kuwaiti brothers.

Questions were asked in the Kuwaiti parliament: in the words of Shlomo, asking, "so what if they were Jewish?".

Shlomo says people from Arab countries sent him more than 650 songs which he did not know about, saying that they were the work of his father.

Then the family approached the Tel Aviv city council to ask for municipal recognition.

That process culminated with the re-naming of a small street in the south of the city.

Shlomo says that, during the ceremony, in February, the residents complained noisily.

They were, he says, "from the right, right-wing of Israeli society. They said we don't want this name because it's Arabic. We began to describe who these people were. And then the residents were angry with the municipality for not explaining."

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