A fragment of Mohamed Abdel Wahab’s voice, recorded for the 1933 Egyptian musical al-Warda al-Baida (The White Rose), runs through “Al Maktaa al Awwal (Verse 1)”. Jana Saleh lifted it from “Gafnouhu Allam Al Ghazal”, a love song written by the Lebanese poet Bechara Al Khoury, then played and programmed everything around it herself. The song’s title names its own form, the ghazal: the classical Arabic love poem of beauty, longing and the ache of separation.
The single is the first of seven movements in I Only Have Eyes For You, Saleh’s debut album, which plays as one continuous 32-minute piece. Its Arabic title means “the first section”. The London label Mais Um released it on 15 October in an album version, a club edit and a radio edit; Alex Venguer mixed it, Oscar Zambrano mastered it.
The album grew out of her research into tarab, the shared rapture Arabic music reaches when singer, musicians and listeners feed off each other in the same room. She had already tested the idea on her Versions EP, taking apart live recordings by Umm Kulthum, Zaki Nassif and Sabah Fakhri before rebuilding them with her own synths, percussion, drums and bass.
Saleh was born in Beirut in 1980 and learned piano there from Boghos Gelalian, musical adviser to the Rahbani brothers, the songwriters behind much of Fairuz’s repertoire. From there she went to Berklee College of Music to study film scoring and music synthesis. Ten years in New York followed, touring North America in an electro-acoustic duo with Richard Boulanger, a pioneer of the Csound computer music software, while running new media at the reggae and dancehall label VP Records. Home again in Beirut, she opened the B-ROOT studio, co-produced the debut album by the indie band Mashrou’ Leila and became a regular behind the decks across the city, until the port explosion of August 2020 wrecked both her studio and her home. She moved to London later that year, where she now hosts a monthly show on the online station Radio Al Hara.
Listen to “Al Maktaa al Awwal (Verse 1)” HERE and pre-order I Only Have Eyes For You following THIS LINK