[custom_adv] Umm Kulthum was an Egyptian singer, songwriter, and film actress active from the 1920s to the 1970s. She was given the honorific title Kawkab al-Sharq. Umm Kulthum was known for her vocal ability and unique style. [custom_adv] Umm Kulthum recorded about 300 songs over a 60-year career and her words of love, loss and longing drift reliably from taxis, radios and cafes across the Arab world today, 45 years after her death. Despite singing complex Arabic poetry, she influenced some of the west’s greatest singers. [custom_adv] Bob Dylan said: “She’s great. She really is.” Shakira and Beyoncé have performed dance routines to her music. Maria Callas called her “the incomparable voice”. There is no western counterpart to Umm Kulthum, no artist as respected and beloved as she is in the Arab world. [custom_adv] Despite that, she remains relatively unknown in the UK; a one-off show at the London Palladium on 2 March aims to change that. Umm Kulthum & the Golden Era will dramatise the singer’s life in English with her music sung in Arabic. “My whole message,” says the show’s producer, Mona Khashoggi, “is to promote our rich culture of classical Arabic music in the west.” [custom_adv] The musical depicts Egypt during a period of cultural fertility and seismic sociopolitical change. It responds to a question posed by the ethnomusicologist Virginia Danielson, who wrote a biography of Umm Kulthum: “Is it possible that 50 years in Arab societies, where women appear to outsiders to be oppressed, silent and veiled, could be represented by the life and work of a woman?” And not just a woman, but one whose possible lesbianism and rejection of gender norms raised a few eyebrows in her lifetime. [custom_adv] Umm Kulthum was born in a Nile delta village in about 1904 to an imam and his wife. Her father supplemented his income by singing religious songs with his son and nephew, and his daughter would mimic them, later reflecting that she first learned to sing “like a parrot”. [custom_adv] Joining the family ensemble, her powerful voice proved a novelty but also, as a woman performing religious songs, provocative. Her father dressed her in a boy’s coat and black Bedouin headdress, leaving only her eyes and mouth visible. Freed from the limitations of gender, her talent shone and she attracted the interest of noted musicians, who invited her to Cairo. [custom_adv] It took Umm Kulthum time to find her feet in the big city in the early 1920s. While her voice was admired in the homes of Cairo’s elite, she was mocked for her rough country attire and behaviour. [custom_adv] She gradually learned to dress with style and worked with the best artists of the age, despite a reputation as a demanding collaborator. Record labels competed over her and she negotiated shrewdly to increase her fees and fame. Soon she was making twice as much money as the biggest stars of Cairo’s art scene. [custom_adv] Her voice was a contralto, the lowest type for a female, and had enormous power. She performed to large audiences without a microphone and improvised virtuosically. “She acted like a preacher who becomes inspired by his congregation,” the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz once said. [custom_adv] “When he sees what reaches them he gives them more of it, he works it, he refines it, he embellishes it.” Crowds called out for line repetitions and she obliged, meaning a song could last between 45 and 90 minutes. She subtly altered emphasis and explored the maqamat, the set of Arabic scales, to eruptions of applause. It was said she never sang a line the same way twice.
