Shams

In 1990 a small Canadian label called Network Records released Ayoban, an eight-song LP by Shams carrying a plain description on the sleeve: Hararian Ethiopian Songs. It was recorded in Toronto, and it is a rare Canadian document of Harari song.

The Harari call themselves Gēy Usuach, the people of the city. The city is Harar, the walled Muslim centre of eastern Ethiopia, whose old quarter of Jugol was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006. Their Ethiosemitic language is spoken by a few tens of thousands of people, and it carries a song tradition known as gey fäqär, the songs of the city. Women sang them at weddings, a choir answering a lead singer-poet called a wāli over voice and drum, with verses about faith, love, marriage, friendship and Harar itself. By the 1970s Harari groups were posing for photographs with radios, microphones and imported instruments, and the old songs were moving into a modern Harari pop carried on cassette.

Hararis had been leaving home for a long time. An imperial crackdown in 1948 drove an estimated 10,000 of them out of the city, and the 1974 revolution and the Derg years that followed sent Ethiopians of every background into refugee camps in Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan, and from there to the West. Toronto became one of the main landing places. The Ethiopian Association in Toronto was founded in 1980, and the Harari community that formed in the city grew into what its own heritage centre now calls the largest outside Ethiopia. Ayoban was recorded in Toronto while that community was putting down roots.

The sessions took place at Studio 92 Canada, which engineer Norm Barker opened in 1986 on the third floor of the old Donlands Theatre at 397 Donlands Avenue in East York. The building had opened as a movie house in 1948 and spent the 1970s and early 1980s screening Indian films before it was converted into a complex of recording and post-production rooms at the end of the decade. Barker later won two Juno Awards for his work there.

-Robert Williston