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It’s 9 PM Saudi time on a Monday evening and I’m on a video call chatting with Elham Ghanimah, the manager of Riyadh-based Jazz fusion band Garwasha, and we’re both waiting for the four band members to join us. As the minutes tick by, Ghanimah explains that bass player Abdulrahman “Koosh” Alkhawashki will actually be joining from LA, where he’s studying for a Bachelor’s degree in Bass Performance, so for him it’s 7 AM which explains why trying to find a time that works for everyone, across an 11-hour time difference, has taken over two weeks. But alas, we’re here. Sort of.
Guitarist Mazen Lawand joins first, we all exchange pleasantries but he suddenly drops off the call. Then Hassan Alkhedher, the drummer, joins and we make small talk. Ten minutes into the call and he’s still the only one there so, he takes it upon himself to start telling the story of how the band came about, even though he was the last member to join, eventually admitting “I am the outsider. I’m not the ideal person to explain.” Luckily, Lawand returns to the call before Alkhedher has got too deep into it, but his line is cutting in and out and it sounds like he’s in a noisy vehicle – the guitarist confirms that he’s in transit to Alkhedher’s house. The other two band members including keyboard player Rami Elamine, never actually join the hour-long call and nor do we ever find out what kept them away.
This is the chaotic, anything-goes world of Garwasha, and much like the “free jazz” they incorporate into their sound, it’s messy, it’s organic but somehow, it actually works. It more than works. In fact, their hybrid sound, which collects influences from across genres and geographies, is catchy, inviting and it’s technically superb. And yeah, the guys might be late, or missing in action for this particular interview, but on the whole, they’re likeable, funny, passionate and especially humble, in spite of their far-reaching music knowledge and skills.
“We’re all over the place,” admits Alkhedher matter-of-factly, before Lawand laughs: “We live our lives like children.” Crediting Ghanimah for keeping the band functioning, he said “We’re going to become something just because of her, she’s really helped us out as a manager.” It’s a kind sentiment, but the music, in particular their performance at the Riyadh International Jazz Festival last month, speaks for itself. And Ghanimah openly claims that the band she’s managing “are the best band in Saudi right now.”
Garwasha was officially formed in 2021, but the idea started with Lawand and “Koosh” Alkhawashki a year earlier. They both had previously dabbled in progressive rock and metal, but had found their way to Jazz around 2015, “which just completely changed our lives,” remembers Lawand, a self-taught musician who graduated with a degree in Contemporary Writing and Production from Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts, Boston in December 2020. It was while he was there that he started learning about Arabic notes and how to play them on the guitar and was lucky enough to meet revered Palestinian oud and violin player Simon Shaheen. “I studied with him for two semesters and he taught me a lot about Arabic music and how you’re supposed to play it, and I just got obsessed,” remembers Lawand, who is of Lebanese heritage now living in Riyadh. “And all of that just kind of took me away from jazz and back to Arabic music and I saw a lot of commonalities between jazz and Arabic, and also Latin music which I’d learned a lot about while at Berklee too – there were so many commonalities. I talked to Koosh and he saw them too and we were like, yeah, let’s start a band. We wanted to form a musical ensemble that was capable of playing different styles of Latin, different styles of Arabic, and some styles from the United States like funk, pop, and fusion.”
With the idea in place, the guitar player, bass and an old mate on keyboards set about looking for a drummer and found Alkhedher through a friend of a friend. “We were also Instagram friends but we’d never spoken,” laughs Lawand. Alkhedher has played percussion for 12 years, he’d already toured Europe supporting thrash metal giants Onslaught and played at Bloodstock festival in the UK and Tuska in Finland when the band reached out. “I was playing progressive metal or what’s known as math rock which derives a lot of its rhythmical movements and awkward beats from jazz,” he explains. “It’s kind of unorthodox let’s say so, that’s where my interest aligned with theirs because I was already playing those sorts of rhythms.”
And so, the quartet was formed, they started writing music together and Garwasha was born. Well, the name still needed fine-tuning. “We were thinking of calling ourselves something like ‘The North Riyadh Ensemble’,” says Lawand, now laughing about how straight the name sounds. “And I mentioned it to a friend and he just looked at us and he laughed,” Lawand explained that he wanted to be taken seriously as a musician but his friend was not convinced. “Instead, he said, ‘You guys should call it Garwasha because it’s all you guys say, you sit around and say everything is Garwasha’, which to be fair we did.” The word Garwasha translates to ‘finding a situation an annoyance’ and the guys decided to go with it.
So, what do they find Garwasha about the music industry in Riyadh? Both band members and their manager start laughing, there seems to be one annoying thing that the term gets used to describe a lot. “Fake violin players,” laughs Lawand. Apparently, it’s a thing in Riyadh restaurants and venues; musicians pretending to play instruments to a backing track. “Fake saxophone players are a thing too,” says Lawand. “I think it’s a Dubai thing that’s been flown over there,” chips in Alkhedher slyly.
Luckily, fake musicians aren’t something Garwasha could ever be accused of being and very soon after forming, live performance requests started rolling in. But how did audiences take to their fusion sounds? “This blending of Arabic scales with Western harmony and different Western rhythms is already very appealing here,” explains Alkhedher, who is of Saudi and Lebanese heritage and grew up in the eastern region of the Kingdom. “They cherish the local sound and the oud, so when they hear a band that’s playing that, we have their attention…and then it just gets weird from there.” Alkhedher laughs as he continues. “They tell us that, some people are like, that’s weird but the song was good. Mazen and the guys do bring forth like a pop influence and hip hop influence too, there’s a lot of variety in the music, so someone will like at least a segment of what we’re playing.”
Bigger gigs around The Kingdom followed, including at The Music Space in Jeddah and XP Music Futures 2022 in Riyadh, then Notah Festival 2023 in Abha, ITHRA 2023 in Dhahran, culminating with the Riyadh International Jazz Festival last month at the Mayadeen Theatre in Diriyah. The band remember hearing rumours that there was going to be a jazz festival in Riyadh but held back their excitement in case it didn’t materialise, even when they got the email inviting them to play and the big international names started getting thrown around they managed their expectations. “It wasn’t until it became official that we really lost our minds,” admits Alkhedher. “And then again, when we also found out that it was Hiatus Kaiyote that we were opening for – that’s one of our favourite bands!”
Garwasha had a short time to practice once bass player Alkhawashki had flown back from LA but managed to write a new song specifically for the festival. “Even with the older material we try and play it in a new way. That’s just the way the band is set up, there’s lots of room for just instantaneous expression,” says Alkhedher, who thinks they went down well with what is not their conventional crowd. “So this audience was different because it was the International Jazz Festival in Riyadh after all and you had the fanciest people in town, there were a lot of very well-polished people wearing traditional clothes, as well as our friends of course, and it was a good reaction, absolutely it was!”
Manager Ghanimah is quick to add that those backstage were equally impressed. “The international bands were saying ‘wow’. The drummer from Hiatus Kaiyote was standing next to me, saying, ‘Whoa, this is really cool’ and even mimicking the drum sound,” she remembers.
The festival has been a highlight for the band and quite a turnaround for the guys who had only played in closed quarters within the Kingdom before music returned to public life when the General Entertainment Authority was founded in 2016. “Musical instruments were always sold everywhere but it was not acceptable to play in public because it was considered a disturbance, mostly we played in our houses,” remembers Lawand. “And of course, we used to go and play in compounds where non-Saudis lived. There were stages mostly for foreigners to come and play but they also hosted locals to come and play. So we were very grateful to go and play on those.”
He also adds how his parents encouraged him to take up playing an instrument. “Music is very important in Saudi, it’s everywhere, like lots of households will have an uncle or a grandparent or someone who is involved somehow in music and that’s how it’s taught.” But following it as a professional choice was still a taboo. “I think it is heavily encouraged by families but in a way where it’s a secondary hobby that’s never going anywhere,” clarifies Alkhedher, who would also play in the foreign compounds growing up in the eastern region of the Kingdom. “When it comes to doing it for work, you’re not allowed to do this. There’s even a public stigma If you’re a performer or if you’re a recording artist. Like, just don’t do that, Just do it for the love of it.”
That’s all changing. The attitude towards a music career, and indeed the funding, venues and grassroots schemes that are needed to pursue one, are being shaped by the Ministry’s Music Commission and its new CEO Paul Pacifico. Garwasha were able to have time with some of the international acts outside of the festival to discuss touring, festivals, and general ideas and pick their brains to help globalise their careers, they have made connections that are still going strong.
They can then feedback on that knowledge to their small music community which consists of instrumentalists and hip-hop artists. The band are now planning to fine-tune their craft on a regional tour and are working on an album that they hope to release later this year. Is success within their reach? “I think success for us will be other people starting to play like us,” says Lawand thoughtfully. “I would say not even play like us but just really enjoy how we play,” adds Alkhedher. “Like someone who listens to the details and appreciates what’s going on.”
