By Ziad Nawfal

There is a word in the Mindala dialect of the Congo that signifies yesterday, today, and tomorrow: “lobi”. Time is a relative concept for this African tribe, a concept that disposes of a considerable range of possibilities. The word can easily be applied to the timeless music of Dimi Mint Abba.

Mint Abba is, quite simply, the most famous musician in Mauritania. Both of her parents were musicians, and she started singing and playing when she was only seven years old. Her professional career began in 1976, when she sang on the radio and competed, the following year, in the Umm Kulthum Contest in Tunis. Amino Belyamani, her partner of one night in Sharjah’s Score for a Biennial music program, is a Moroccan-born, New York-based pianist, with training in classical music and a large palette of other genres. He arrived to Sharjah ahead of time, in order to tune his piano to the particular scale of the Mauritanian singer, as well as her kora-like instrument.

As she walked down the aisle of the sumptuous University City Hall for their first rehearsal, and heard Belyamani running a few scales on his instrument, she exclaimed, “No, no, this is not correct, this is not the proper scale, I do not sing this way anymore.” What seemed like a joke at first gave the young pianist a cold sweat, as he witnessed several days of hard work, tuning rehearsal and performance pianos to Mint Abba’s tremendous vocal inflections, simply swept away.

As Belyamani went to work re-adjusting his instrument (and eventually succeeding in doing so), Dimi positioned herself center stage, along with a backing vocalist, a guitar player, and a percussionist. In addition to her singing, she plays a traditional Mauritanian stringed instrument called the “ardin”. She explained that this relative of the kora is played exclusively by women in the Mauritanian tradition, while the “tidinit”, an hourglass-shaped four-stringed lute, was the property of male musicians. The music of Mauritania comes predominantly from the country's largest ethnic group, the Moors. In Moorish society the musicians’ caste is referred to as “iggawin”. Music is a skill passed on from one generation to the next in iggawin families, Dimi went on explaining. Her father, who composed the country’s national anthem, is often credited for the introduction of the electric guitar in the Mauritanian musical tradition.

It was a marvelous feeling, to watch and listen as these two musicians sought ways to coalesce their particular approaches. When they eventually took the stage of Beit el Shamsi three days later, Dimi Mint Abba’s husky, tremulous voice soared and leaped, while Belyamani succeeded in rendering her complicated scales on his re-tuned piano. He accompanied the four African musicians to perfection, with Mint Abba often shouting encouragements from across the stage. The stuff of magic, indeed.