Voices and Music from Palestine
47Soul
Hamza Arnaout guitar
Tareq Abu Kwaik vocals, percussions
Ramzy Sulieman vocals, keyboards
in collaboration with Festival delle Culture
Music has always played a crucial role in the almost eighty-year-long tragedy of the Palestinian people: whether traditional, hip-hop or electronic, music has contributed greatly to the defence and development of a collective identity. If the dramatic history of the Palestinian exodus, conflict, occupation and exile has strengthened rather than weakened the people’s sense of belonging to a land and a history, the pre-1948 upheavals and the current diaspora have allowed the Palestinian world to develop a capacity for resilience and to forge links with other cultures. It is an experience that aligns Palestinian music with the typical features of contemporaneity, such as the hybridisation of languages, cultural ubiquity, and the constant tension between tradition and innovation, between the local and the global.
The name of the band alludes to 1947, when it was still possible to travel freely around Greater Syria with a freedom of movement that is now unconceivable: at the time, the year before the first Arab-Israeli war, the borders between Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus and Beirut were not an issue.
47soul have created their own unique musical genre called ‘Shamstep’ – a powerful blend of traditional street music from the Bilad al-Sham region (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, parts of Jordan, Iraq and Turkey) with electronic beats and influences from funk, hip hop and rock, combining centuries-old Arab melodies with analogue synthesizers, hypnotic guitar lines and vocals in a mix of Arabic and English.
