San Diego's 'Al Akhbar' Fuses Cultures and Sounds With Middle Eastern Jazz

On an October night, a crowd packed tightly in San Diego’s Lightbulb Coffee murmured with excitement as they waited for a concert to begin.

It was only a few days before the first anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war and the atmosphere was tense.

“We have heavy, heavy hearts,” Sarab Aziz, a Syrian concert attendee, told KQED.

A saxophone let out a melancholic sound, accompanied by an agitated hum of a cymbal. Suddenly, the playful melodies of the nye — an Arabic reed flute — joined in. The atmosphere in the coffee shop transformed from heaviness to joy as the crowd recognized “Khosara,” a popular Egyptian song made even more famous when Jay-Z sampled it in his 2000 hit “Big Pimpin’.” But this wasn’t the version of the song most may be familiar with or traditional Arabic music at all: it was a jazz cover.

The band on stage was Al Akhbar, which means “the news” in Arabic. The San Diego-based group weaves together the instrumentation and rhythms of the Middle East with Western jazz, bringing audiences from diverse backgrounds together with their unique sound.

The origin of the band follows multiple, interweaving stories. Keyboardist Tamir Persekian’s story begins across the ocean in East Jerusalem, where he was raised. The earliest sounds Persekian remembers are from family mornings.

“You’d hear the spoon just stirring in the pot,” he said, “My parents making coffee with the radio on.”

While Persekian grew up with all kinds of music, his first love was hip-hop.

“All the hip-hop that was coming out of Palestine was like a form of protest,” he said.

As a teenager, he loved listening to Palestinian rappers such as Shadia Mansour and DAM, as well as Black American musicians like Kendrick Lamar and J Dilla. Their music spoke to Persekian’s experiences of seeing family members harassed by Israeli soldiers in the streets and at military checkpoints.

“It got to the point where it’s like, ‘All right guys, can we listen to some hip-hop that’s not about occupation?’” Persekian said. “But it’s hard, ‘cause that’s what you live, breathe, eat, drink. Every single day.”

After graduating from high school, Persekian came to the United States to study music at Mesa College in San Diego. There, he met drummer Naji Chaaban, who was also studying jazz. The two connected immediately.

“Music is not something I do just for fun,” said Chaaban. “It’s my language. It’s how I express myself on a very deep level.”

Chaaban has been playing music since he was a toddler. When his mother couldn’t find him inside the house one day, she saw kitchen cabinets emptied and, hearing noise, walked to their backyard.

“She found me just banging on a bunch of pots,” he said. “I had them set up in a tuned way.

Although he was born in the United States, Chaaban grew up visiting relatives in Aleppo, Syria, during summers. He can still recall the smell of the jasmine growing on their apartment entrance. However, the trips stopped abruptly after the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011. He was around 10.

“Not being able to go there just like every other Syrian is definitely a sense feeling lost,” Chaaban said.

This loss prompted an identity crisis.

“I felt like I was a bit too Arab for the Americans and then not Arab enough for the Arabs,” he said. “It kind of just threw me off for a while.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chaaban researched Arabic music. He dug deep into Inside Arabic Music, a book that breaks down maqams, or Arabic melodies and their theories. As he read, Chaaban realized there were overlaps between jazz and Arabic music, like the emphasis on rhythm and the political circumstances that gave rise to both genres.

“Revolution music is a good way to describe Black American music,” he said. “Resistance music is a great way to describe Middle Eastern music.”

Persekian saw these links too, and soon, the two began experimenting, combining the music they were raised with and the music they adopted and performing jazz-inspired covers of Arabic music.

Soon after, Persekian went to a local Arab classical music concert put on by an organization called Mazikaa Enterprises, led by Layan Amkieh.

“That scarcity, that feeling of always carrying an armor,” Amkieh began, “led to the need for a space where we could take off that armor. A space that we could look in the mirror, be fully us.”

Amkieh is also Syrian, and she grew up between the United States and the Middle East. She said she felt like she had to buffer her national, cultural and religious identity from others. So, in 2023, she started Mazikaa Enterprises with her sister, Nour Amikeh, in order to curate spaces where Southwest Asian and North African cultures, known as SWANA, could be celebrated in diaspora communities.

When Amkieh and Persekian spoke, he broached the idea of fusion music with her. She loved it and became the band’s manager to make it happen.

Persekian enlisted additional friends, including saxophone player Richard Albert IV, who goes by Riva, and bassist Hank Lee Nelson.

According to Albert, who grew up in Texas with Mexican and Puerto Rican parents, playing Arabic music has deepened his connection to his Latin American roots.

“Those percussive elements and some of the harmonic elements [in Latin music] belong to Arabic culture that … through generations and generations are passed down,” he said. “So learning my own culture through Arabic culture…it’s such a crazy journey as well.”

Originally from the Bay Area, Nelson’s path to Al Akhbar was more dramatic. One night, he was out with Albert and other friends when Persekian called him in a panic.

“He’s like, ‘Yo, the bassist dropped out. Can you pull up and play?’” Nelson recalled. He was floored.

“You want me to play bass at your gig that starts in like 15 minutes?” he responded.

Nelson had only practiced the music once. When the concert started, he was shaking as he strummed.

“I don’t know how or why, but [Nelson] killed it,” Persekian recalled of that night.

The last member to join the band was vocalist and Arab instrumentalist Salem Khattar. Growing up, Khattar’s Lebanese parents would take him to their home country in the summers. Khattar said he felt the musical spark when his grandparents took him to a music festival, where he saw a band play Arabic music live for the first time.

“I was obsessed with it, and I wanted to learn so bad,” he said.

His family bought him his first nye soon after.

Years later, while attending law school, Khattar threw himself into practicing the oud, a lute. Like Persekian, Khattar met Amkieh, the band’s manager, at a concert, exchanging Instagram handles. Then, he joined one of their rehearsals.

“When I met Naji, I was like, ‘I’ll break your legs if you don’t let me into this group,” Khattar said as he laughed.

San Diego contains many diasporic communities, as about a quarter of its population was born outside the country, according to 2022 census data. San Diego County has historically welcomed more refugees than others in California.

The band also attracts a multicultural audience.

Megan Kirie, who identifies as Boricua, or Puerto Rican, said the music that Al Akhbar played at Lightbulb Coffee resonated with her. It reminded her of the tunes her parents would dance to back home in New York and brought back memories of her time volunteering in the occupied West Bank.

“Music is our language. It’s what connects us and brings us together,” she said, referring to the Global South. “It’s how we survive as a people.”

Kirie said the Israel-Hamas war has taken an emotional toll on her. It reminded her of her Palestinian friends. She stifled a sob as she explained that the music evoked thoughts of both ancestors and current events.

“It’s never just the people in the room,” Kirie said. “It’s always who’s not with us in the room as well.”

The layered emotions aren’t unfamiliar to Al Akhbar, as war and upheaval in the Middle East have impacted band members. Khattar has, at times, felt guilty about performing, worried about his relatives in Lebanon.

“I’m going to play a party, and they’re worried about tomorrow, you know?” he said.

Persekian also missed his family in East Jerusalem and is unsure when he can visit them.

“It just breaks my heart because it just feels like there’s less chances of us returning or being able to be together,” he said.

Khattar’s family abroad has offered support, commenting on his Instagram posts about the band.

“My relatives back home personally have reached out to me on my Stories and said, ‘Good for you,’” he said.

For him and other band members, performing has become a means of resistance.

“Not only is war like an attack on infrastructure or on humans, but it’s also a psychological thing,” Khattar said. “Like, you shouldn’t be happy, and they don’t want you to be happy. So being joyful and having a good time is almost like a rebellion in itself.”

Persekian agrees, viewing the band’s music as a way to keep their culture alive while it’s under siege. Gaza’s health ministry has reported that Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, and the war has leveled the architecture of cultural life as well. Mosques, churches, universities and art galleries have been destroyed.

“When your culture is being stolen, you gotta be louder than ever,” he said.

[March 9: A previous version of this story misspelled the names of Layan Amkieh, Salem Khattar, Naji Chaaban, Nour Amikeh and Mazikaa Enterprises. The story has been updated.]