Portland-based ensemble Seffarine blends music of southern Spain and Morocco with contemporary influences

During their very first meeting, musicians Lamiae Naki and Nat Hulskamp wrote their first song together and decided to get married. The resulting project was Seffarine, an eclectic ensemble that blends traditional Andalusian and Moroccan music with jazz and other contemporary influences. The band is based in Portland, but has performed and recorded throughout Europe, Africa and North America. Their most recent residency was in Morocco, just days after the devastating earthquake that leveled several remote villages in the Atlas Mountains.

Naki and Hulskamp join us for an in-studio performance and a conversation about their wide-ranging influences, their travels and the band’s upcoming show at the Alberta Rose Theatre, which will benefit earthquake relief efforts in Morocco.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. During their very first meeting, musicians Lamiae Naki and Nat Hulskamp decided to make music together, write a song together, and here is the kicker, get married. That was about 15 years ago. They are still together and still making music. Their band is called Seffarine. The ensemble blends traditional music from Morocco and Southern Spain with jazz and a number of other influences. They’re based in Portland, but they performed and recorded throughout Europe, Africa, and North America. Their most recent residency was in Morocco. That was just days after the devastating earthquake that leveled several remote villages in the Atlas Mountains. They’ll be at Portland’s Alberta Rose Theater this Sunday in a show to benefit earthquake relief efforts there. Lamiae Naki and Nat Hulskamp join us now. Welcome to the show.

Lamiae Naki: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Nat Hulskamp: Thank you.

Miller: This is inescapable. I imagine you’ve been asked this many times, but I still have to ask it. Lamiae, first. Can you just tell us about the day that you both met?

Naki: We met in Fez, have you heard about Fez before, in Morocco?

Miller: I have but I would like to hear more.

Naki: Fez is a medieval city that dates back to centuries ago. And we first met there through a common friend called Tarik Banzi, a musician from here. Well, he lived here but he’s back to Morocco and the day we met it was a special day. We wrote some songs together and decided to get married after that.

Miller: You just skipped ahead to all the parts that I think are maybe mind boggling for a lot of us. So you wrote a song together that we’ll hear in a little bit called “Another Chance.” Well, so let’s zero in on that now. What does the song mean?

Hulskamp: Yeah. It’s about what we wanted to do with our lives. That’s kind of how the conversation, that first cup of coffee went. We talked about music, of course, what we wanted to do with music, with our lives and it included writing music and blending the different traditional backgrounds that we had, traveling for music and all of these are things that our life has been based around since then.

Miller: I sometimes have a hard time deciding just what sandwich to order at lunch.

You made the decision to make lives together in the course of a couple of hours?

Hulskamp: Yeah. Part of that was writing the song together right away and a lot of things just lined up right away, and another part, it, just the practicalities of Lamiae being from a pretty traditional family in Morocco. If we wanted to be together, you gotta commit.

Miller: I think we should probably hear the song that was the first fruit of your relationship. Anything else, Lamiae, that we should know about it, before we hear it? It’s in French, right?

Naki: It’s in French and Arabic.

Miller: Both languages. So what are some of the translations of the lyrics that folks can listen for if they don’t speak French or Arabic?

Naki: (Speaking some words in French) Sometimes one word can answer all the questions that we’re waiting for. Especially that word that we’re waiting for to hear. That word could be a word of love, can be a tree that will give us the shade that we’re looking for. That word is the answer and that word that gives us that chance that is what we’re looking for.

Miller: Let’s have a listen.

(Music playing, singing)

Miller: I don’t even want to talk now but I have to because there’s 15 more minutes of our show. That was so lovely. That was two members of the group, Seffarine - Nat Hulskamp playing guitar there, and singing is Lamiae Naki. I’m curious, had you heard Nat play guitar before you met him for that coffee?

Naki: Yeah, I heard him play guitar, but not in person.

Miller: You heard a recording?

Naki: In a recording, yeah, because he used to play with that common friend here in Portland. Nat can talk more about Tarik and their friendship. And through that, when we met the first time, I heard him in person playing, that was mind blowing.

Miller: What do you remember about that first time?

Naki: A lot of memories, a lot of emotions. It was the moment where music connected to a person and speaks to you directly, that special moment. That’s what happened to me, and at that time I was going through a lot of ups and downs with deciding to be a musician or not. There were many voices telling me like, oh, you cannot do that. You cannot sing.

Miller: Voices inside your mind or outsiders?

Naki: Outsiders.

Miller: Saying what?

Naki: Saying that I cannot sing, that I should not be pursuing music as a profession. And that, and when I met Nat, they were these voices telling me through him, you can do this, you can pursue music.

Hulskamp: In Morocco, like many places, they have kind of a dim view of music as a profession. So, although they thought that Lamiae had a beautiful voice and enjoyed it, in family situations or at home, pursuing music as a profession is not very encouraged. But I heard her sing. She’s a very soulful singer from the very beginning and of course, I had been working as a musician for years and really wanted to encourage her to pursue it and she had a lot of ideas of her own about what she wanted to do with music and had already been absorbing tons of influences.

Miller: What about your influences? My understanding is you grew up in Portland. What drew you to flamenco from Southern Spain or North African music? And my understanding is there’s a lot of overlap in this Mediterranean world. But, what attracted you to these musics?

Hulskamp: I was playing guitar but a very, very different style and somebody, a friend of my sisters, gave me a cassette of the great Paco de Lucía, who for most flamenco guitarists, if you ask them who their first influence was, they’ll say Paco. He was the great virtuoso and revolutionary, kind of brought flamenco from a folkloric music into a modern progressive art form. So I heard that and actually it was the singing, this really expressive singing, that’s what caught my attention. But I have this deathly fear of singing. So I stuck with the guitar and I found a teacher who really brought me under his wing, named José Solano, that lived here and I played a lot of gigs with him as second guitar. I learned how it all worked. And eventually I became interested in the history of Andalusia in Southern Spain, which led me to study in Morocco.

Miller: Could we hear another song?

Hulskamp: Sure.

Miller: What should we know before we hear it?

Hulskamp: We’ll play a little bit of a very old Arabic song called “Adir lana’akwab” and I’ll play it on oud. This is an example of a poetic form that dated back to Moorish Spain.

Miller: Can you describe the oud before we hear it?

Hulskamp: Sure. It is a lute. So it resembles the European lute a little bit, has a rounded back and 11 strings. It’s played with a pick. And the main difference between this and a lute is that it’s fretless, because we have notes in Arabic music in between the semitones of western music, in between the keys of the piano or the frets of the guitar, for example. So we can reach those notes on this fretless instrument.

Miller: All right, let’s have a listen.

(Music playing, singing)

Miller: That’s Lamiae Naki and Nat Hulskamp, two members of the group Seffarine, a Portland based group that performs all over the world. Lamiae, you were in Morocco in September, the two of you, not too long after a massive earthquake there. What did you see there? What was your trip like?

Naki: We arrived probably four days after the earthquake to Marrakech and we saw a lot of damage, because Marrakech is a medieval city and there are some old buildings and we saw the damage and people were still afraid back then, still sleeping in the squares, just with their blankets, nothing really to protect them. Thank God the weather was not rainy, but it was pretty rough. And after that, we took the drive from Marrakech to Mohammed Island, where we had the residency there and we drove through the Atlas Mountains and we saw more damage up there, in the Atlas Mountains where the houses are built out of mud and stone. So the damage was much more in those areas and that’s where unfortunately, you can see heartbreaking images.

Miller: Now, my understanding is, obviously you went there not knowing there was going to be an earthquake, it was planned ahead of time to call attention to another, broader issue of climate change. How is climate change affecting this part of Morocco, this part of North Africa, specifically?

Naki: Yeah, the desert is growing. I mean, I think most of us kind of know that in a vague way, but as we traveled south over the Atlas Mountain Range, which is basically what protects Morocco from the growth of the desert, but to get to this residency, we had to cross, to go into the desert. And as you travel south, you see the oases turning yellow, there are these big washes of yellow of basically the dying oases and it’s heartbreaking when you first see it. And it grows till…we were following the valley of Morocco’s biggest river, the Draa. And by the time we got to our destination, it was completely dry.

Miller: Your music, it combines influences from North Africa, from West Africa, from Southern Spain, from Iran. Your band members have a similarly wide ranging geographic spread. It’s such a hopeful version of people from different cultures coming together and making art together, making music together, and it’s been inescapable as I’ve been thinking about the two of you coming here today to not think about the opposite, to not think about war. I’m just curious what both of you think, what role music making and art making plays in society?

Naki: Yeah. It’s important. I feel like it’s the only thing that links everybody without question, without putting that question, oh, we’re different, we can’t get together. But with music you can be, I don’t know, you can be from India, you can be from Morocco. You can be from New Jersey and sit together and you can play something together and that connects people more than anything else I’ve seen besides food.

Hulskamp: Our other love. Yeah, music, it actually shuts down if there is competition. So that’s something that exists in every culture. But that’s why it can unify things and that’s where a lot of our work is based. I mean, kind of inspired by this period of history where there was a lot of tolerance in exchange at the mouth of the Mediterranean. Morocco, the African coast and the European coast, where Spain, Southern Spain, they’re only separated by about 10 kilometers at that point. So there’s been a lot of exchange there forever. Morocco is a real crossroad there with the Iberian Peninsula. But this project we just did was also kind of Morocco’s other crossroad in the desert because of the caravans. There’s a lot of influence from West Africa too, in this oasis where we went at the end of the road. There were Jews there for 3000 years. There are Arab nomads, Indigenous people, Sahrawi, who are descendants of the slave trade across the Sahara that have, all these people have their own kind of music and they’re all being threatened by the climate change you mentioned. So we were working on a project to preserve these traditions.

Miller: I wonder if you could take us out with one more song and it’ll give me a chance to just remind folks who you are. We’ve been hearing Nat Hulskamp and Lamiae Naki. They’re co-founders of the group Seffarine. You can see them on Sunday evening at the Alberta Rose Theater. It is a benefit for survivors of the recent earthquake in Morocco. If you don’t mind taking us out.

Hulskamp: Sure. Thanks for having us.

(Music playing, singing)

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