From the moment her mother taught her to sing her very first Fairuz song when she was just four years old, music exerted a fierce grip upon her. “She would sit with me in the living room and teach me the song word by word,” says Gaida. “Then I would sing it back to her. That’s really where my musical training came from.” Gaida was born in Germany where her father was studying engineering, but was raised mostly in Damascus, Syria, entranced with the rich musical heritage of the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Gaida sang at school events and informal weekly get-togethers between family and friends where many of her family members sang traditional and folk songs and played the oud. In fact, Gaida spent a great deal of time practicing songs to perform them at those events and as much as her father appreciated the beauty of her voice, he didn’t see singing as an acceptable career choice. So with her dreams still steeped with music, she enrolled at the University of Damascus majoring in biological science and kept singing as a hobby.
In 1993, Gaida headed to Detroit to resume her studies at Wayne State University, where an old friend was already enrolled. While at a dinner party in a Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn, her friends encouraged her to sing an old Fairuz tune. Soon, the restaurant’s owner asked her to sing every week. Although she was completing her biological science degree at Wayne State, at the time she was also taking a full complement of music classes: theory, ear training, composition, piano, and voice.
When one of her instructors continually criticized her natural tendency to add microtonal ornaments to western pieces, Gaida realized that the western training threatened to change the way she sang Arabic music. She left the music program, quickly finished up her biology degree, and landed a job in the public heath field. She settled into a new life, working and hosting a weekly radio program for the Arab community, and singing Arabic music in local venues. In Detroit and through the music school, Gaida met many American musicians, who introduced her to blues, jazz, and rock music. To Gaida, this music was exotic and fascinating. Many of her musician friends invited her as a guest artist to improvise her enchantments over some of their tunes in concert. Gaida also performed with the Immigrant Sons, a well-known world music band, and recorded with them on their album “More than Food.”
In April of 2001, Gaida moved to New York, where her younger brother, Adel, was living. Her brother had not only encouraged her to pursue music all along, but also later on engineered and produced her new album. He was the one who urged her to write “Ammar” as a wedding gift to their younger brother. It was the first song she had written. While in New York, Gaida worked as a health service coordinator, and over time she noticed that a sizable number of Arabic children were in need of speech pathologists that spoke Arabic. The proverbial light bulb went off in her head, and the following year, she began studying at Columbia University; she graduated in 2005 with a Masters in Speech Pathology and began to serve those needy kids.
Although music had taken a backseat during those years she hadn’t forgotten about it by any means. That same year, she attended a concert at Alwan for the Arts, a cultural art center, where she discovered a local community with a passion for the Arabic music. She met musicians like Johnny Farraj and Tareq Abboushi who quickly lured her back into singing; Gaida was suddenly hanging out with high-caliber musicians skilled in traditional and folk Arabic music. She spent many of her free nights singing with them at informal rehearsals. Eventually, they began asking her to perform in their various ensembles, whether it was one devoted to Egyptian film music or to the classic Arabic songs by Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz of her cherished memories. “Performing with them was a nostalgic experience with those traditional instruments,” she says. “It was the acoustic sound I grew up with. For many people, those concerts might have been a casual experience, but for me, for a year, there were tears in my eyes every time I sang. It felt like my mother was hugging me again when I was inside the music.”
During this time, while her father was on his annual visit, Gaida decided to bare her soul and showed him her Myspace.com page. He read her biography, press comments, and a blurb about her influences in silence. He stood and hugged her, and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” With Gaida set to give her first performance as a bandleader a few days after he was due to return home, he hastily changed his flight so he and Gaida’s mother could be there for that November, 2006 concert. “He came to the concert, but I could not look at him,” she recalls. “Every time I did I felt like I was going to cry. It was not easy for me and very emotional. After I finished the gig and I stepped down from the stage my Dad hugged and kissed me and he told me the one thing that changed my career: ‘I am proud of you.’ Everything changed for me, my voice, and the way I stood on stage. There was no block anymore between us.”
Following that concert came along her most trusted collaborators the trumpeter, singer, and santoor player Amir ElSaffar, a musician equally fluent in Iraqi maqam and jazz. Gaida says he encouraged her to trust her own instincts. A tendency that fully bloomed after her father finally saw her perform. Since that evening things have been happening for her. Her singing has turned up four films, including Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married” and performances in major venues, including Symphony Space, the Kennedy Center and the Lincoln Center.
Her songwriting has now become more prolific—until 2005 she had only written a total of three pieces. Today, she has a full-length CD of almost entirely original material. Gaida doesn’t sit down at an instrument or a desk to write music. Usually, it is after an emotional experience or a significant event, which the melody and words come out simultaneously as a pure response to the moment. “I never think that I’m going to write something,” she says. “It usually happens at the wrong place and the wrong time, where I don’t have a recorder or paper and pen.” Many of these songs disappear as quickly as they came, but fortunately a number of gems have been preserved on her new recording, “Levantine Indulgence.”
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