http://www.torontosun.com/News/TorontoAndGTA/2008/06/18/5910676-sun.html
Arab singer and instrumentalist Maryem Tollar brings the world together with her "fusion music" from different cultures. The atmosphere was charged two weeks ago when she sang with South Indian musicians and Indian classical Bharatnatyam and Kathak dancers at the Premiere Dance Theatre. She was singing romantic Egyptian songs and playing the oanun, an Arabic table harp, and the oud, an early form of lute accompanied by Praveen D. Rao, on percussion. Tollar is promising another feast of "world music" when she performs this Sunday at CBC's Glenn Gould studio. She says the audiences who go to her shows are primarily world music lovers -- not Arabic audiences. "They are people who like to hear music from around the world." Artists like Tollar fit right in with the demographics of Toronto and its many cultures and languages. For those who don't understand her lyrics, Tollar offers some explanation in brochures and also takes time on stage to briefly explain what the songs mean. Her group, Tollar and Ernie Tollar's Cairo Toronto Collective, carries on the multicultural theme with Debashis Sinha, an Indo-Canadian percussionist. Her husband, Ernie, plays wind instruments and for the last 15 years has been studying South Indian music with Trichy Sankaranm, a music prof at York University. He has also travelled to South India twice to study. *Tollar was discovered by renowned Indian music composer A.R. Rahman when he was in Toronto in 2006. * *He was so impressed with her voice he asked her to sing the hit song Mayya Mayya for the highly acclaimed Bollywood Hindi movie Guru which had its world premier in Toronto in December, 2006. * Tollar has been involved in several groups from different cultures. She has sung on three Toronto Tabla Ensemble CDs, performed with Kathak dancer Joanna Desouza and Flamenco dancer Esmeralda Enrique, and is involved in a multimedia project with electro-acoustic Greek born composer Christos Hatzis, who uses music from classical, Arabic, Greek, and new music sources. She comes from Egypt and started studying music in 1994 with Dr. George Sawa and has also travelled to Aleppo, Syria to study Sufi devotional love songs. Tollar goes wherever she can to study Arab musical traditions and is a frequent visitor to South Hadley, Mass. and Simon Shaheen's Arabic music retreat. She plans to travel there again later this year to study vocals with Rima Khcheich. Musicians accompanying her at Sunday's concert, co-produced by the Downtown Jazz Festival, will include Levon Ichkhanian, Alfred Gamil and Mohamed Aly. Tollar describes Gamil as "a master musician on Arabic violin and oud who leads his own group Qithara in Egypt that performs and preserves Egyptian music from the early 1900s.
