Daline Jabbour

Daline Jabbour (the solo singer of the group) holds a degree in Music Education from the Lebanese University and a Bachelor in Arab Heritage Singing from the Higher Institute of Music in Antonine University.

She performed in several Lebanese theaters and participated in the opening of the cultural festival in the Center of Shaikh Ebrahim Bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa Center for Culture & Research in Bahrain in the first of October 2011. She participated as well with Ensemble Assil during the centennial of Sheikh Youssef Al-Manyalawy’s death in Fouad The First Theater (Cairo) in the nineteenth of November 2011 .

The singer is accompanied by a group of specialized musicians expert in the domain of improvising in accordance with the Takht Standard of the Arabic Music.

This group adopts the traditional method of musical interpretation of the Arabic Levant (such as Andalusian Mowashahat, Sufi Poems, Tawashih, adwar…) that was adopted during the Renaissance (Nahda) in the 19th century. According to this method, the performance consists of a modal suite (waṣla), revolving around a number of pre-composed and improvised melodies all in the same mode (maqām) within a dialectal structure as follows:

In its first phase, the suite begins with a pre-composed instrumental musical form (Samā‘i, bašraf...) just to be followed later by a pre-composed vocal musical form (muwaššah, qadd, ...), aiming thus to display the maqām and fix it in the mind of both the interpeeter and the spectator.

As for the second phase, it consists of free vocal and instrumental improvisations on non-cyclical rhythms. Then, comes the third phase that displays a mixed musical forms (Dawr, the Qasida,..) that consists of a steady melody along with some metric improvisations.

Daline’s Group is influenced by the Renaissance times musicians such as Abdo El Hamouli, Mohamed Osman, Sheikh Youssef Al-Manyalawy, Abdul Hay Helmi, Saleh Abdul Hay, Abou El Alaa’ Mohamed, Mohieddine Beaoun, Sami Al Shawa, Mohamed Al Aakad and Heikj Sayed Darwish.

The group aims to refresh a form of music that had been neglected for over a hundred years.