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eattle, circa 1990, was not the best place to study spirituality.

It was the place where greed was good. It was the time when a software company created a handful of billionaires virtually overnight by charging people every time they used their computers, a city where customers paid US$6 for a cup of coffee.

Culturally speaking, it was not the ideal place to learn about Sufi-leaning Central Asian music that average Americans had little knowledge of. In 1992, Seattle claimed its 15 minutes of fame as the cradle of grunge, the genre of rock peddled by flannel-flaunting, depressed-looking twenty-somethings who sang about loneliness, suicide and teen spirit.

Husband and wife Irwansyah Harahap and Rithaony Hutajulu from Medan, North Sumatra, were there, attending the University of Washington in Seattle on Ford Foundation scholarships

Fortunately for them, not only did they survive the expensive coffee and exorbitant apartment rents, the couple also turned down grunge and learned the divine Pakistani music qawwali under Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a legend of world music. (Nusrat’s breathtaking vocals have been sampled by Peter Gabriel and trip-hop outfit Massive Attack, among others, while two years prior to his death he collaborated with Seattle transplant Eddie Vedder of grunge band Pearl Jam for the soundtrack of the movie Dead Man Walking).

The two also learned from some the best teachers in world music: Darius Talai, the maestro of the traditional Iranian stringed instrument oud; Sujath Khan, the Indian sitar master, and Pakistani tabla legend Akhram Khan.

The grunge demon proved to be difficult to dispel, but Irwansyah narrowly evaded it. A survivor of the 1980s progressive rock movement, he was enamored with grunge when the genre was all the rage around him.

“Rita was so worried that I would end up quitting grad school. I skipped class, went to clubs most of the times, played grunge at parties, got chased by the police, went touring in a van, hopped from café to café,” Irwansyah says.

Nusrat helped exorcise the grunge demon.

“Meeting him started my moment of enlightenment. Something about his spiritualism really drew me in,” he says.

Music Lessons

When his stint with a traveling grunge outfit in Seattle was over, Irwansyah began to recast his old materials in the traditions of Eastern European folk music, African polyrhythmic tradition and the Southeast Asian pentatonic scales – lessons that he took from class.

Nusrat, who died of a heart attack in 1997, was a visiting artist who taught at the university’s ethnomusicology department.

The couple returned to Medan, took up teaching jobs at the music department of North Sumatra University, and by 1994 their musical and spiritual journey seemed to be over. During their free time, the couple rehashed some of the old materials by jamming with students and colleagues. More than 17 years after grunge took the world by storm – now reduced to little more than a footnote in rock history – the husband and wife serendipitously returned to America and staged its own little musical revolution.

Late last year, the recorded work of Rithaony and Irwansyah, who now go by the moniker Suarasama, was released in the American market by Chicago-based Drag City, a hip independent label.

The LP, a recording of a live performance in Yogyakarta and titled Fajar di Atas Awan (Dawn Over the Cloud), is billed by Drag City as “no regular world music”. The LP, characteristic of other Drag City releases, has probably only sold a few thousand copies and is unlikely to turn Suarasama into an overnight sensation, but it has struck a chord with indie-leaning music fans the world over.

American indie elder statesman, Will Oldham, is a fan of Suarasama and was responsible for cajoling Drag City
into releasing Fajar, after first hearing a tune recorded by curator Philip Yampolsky for the Smithsonian Folkways collection of guitar-based music from Indonesia.

Shortly upon its release, the hard-to-please critic of the Chicago-based online music magazine Pitchfork, Joshua Klein, wrote a glowing review of the release and gave it a rating of 7.2 out of 10. (By comparison, Klein gave Coldplay’s Viva La Vida a mere 6.5).

Klein wrote “There’s no question that the group is reaching for something bigger than itself, searching beyond borders in all directions and dimensions for spiritual truth by way of melodies.”

World Beat

Klein’s assessment sums up Suarasama’s philosophy toward music.

“I want to go beyond borders to find commonalities among the world’s different musical traditions and transcend them,” Irwansyah says. “What we’re trying to do is find the common objectives among Asian, African and other cultures in the world … politics, economy, religions have thus far failed to unite us.”

The name Suarasama says it all. Indonesian for equal sound, it was born out of Irwansyah’s conviction that what matters most in music is equality, between the instruments from the East and from the West.

“For centuries we believed that a schism existed between the East and the West. I want to go past that. What matters in my music is not what instruments we play, but what we speak about,” he says.

The essence of Suarasama’s music is best captured in Habibullah, the album’s most melodic and most religious song. A traditional Malay song of tribute to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, this tune strides on unassumingly in a Zen-like mode with nothing but spiritual motifs.

In Playing Gambus, an intricately written composition, Suarasama excavates the rich tradition of Middle Eastern music to highlight the missing link between traditional West Sumatran music and its antecedent in the Sahara.

The last track on the LP, the 14-minute Merangkai Warna (Arranging Colors), is a meditative piece built around an Indian tabla pattern and a versatile slide guitar over which Rithaony sings and chants in her most trance-like state, channeling Nusrat in a tribute to the mentor and close acquaintance from her early years in grad school.

Legendary Influence

For Rithaony, Nusrat was an influence long before she took up qawwali lessons with him. A Pakistani student at the University of Washington gave her a cassette of Nusrat’s work, and that helped her a lot in going through the settling-in ordeal early in her grad school years.

The endless loops of Nusrat’s cassette paid off well. When it was finally time for Rithaony to take his class, it was easy for her to follow his instructions.

“[Nusrat] always asked me to bring him a drink, something that he never did with other students,” she recalls.

“This is a typical relationship between teacher and student in South Asian tradition. Whenever he called in sick, he always phoned me about it.”

Long before Vedder sang with Nusrat on Dead Man Walking, the Pakistani legend wrote compositions for Rithaony.

For Irwansyah, Nusrat’s sufistic teaching revived the spiritualism within him. In the late 1980s, he dipped his toes in spiritualism by writing a devotional song based on traditional Malay music. One song, Sang Hyang Guru, written in 1989, had a motif based on the 99 names of Allah commonly used in wirid, an Islamic meditative practice.

The choice of qawwali was also motivated by pragmatism. By the time the couple had returned to Medan, grunge had become a caricature of its former self. The same went for world music. Pop musicians like Sting, Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel had been successful in bringing world music to the masses, but it left little room for other artists to carve out a distinctive identity.

The couple wanted to play world music without pandering to the popular taste.

“We then toyed with the idea of what if we do world music but it was seen through the eyes of people who are really close to local tradition. We decided to compose songs with Indonesian roots, but constructed in world music idioms,” Irwansyah says.

He went as far as constructing his own electric saz guitar that he used to reproduce and amplify the distinctive sound of that Middle Eastern instrument.

It is apparent, though, that despite his newfound spiritualism, the ghost of his rock past is still alive.

Backstage after a show earlier this year in Jakarta, he said the rapturous acceptance of his performance may have been the reason why he went up on stage and played.

But that means little to him now.

“In these past two years I’ve preferred to play music on my own, and that satisfies me more than anything,” he says.