JAWA (SY)

Music as invocation, movement as memory. JAWA transforms sacred echoes of Aleppo into living, breathing sound—where the past isn't revived, but reborn.

JAWA isn't merely preserving Sufi traditions from a war-scarred Syria—they’re reimagining them, respectfully but boldly. Once sung a cappella in spiritual gatherings, these muwashahat now pulse with new instrumentation, reconfigured through qanun, oud, ney, and intricate percussion. Woven with maqams and rooted in the divine geometry of rhythm, each piece is a spiral toward transcendence, guided by the voice of Khaled Alhafez and the rotating cosmos of Mevlevi dervishes. Their album ‘Last Breaths from Aleppo’ is a luminous ritual in five waslas, each movement a shift in spiritual and sonic gravity—where mournful improvisation yields to joy, where the body leaves the earth to orbit the divine.

In JAWA's vision, tradition is not a museum piece—it’s a live wire. This is devotional music that slips through borders, flickering between trance and clarity, resistance and remembrance. The whirling dervish becomes the turning axis of a fading world and a new one, still imagined.

This is not nostalgia—it’s an urgent prayer in motion.

RIYL: Nawa Ensemble, Le Trio Joubran, Al-Kindi Ensemble, Yasmine Hamdan, Dhafer Youssef, Rizan Said, Maurice Louca, Arooj Aftab.