Digital Concert: Karim Sulayman, tenor and Sean Shibe, guitar

A note from Karim Sulayman

I met and started working with Sean a decade ago at the Marlboro Music Festival, the storied chamber music Mecca in southern Vermont. Ever since those days in the confines of a most traditional classical music space, Sean and I frequently discussed making an album together. I am so pleased the time has come to offer Broken Branches to our listeners.

Over the years, I have often strayed from the well worn footpaths of a career in classical music. It’s in these wanderings where so much can be learned about one’s roots and the idea of a home base. For me, music (regardless of genre) will always be my home. I want my storytelling-through-song to resonate with the times we’re living in and how I experience them as an individual artist.

As 2020 upended the classical music world in so many ways, an explosion in the port of Beirut occurred and shook every Lebanese household, both in Lebanon and throughout the world. Four days later, my father died from cancer and I was staring into a void. With my father’s death, a blank calendar, and a world in total chaos, “home,” in all its meanings, was in shambles.

In the weeks and months after this, I rebuilt my home by dreaming up and following through with projects, including this program with my dear friend Sean (who reached out often to offer support in a bleak time—he was one of my many solid oaks, if you will). Broken Branches explores a wide range of repertoire offering its listeners the idea that home can transcend one specific place or time. Referencing the final line of Sinan Antoon’s poetry in the song Layale Chaker wrote for us, the title reflects the many themes of this album: the wood of the guitar and its relatives, our own family trees, and the splintering of that history as we examine the diaspora, and the attempt to build “home” separate of physical borders.