At one of the city's few remaining restaurants Christopher Garabedian plays nightly for a handful of regulars, writes NADA BAKRIin Baghdad
CHRISTOPHER GARABEDIAN lit the candles perched on top of his Korean-made piano and flipped through a folder of music, some of it handwritten. He glanced at his watch. It was 7.30pm, so he sat down behind the instrument.
At home, his drink of choice is vodka. Here at the piano, it is Lebanese red wine. He reached for his glass, placed at the left corner of the piano, took a sip, then let his fingers slide across the keys. What followed were songs seldom heard in Baghdad, a city where pianists are rare and music venues are few.
Garabedian is the Piano Man of Baghdad, and his performance had begun.
“It was my only friend during the war and the events,” Garabedian (53) said as he patted his instrument affectionately. Like many here, by “events” he means the sectarian warfare that plunged his country into blood-soaked chaos in 2006 and 2007. “Without it, I wouldn’t have survived.”
Garabedian plays every night at Al-Rif, one of the few restaurants doing business in Baghdad these days. In the upscale neighbourhood of Arrassat, which has witnessed its share of bombings, the restaurant attracts only a handful of customers every night. Some come to listen to Garabedian’s medley of western and eastern tunes, including Iraqi traditional songs, that has earned him many admirers.
“He is the best pianist here,” said Najat Mashkouri, a longtime fan and a regular at the restaurant. “His music makes you forget where you are.”
At age 12, Garabedian started playing the harmonica at the Armenian school in Baghdad. But when his Russian teacher, Mrs Natasha, overheard him perform the piano, she enrolled him in her lessons, he recalled. Impressed by his talent, she suggested he travel to Moscow, where he would study to become a professional. But money was an obstacle, and Garabedian never left Iraq. Neither did he finish school or complete his lessons. Instead, he played with local bands at restaurants, parties and nightclubs for about €3 a performance, which he gave to his father.
At 8pm, waiters ferried an occasional dish to the few patrons here on this night. Save for Mashkouri and her companion, no one seemed to be paying much attention to the music. For a born performer, the lack of notice seemed painful. But Garabedian kept playing. Next in his repertoire was Que Sera, Sera.
Garabedian improved by relying on his sharp ear and practising a few hours every week on a borrowed keyboard. He joined a group called the Stars Band with four other musicians, and together they covered the Beatles, the Carpenters, the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple and Rare Earth in bars across Baghdad.
He learned how to sing in English, Spanish, Italian and even a Filipino dialect. In the early 1980s, he performed a one-man show in a nightclub once Baghdad’s most famous, Al-Tahouna Hamra, or the Red Mill, where he played with visiting artists such as Denis Rose, an English jazz musician, and Dan Reed from the rock-funk metal band Dan Reed Network.
“Life taught me everything I know,” he said.
At half past eight, he adjusted his posture, his right hand on the piano and the left on an adjacent keyboard. A waiter stood by a nearby table, listening as Garabedian played a selection of songs of Fairuz, a Lebanese singer. “Christo is a flower,” said Ashour Francis, the waiter, using Garabedian’s nickname. “No one can outplay him. It comes from his heart.”
Al-Rif is a familiar locale for Garabedian. He performed here for seven years in a one-man show until a suicide bomber blew himself up at the place next door during a New Year’s Eve party in 2004. The restaurant closed 15 days later.
Without a steady income, Garabedian, a father of two, gave private lessons to a handful of students. When the last one failed to show up for a session, Garabedian sold his piano for $2,500, a sum that lasted his family no more than two months.
Explosions have broken his apartment’s doors and shattered its windows eight times since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. But his music, which he continued to play on guitar, sheltered him from what happened on the streets of his neighbourhood, Hay al-Sinai, with its sizable but dwindling Christian population. “I kept my door closed,” he said. “Every evening, I poured myself a glass of vodka or wine and played until I forgot what was happening around me.”
It was nine o'clock when Garabedian started singing And I Love You So. A customer approached him, waiting several minutes for him to finish. When he did, she requested an old Iraqi folk song. "I won't sing it, but I will play it," Garabedian told her. "It will make me cry." Nature Boy followed. It was the last song he performed before the clock struck 10. The song, he said, reminds him of himself.
“There was a boy,” he sang in English, “a very strange enchanted boy.”
Customers paid their bills, and waiters cleared tables.
"And then one day," he went on, "One magic day, he passed my way./ And while we spoke of many things,/ Fools and kings,/ This, he said to me: 'The greatest thing you'll ever learn/ Is just to love and be loved in return." – (LA Times-Washington Postservice)