Nai Barghouti On Developing A Vocal Technique, Stubbornness, And The Vulnerability Of Performance

The Palestinian singer, flautist, and composer previews her upcoming Reykjavík debut

“I always say that just being on stage — after the first, let’s say, three minutes, that’s the worst — then it becomes one of the best feelings ever,” Nai Barghouti laughs, calling from Amsterdam. “I was born to do this. This is what I love doing the most, more than recording in the studio, more than anything else.”

Nai is a musician and composer, raised in Ramallah, who is currently touring her evocative, narrative music alongside her four-piece band. She performs both singing and playing the flute — the latter being her childhood passion — and explains that her drive to create and perform has been present for as long as she can remember.

Music played a crucial role in Nai’s upbringing. “As a Palestinian child, just like any Palestinian child, you’re under so many boundaries that are forced on you, whether it’s actual physical checkpoints or just the mental boundaries that are enforced by the occupation on us,” she explains. “It was very important for me to find this thing that I can express myself with — and music was that.”

She began studying the flute at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music at age six; however, at times it was difficult to travel to the music school in Israel. Checkpoints and resistance lay along the way, but nothing deterred her. “Every child is also very stubborn — [your parents] tell you to take a jacket, so then, all of a sudden, you’re not cold. That’s just how it was, but on a much larger scale.”

Nai continues, “It’s also showing you how strong it is to be a musician. For a soldier that is completely armed and very powerful in terms of their weapons, in terms of the support that they have, and then there’s a helpless child with her flute, and yet that somehow is very threatening to them. And that idea just always stays with you. You don’t really get it as a child, at that point, but it really just stays with you — to always want to keep pursuing your dream.”
“I always had to just do what I felt, and not just what somebody said was right or not right 100 years ago or 400 years ago.”

For Nai, her roots in Palestinian folk continue to inspire her. The music tradition “can be very rhythmic. It has a special factor of sounding joyful, yet the lyrics can be quite sad and very expressive towards poverty, or occupation, or racism.” She gives an example: “Yuma Mwel al Hawa,” a soft traditional lullaby whose title roughly translates to “Mum, Sing to the Wind.” The refrain of the song, though, repeats: “A dagger’s stab is better than being ruled by a scoundrel.” “It’s calm, yet the lyrics are very powerful,” she explains. “I always like to have it in every concert.”

Following the feeling

As a teenager, Nai moved abroad to continue her music education. While she studied, she began refining her tastes and her style. She moved first to the United States, and later to Amsterdam, explaining, “The general atmosphere of being in [the United States] was just not fitting with what I wanted to do, and also because the academic rules there were very strict in terms of what you can and cannot do. And for me, that never worked. I always had to just do what I felt, and not just what somebody said was right or not right 100 years ago or 400 years ago.”

By following what felt right, Nai explored new paths. “I always was curious to just do music that is not always labelled and not always put in, like, ‘This is jazz,’ or ‘This is classical music,’ or ‘This is pop,’” she emphasises. “It was just music that sounded good, and that was developing, and that was curious, and that’s all I cared about at that point.”

Following these curiosities led her towards developing her own vocal technique — which eventually became the subject of her master’s thesis in the Netherlands — deemed “Naistrumenting.” She explains that Naistrumenting is to use the voice as an instrument, and forging this style was the key to figuring out “how to seamlessly blend Arabic music with jazz and other music genres.”

“Using the voice as an instrument is not my own discovery, obviously,” she clarifies. “It’s been used a lot in different music genres like scat singing in jazz, Konnakol in Indian music and many, many others. But using the voice as an instrument in an Arabic-music setting that focuses on a multi-layered ornamentation technique — that was the thing that I was developing, which has not been done before.”

A journey of emotions

In recent years, Nai has won the Concertgebouw Young Talent Award, released her debut album Nai 1, garnered a quarter of a million followers on social media, and toured all over the world. She’s even lent her voice on a Skrillex track, “XENA,” where her Naistrumentation of a traditional Palestinian wedding song combines with Skrillex beats to make something electric and immersive.

Now, in her current tour, she brings together four other musicians: Khalil Khoury, Tony Roe, Ruven Ruppik, and Mark Haanstra. One enthralling aspect of their performance is Khalil, who plays the qanun — a harp-like instrument played in the lap, similar to a zither. “The beautiful and most complex thing about this instrument is that every single accidental has to be physically manipulated with the fingers,” Nai notes. “Khalil has this ability to adjust so deeply, not just in volume, but filling the music, filling the sentence, filling the notes.”

All together, Nai’s performances are distinct and textured; her style has hooked her fans, who describe her music as “flawless,” “angelic,” and “magic.” Nai notes that many of her listeners have found her through social media, where she posts videos — simple, unvarnished — of her singing.

“Social media has always been a very weird thing for me to get used to,” she admits. “It all started with Facebook — at the time where Facebook was the main thing — before I could be a lot on stage or have a lot of professional videos taken of me on stage, a lot of it was undocumented. And so I just would sing at home and post a video, and a lot of people found out about what I do through that. There’s a lot of beauty in that; you can share things and reach people. Then there are a lot of barriers as well because it feels like sometimes that’s the only way to reach people.”

“These trending, very polished videos — it’s just very different than what I like music to be and the personal experience behind it,” she emphasises.

In contrast, Nai hopes to create a rich, deeper experience for her audiences in her concerts. “It’s really more of a journey of emotions that the audience goes through,” she notes. “It can have joy, and then it can have grief, and then you can cry, and then you can laugh. And then it’s everything in between.”

She identifies that the unpolished side of live performance is what makes it beautiful. “It’s being in that very vulnerable state, where anything can go wrong and everything can go wrong. You’re affected by everything as well — if somebody coughs, if you all of a sudden have to sneeze — the voice is such a fragile instrument,” she says. “I just need to be present in that moment. And I think that’s the most beautiful point for me: to just let go.”

Nai Barghouti and her band will perform in Harpa’s Eldborg on April 17 at 20:00, and tickets can be found here. On April 18 at 13:00, there will be a free Q&A with Nai hosted by the Palestinian Project at the University of Iceland in Harpa’s Flói space, which you can learn more about here. Nai’s music can be found on most streaming services.