Kinan Azmeh & CityBand at Stable Hall

Kinan Azmeh & CityBAnd
Stable Hall
The New Season 2025/26
San Antonio
October 12, 2025

The concert on October 12, 2025 was not Syrian-born Azmeh's first rodeo, you might say. He had performed in San Antonio a handful of times prior to the Stable Hall concert at the behest of Musical Bridges Around the World, which provides, as their website rightly proclaims, "free access to high quality global performing arts, with a clear focus on cross-cultural collaboration." On this occasion, he brought CityBand, whom he calls his "family away from family," and who are celebrating the release of Berlin and Beyond (Dreyer Gaido, 2025). The cohort includes guitarist Kyle Sanna and bassist Josh Myers, both—like Azmeh—Brooklyn-based, along with Paris-based drummer John Hadfield.

The ensemble played selections from the release, beginning with the first two album cuts in rapid succession. "The Queen Commanded," which sets a poem by Berlin-based Syrian poet Ramy Al-Asheq, was written for a play entitled The Queen Commanded Him to Forget (Ofira Henig and Khalifa Natour). The clarinet begins alone, out of time, with the other instruments added one by one until the drums enter and a pulse begins. "The Translator" was written for a film, as Azmeh explained to the audience, but the producers found it "too intellectual." He took the rejection in stride, deconstructing the piece into "a groove and a couple of intervals" and reconstituting it as a free improvisation.

The set included two pieces tied to specific locations of particular significance to Azmeh. "Jisreen" is named for a community that is part of a green belt around Damascus, which suffered a lot of destruction during the 2011-2024 uprising. "It was basically the cradle of the uprising," he said. Azmeh's father had a place there when he was growing up, and the extended family, including grandchildren and their friends, would go on weekends to play in the countryside "but most importantly," he said, "to work the land." He planted trees and watched them grow, watering and taking care of them, growing alongside them. He created the piece as "a tribute to the people of that land, the apricot trees that I planted and soil and the soul of the place."

The second is "Daraa." He gave AAJ this background in a March 2025 interview:

Daraa is the name of a city in the southwest corner of Syria, and that's also where the uprising began back in 2011, in March. So this piece is dedicated to the people of that city and what they represented. I am happy to reacknowledge that it finally brought down the tyrant, the dictator in Damascus, but... It's little known that for the first maybe two years of the uprising, the people used to sing songs in support of the other cities that were bombed or shot at. So at some point in 2011 or 2012, this melody that you hear, "Daraa''—the only not-original melody on the album—was sung by millions of Syrians who went to the streets singing for Daraa. But of course I put it totally in a different context, and you hear it over and over. It's like a protest song, obviously.

The set ended with "Wedding," Azmeh's centrifugal tribute to those who fall in love in times of war. He set the scene for the audience: A wedding party in a village lasts for days; the whole village is invited, all musicians take part, everybody dances. It is the band's most-played number, and has "a very small score," as he put it. For aficionados, here is the scoop:

The piece is in a 15/8 meter, but we play in the subdivisions a lot, 5-2-3-5, 5-4-3-2-1, different groupings. Maybe this is part of my obsession with math and physics, you know, that brought me to work on this groove, because it is not a traditional Syrian groove or anything. It's made up. And the band and I totally nerd out typically in this piece.

Small score, big meter, the audience adored it, demanding an encore before the musicians had a chance to leave the stage. The finale was "Airports," a tune Azmeh wrote while waiting in the secondary security check room of JFK airport, heading home after an international tour. An American citizen, he had been stopped for reasons that were not clear. While sitting there, he imagined how nice it would be if everyone in the room, all strangers in a similar predicament, sang wordlessly together as they waited. The audience, rising to the task of realizing the piece with him, left the hall humming.

Farther Down the Road

Musical Bridges hosts Sam Reider & The Human Hands on November 9, 2025 for an original program of "modern folk music." Next up on the calendar is Fireworks, with Gurwitz 2024 International Piano Competition gold medalist Yungyung Guo at the piano, Scott Yoo on violin and Bion Tsang on cello in a concert of virtuoso favorites. Later in the season, Gurwitz 2024 bronze medalist Young Sun Choi holds forth in a solo recital. In January 2026, the San Antonio Gospel Heritage Choir joins local luminaries as part of DreamWeak San Antonio's two-week festival of events celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King. Stable Hall welcomes the eight-man acapella group Cantus in March for a celebration of America's 250th birthday, focusing on works by composers with immigrant backgrounds. The season closes with Roby Lakatos' proprietary blend of jazz, classical and Hungarian Romani music for violin, piano, cimbalom and double bass.

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