How can a strange land be at once familiar?

Arriving in Amman, Jordan several years ago on the final leg of a multinational tour, I unexpectedly met a part of myself — following performances, exploring the streets, at restaurants, cafes and shops. It was in the people who would invariably come up to me and ask if I was Jordanian. They recognized something in me, and I in them. It was surreal.

In fact, I had landed right in the homeland of my paternal ancestors.

Until that point, I only had an inkling that part of my bloodline originated from somewhere around the region. This experience was the catalyst to seek out my Palestinian roots for the first time. What followed a few years later was a reunion with my biological father and uncle, (I hadn’t been in contact with either of them since I was a small child) along with the discovery of three half-siblings. Remarkably, they were all based just a few miles from where I had stayed in Amman.

My upbringing was Jewish. Assimilating this with my reawakened Arab lineage was a transformative process. Eventually, I began to contemplate the rich beauty of these two cultures and the profound complexities between them from a compositional perspective. The rhythms, maqam-infused melodies and folk harmonies of these Semitic musical traditions have always resonated deeply with me, and I explored weaving an essence of them together with a palette of other long-standing musical influences of mine that ultimately shaped my vision for this project.