The thick, black vinyl discs were hot to the touch in the repressive, North African sun. But the sound they made was just so — cool.
Cheb i. Sabbeh remembers those days, when the sound of Andalusian music echoed around the concrete walls in the Jewish quarter of his hometown of Constantine, Algeria. Sometimes a neighbor pulled a radio or turntable out into the street and sometimes there was even a band. The men played and the women danced.
Those were good times, and he smiles at the memory.
It was not to last.
Sabbeh, a San Francisco DJ and record producer for the past 20-odd years, is an easy man to spot. On the day of our interview, the 60-year-old walked into the café bundled tightly in a green coat — he was battling a cold — that clashed with his maroon pants and chartreuse boots. His long salt-and-pepper hair was bundled into a topknot, and bright gold earrings dangled from both lobes.
Sabbeh was born Haïm El Baz, the only surviving child of a secretary mother and a father who stained furniture to the desired wood tone (his stage name roughly translates from Arabic as “young man of the sunshine,” a humorously self-applied moniker for a man who spins records until four or five every morning).
As Jews in Algeria, Sabbeh’s family found itself caught in the middle between Muslim revolutionaries and right-wing French colonists. As a teenager, Sabbeh remembers days when bullets soared through the neighborhood and car bombs exploded nearby. Someone — he’s not sure who — put razor blades in the community’s food.
In 1960, the beloved Jewish musician Cheb Raymond was assassinated.
“This was a signal things were finished for us in Algeria,” he recalls. “Maybe it was time to go.”
Two years later, clutching a mattress and a few small boxes, his family fled to Paris after France ceded its former territory to Islamic revolutionaries after a horrifically bloody war. Other than a hitchhiking jaunt across North Africa in 1968, Sabbeh never returned to the nation of his birth.
In 1964, vinyl discs again entered Sabbeh’s life. “Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, the Bar-Kays,” Sabbeh rattles off in his French-accented and soft-spoken pitter-patter. After filling in for a DJ pal, he picked up the job full-time (and then some). Six days a week he spun 7-inch vinyls of American soul acts. After quitting school at 15 and
failing to launch as a hairdresser, this was not the kind of news his parents wanted to hear.
“Where they came from, and after seeing all these changes, not just with me, that was way too much,” he recalls. “That wasn’t a real job.”
Sabbeh went on to a series of not-real jobs. He moved to New York and acted in the avant-garde Living Theater. He worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but says emphatically, “I don’t want to talk about that one.”
He moved to San Francisco two decades ago, and founded the Tribal Warning Theater. It was when he began mixing eclectic bits of music to create soundtracks for his plays that vinyl changed his life for a third time.
Thirty thousand fans clapped their hands for him in Morocco. Thirty thousand more in Seattle. When Sabbeh was a kid, musicians used to have to sing, play or both to make a record (and he tried). These days, recording artists just need to remix existing music, speed it up, slow it down, and bring in new sounds emanating from North Africa, India and elsewhere.
For Sabbeh’s latest record — “Devotion,” which he released in late January — he worked with musicians in New Delhi, recording (and remixing) songs representing India’s three major religions: Hindu-ism, Islam and Sikhism. A 2005 release, “La Kahena,” is a tribute to the Jewish woman who united the North African Berbers thousands of years ago against the first wave of Arab Muslim invaders.
On any given weekend, Sabbeh will be in Los Angeles, Seattle or any other city in the nation or world. Often, the gigs come last minute. It’s hectic; sometimes crazy. But he’s not a hairdresser or staining furniture for a living. And he’s happy.
As a DJ, “it doesn’t matter how much you work on it. It’s never done. You’re always working, but it’s never done,” he says with a smile. “And when you get up there in front of 5,000 people or 30,000 people, and when the magic is there, then it all makes sense.”
Cheb i. Sabbeh is holding a CD release party at 10 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9 at the Temple San Francisco nightclub, 540 Howard St., S.F. Tickets: $18. Information: www.chebisabbeh.com.