This is not an easy time to be the musical voice of Lebanon. Marcel Khalife, who was born in a small seaside village about 25 miles from Beirut, has been singing and playing Lebanese popular and classical music for some 40 years and is the country's most respected singer and composer.
In 2005, UNESCO named him an International Artist for Peace. And yet, having toured the world, he is well aware that the only thing most people outside the Middle East know about his homeland is its recent history of war and ethnic strife.
"That is very hard," Khalife says, speaking in French from a European tour stop. "They always write about that, and if there is also beauty, they do not write about it. . . . Not only in Lebanon but in the whole region, there are great traditions of music, of poetry, of song, of performance, and it is too bad that the media sees only war.
"It was not us who started these wars; they came from outside, with colonization. So we need to say 'No' -- no to war. That is what I hope to do with my concerts: to give a different view of the region, another vision of the culture."
Khalife, who appears Saturday at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, has loved music since his childhood. Born in 1950, he is from a family of Maronite Christians and his first musical inspiration was in church: "I would hear the canticles, and I loved this sound," he recalls. "Because of that I became interested in music. And there was also beautiful music in the mosques."
He says that his family encouraged his interest: "My grandfather played a sort of flute called the ney, and he sang as well. In the beginning, I used to tap out rhythms on tables, on empty milk cartons. Then my parents bought me an instrument, an oud -- the Oriental lute -- and I started to study music."
Khalife went to the Lebanon National Higher Conservatory of Music in Beirut, where he studied Arabic and Western classical styles, and immersed himself in a thousand years of poetry and song. By 1970 he was teaching there, and in 1976 he formed the Al Mayadine Ensemble, and began to tour the world.
But Khalife's reputation is based on more than just his music. He has often been called "the Bob Dylan of Lebanon" for his songs on topical themes and his passionate avowal of the rights of Palestinian refugees. He is considered a hero by many fans for continuing to perform even during the worst years of warfare, appearing in bombed concert halls in spite of personal threats and omnipresent dangers.
