Q&A: Grey Grass

We stumbled upon Grey Grass playing on Road 9 in Maadi, and we knew right away from their unique sound and energizing stage presence that they were a band to watch.

A fun group bound by true friendship, the band is composed of Malak Makar (what a voice!), Kareem Gamroor, Michael Mahmoud, Mostafa Sattar (“the guy with the hat”) and Shahir Eskandar – all talented in their own right.

We caught a jam session with the indie up and comers, where we got to see first hand the makings of some of their epic mashups. Take a listen to the interview, where they give us the scoop on their creative process (let’s just say they work well under pressure) and share some hilarious memories of their musical journey thus far. An abbreviated transcript of the interview follows.

 

 

 

Malak: So. Alright so… it started with – wait, how did it start?

Gamroor: So Malak was – Malak was – Malak, obviously

Malak: No but I would only sing in open mics… and I would sing a lot with my dad and stuff and then a friend of ours – Farida El-Gueretly, who’s also a performer – was organizing… this event, which was basically a fundraiser for a school for kids with disabilities and so she asked me to perform and at that point it was just me and um, and just me.

So I knew Shahir so I asked him to help me out with percussion and another friend of mine Adam Awad, who’s also a performer, a big performer, and then we performed in that concert and then soon after that we got a gig at Bikya, but Adam had already left, so then Shaheer brought in Gamroor and then we started performing together.

But it was just an acoustic set, but we would also do our mashups –

Gamroor: You’re being humble. I mean, like, our first gig, I knew Shahir vaguely –

Shahir: Yea, I called a friend and I told him I’m looking for a guitartist so he told me about Gamroor. I met him like a couple times but just said ‘hi’ ‘hi’ but I don’t know, ya3ny, I’d never seen him playing.

Gamroor: He called me, he says, yea listen, I play with this girl called Malak, who you’ve never met, and we have a gig uh, the day after tomorrow. We have four songs we wanna play, can you play with us? I said alright.

So the first time I met them they came over, we jammed for three hours and then they left and then they came back, jammed for three hours – we actually added a song in three days.

Malak: And then we jammed on the street right before Bikya.

Shahir: Yea, because we weren’t that tight in that time. We were just like, yea the concert was too soon for us. We had a new member and a new song…

Malak: And then we performed. But it was good –

Gamroor: It was a really good performance, actually, yea to the point where they asked us to come back. So we all dispersed and we were like, okay this was great we should meet up again and then six months of nothing and then we get a call from Bikya saying hey, we’re having a really big anniversary concert, can you guys come play, like with Like Jelly and stuff. So we meet up again, we got a little better –

Shahir: It was bigger. We had 45 minutes of songs, a lot of mashups.

Gamroor: That’s when mashups really started. The first thing we’d done was Radiohead, an Oriental version of one of the Radiohead songs.

Shahir: And the Led Zeppelin AC/DC mashup.

…

Gamroor: That was our first big mashup yea. That song’s a killer. Like Malak’s vocals – we have a certain amount of times we can perform it in a six month time –

Malak: So I don’t like tear anything inside – save it for the special occasions…

Gamroor: Yea we were talking a long time about moving from acoustic to electric because there’s a lot of limitations of being an acoustic band – a lot. And all the gigs we’d gotten were like small and people don’t really give you space to set out and don’t care a lot about your audio quality if you’re acoustic and we didn’t like that. So we thought, alright let’s take the step into being an electric band. And I know Sattar? And i think you guys knew him separately –

Malak: The guy with the hat

Scoop: The magician

Gamroor: The magician

Malak: The magician

Sattar: That’s what my friends are calling me

Gamroor: At the time Sattar was a bassist found in at least 95% of the bands in Egypt. There’s no one – like we had to like schedule appointments – but he came and he liked it –

Shahir: He can play, he can play drums on his bass, he can play piano on his bass guitar –

Gamroor: And we had one show with ٍSattar. It was the Bikya Maadi anniversary and that’s when we suited up… so we had a really good show and there’s a couple videos of that, that’s the first time we tried “Panic Station”

…

And then, we liked things, things were progressing but then everyone went their own way for a little bit… and then we got a couple gigs.

Sattar, literally in one of those breaks we had taken, Sattar had picked up the trumpet. Like literally picked it up and in a three month period, he plays it casually. So at the beginning Sattar was still the bassist and we’d ask him to incorporate – we couldn’t find a way like, whether to hang it around a chain around his neck so he could play trumpet and bass at the same time, but that was very inconvenient and then he recommended Michael, who’s actually a guitarist – a pretty fucking awesome guitartist –

Michael: and that’s when things got interesting… ha ha ha!

Sattar: dun dun dun duuuun!

Michael: they came to me, they were like, the band’s falling apart.

Sattar: Michael’s the most humble member, most focused…

At one of their gigs, in the midst of one of their songs, Michael decided to sit on the edge of the stage – a raised platform, basically on the roof of a building.

Malak: I was worried he was going to fall off.

Sattar: I was worried because he was playing my bass.

…

This is the beauty of this band. Each person is thinking something. He’s like, how the hell am I gonna go back so I actually be in sync with them. She’s thinking how is he gonna stand up. I don’t know what you were thinking –

Gamroor: Stupid bass solo

Sattar: I was thinking, if you drop my bass I’m gonna kill you. And he was probably thinking like ‘Caw Caw’

Scoop: But you joined recently, right? I remember when you came into the office you said you had to learn like all these songs in five days or something

Sattar: And he was suffering because he was playing all my bass lines and stuff… but then he made his own thing.

Gamroor: No but yea, like Michael had to learn at least, what? 12 songs –

Michael: More!

Gamroor: in like a week and a half. And songs we were already playing comfortably and like casually… But our first show in Maadi, he was the star. People were chanting his name…

Sattar: I think one of the only names they knew in the band was Michael. Some of the songs I don’t play trumpet, so I stand with the audience. And one of them was like, ‘Yea, Michael!’ And then he looked at me and he was like, ‘Which one is Michael?’

…

 

 

WE SAID THIS: If you’re in Gouna, don’t miss Grey Grass at Moods, where they’ll be performing with DJ Moneim Hafez.