Washington Post
June 11, 2009 Thursday
Met 2 Edition

For the Piano Man of Baghdad, What Will Be, Will Be

by Nada Bakri; Washington Post Foreign Service
BAGHDAD

Christopher Garabedian lighted the candles perched on top of his
Korean-made piano and flipped through a folder of music, some of it
handwritten. He glanced at his watch. It was 7:30 p.m., so he sat down
behind the instrument.

At home, his drink of choice is vodka. Here at the piano, it is
Lebanese red wine, served at room temperature. He reached for his
glass, placed at the left corner of the piano, took a sip, then let
his fingers slide across the keys. What followed were songs seldom
heard in Baghdad, a city where pianists are rare and music venues are
few.

Garabedian is the Piano Man of Baghdad, and his performance had begun.

"It was my only friend during the war and the events," Garabedian, 53,
said as he patted his instrument as he might a friend. Like many here,
by "events" he meant the sectarian warfare that plunged his country
into blood-soaked chaos in 2006 and 2007. "Without it, I wouldn’t have
survived."

Garabedian plays every night at Al-Rif, a tony restaurant and one of
the few doing business in Baghdad these days. In the upscale
neighborhood of Arrassat, which has witnessed its share of bombings,
the restaurant attracts only a handful of customers every night. Some
come to listen to Garabedian’s medley of Western and Eastern tunes,
including Iraqi traditional songs, that has earned him many admirers.

"He is the best pianist here," said Najat Mashkouri, a longtime fan
and a regular at the restaurant. "His music makes you forget where you
are."

At age 12, Garabedian started playing the harmonica at the Armenian
school in Baghdad. But when his Russian teacher, Mrs. Natasha,
overheard him perform the piano, she enrolled him in her lessons, he
recalled. Impressed by his talent, she suggested that he travel to
Moscow, where he would study to become a professional. But money was
an obstacle, and Garabedian never left Iraq. Neither did he finish
school or complete his lessons. Instead, he played with local bands at
restaurants, parties and nightclubs for about $2 a performance, which
he gave to his father.

At 8 p.m., waiters ferried an occasional dish to the few patrons here
on this night. Save for Mashkouri and her companion, no one seemed to
be paying much attention to the music. For a born performer, the lack
of notice seemed painful. But Garabedian kept playing.

Next in his repertoire was "Que Sera, Sera."

Garabedian improved by relying on his sharp ear and practicing a few
hours every week on a borrowed keyboard. He joined a group called the
Stars Band with four other musicians, and together they covered the
Beatles, the Carpenters, the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple and Rare
Earth in bars across Baghdad.

He learned how to sing in English, Spanish, Italian and even a
Filipino dialect. In the early 1980s, he performed a one-man show in a
nightclub once Baghdad’s most famous, Al-Tahouna Hamra, or the Red
Mill, where he played with visiting artists such as Denis Rose, an
English jazz musician, and Dan Reed from the rock-funk metal band Dan
Reed Network.

"Life taught me everything I know," he said.

At 8:30, he adjusted his posture, his right hand on the piano and the
left on an adjacent keyboard. A waiter stood by a nearby table,
listening as Garabedian played a selection of songs of Fairuz, a
Lebanese singer. Lost in the tunes, Garabedian swayed back and forth
as the music filled the almost empty restaurant.

"Christo is a flower," said Ashour Francis, the waiter, using
Garabedian’s nickname. "No one can outplay him. It comes from his
heart."

Al-Rif is a familiar locale for Garabedian. He performed here for
seven years in a one-man show until a suicide bomber blew himself up
at the place next door during a New Year’s Eve party in 2004. The
restaurant closed 15 days later.

Without a steady income, Garabedian, a father of two, gave private
lessons to a handful of students. When the last one failed to show up
for a session, Garabedian sold his piano for $2,500, a sum that lasted
his family no more than two months.

Explosions have broken his apartment’s doors and shattered its windows
eight times since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. But his
music, which he continued to play on a Spanish guitar, sheltered him
from what happened in the streets of his neighborhood, Hay al-Sinai,
with its sizable but dwindling Christian population.

"I kept my door closed," he said. "Every evening, I poured myself a
glass of vodka or wine and played until I forgot what was happening
around me."

It was 9 p.m. when Garabedian started singing "And I Love You So." A
customer approached him, waiting several minutes for him to
finish. When he did, she requested an old Iraqi folk song.

"I won’t sing it, but I will play it," Garabedian told her. "It will
make me cry."

"Nature Boy" followed. It was the last song he performed before the
clock struck 10. The song, he said, reminds him of himself.

"There was a boy," he sang in English, "a very strange enchanted boy."

Customers paid their checks, and waiters cleared tables clothed in a
checkered red.

"And then one day," he went on:
One magic day, he passed my way.
And while we spoke of many things,
Fools and kings,
This, he said to me,
"The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return."