The Sweet Sounds and Compositions of Assyrian American Musician Joseph Sugar

Joseph R. Sugar, 1946. Union High School yearbook. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

Near Eastern American musicians have long come from and identified with a vast array of linguist ethnic groups (Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Turks, and Assyrians), nationalities, and religious faiths (Christians, Muslims, and Jews) with shared but equally varied facets of expressive cultures. Many first wave immigrants and first-generation musicians from the Near East and North Africa like Alexander Maloof, Mohamed Zaineldeen, Moses Cohen, and others who shared this assortment of ethnic identities collaborated, helped one another, and performed together in the 1910s and 1920s. As some of these pioneering musicians began to pass on in the 1940s and 1950s, those who remained, in addition to younger, and sometimes second-wave immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, turned toward recording on new microgroove vinyl records. Second wave immigrant musicians arriving after World War II (Djamal Aslan, Hakki Obadia, Mohammed el Bakkar, etc.) and their first-generation US-born counterparts (Lila Stephan, Anton Abdelahad, Eddie Kochak, etc.) transitioned from 78 rpm to 45 rpm and 33 rpm technology. One musician and composer who has flown beneath the historical radar and has garnered little attention of many researchers and ethnomusicologists is Assyrian American musician Joseph Sugar. 

 

Although most histories of Assyrians in the United States focus on those who immigrated after 1970, Assyrian immigration began alongside that of other Near Eastern immigrants, especially Arabs from Greater Syria, in the late nineteenth century. Professor Arianne Ishaya describes the first Assyrian immigrants to the United States as students of Western missionaries who traveled westward between 1888 and 1913 from Ottoman Turkey and Iraq anticipating return to their homeland. A collapsing economy and mounting political instability in the Ottoman Empire led some to immigrate temporarily and others to settle in the United States more permanently. The largest communities of Assyrians emerged in Illinois, California, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

 

In the United States, one of the earliest Assyrians to appear on 78 rpm phonograph records included Khosrov Malool (c.1880/1884-d.1971), who recorded on Columbia, and later Orient Records, in Turkish and Kurdish as early as 1912. He never seems to have recorded in Aramaic. Born in Diyarbakir, Anatolia, immigrating in 1898 or 1904, Malool lived in Queens, New York, Paterson, New Jersey, and then on Long Island. He later returned to Paterson for the remainder of his life. A musician and recording artist in the 1910s and 1920s, Malool earned his bread and butter working in a silk mill, for the Aleppo Silk Company in Paterson, and then as a weaver and tailor. Arab American musicians who also settled in Paterson included kanunist Mosa Kalooky and brothers Mike and George Hamway. When Malool died in March 1971, his services were held at the church he attended the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the Virgin Mary in Paramus – a church once led by Joseph Sugar’s father Rev. Elias G. Sugar. The most thorough work on Khosrov Malool remains Ian Nagoski's To What Strange Place. Another Assyrian American to appear on 78 rpm record fairly early was the Persian-born Pentecostal evangelist Andrew D. Urshan (b. 1884-d. 1967). Hailing from Abajaluy, near Urima, in modern-day Iran, Urshan immigrated to the United States first in 1902. Urshan lived in various cities and states across the US, Washington, Minnesota, California, Illinois, and Texas, to name a few. After returning to Persia, fleeing to the Russian Empire in the years just before World War I, and making his way back to the United States, Urshan published “Songs of Praise”a book of  Syriac Hymns in Aramaic in 1916. He recorded on the Paramount/Witness of God label and his son and daughter-in-law, Nathan and Jean Urshan recorded Christian hymns at 78 rpm on the Gospel Melodies label. We don’t believe Rev. Elias Sugar recorded in English, Aramaic, or any other language. Joseph Sugar, Rev. Sugar's son,  collaborated with several musicians.

78 rpm Witness of God label by Assyrian immigrant  Rev. Andrew Urshan and Gospel Melodies label with song by First Generation Assyrian American Nathan Urshan and his spouse. 

Joseph R. Sugar, a regular collaborator with Djamal Aslan and Iraqi-Jewish violinist Hakki Obadia, was born 14 December 1928 in Worchester, Massachusetts, to Rev. Elias G. Sugar, an immigrant from mostly Kurdish and Arab, Mardin region of Turkey, near Syria and Iraq, and Massachusetts-born Emily Angelina Sihun (Sayonne). According to some records, Elias came to the US around 1914 lived between the US and Canada before settling for a time in Massachusetts. He married Emily Sihum in 1924 and worked as a waiter. The couple had George in 1925 and Joseph three years later. In the same year of Joseph’s birth, Elias received a call from the Assyrian Jacobite Church, renamed the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the Virgin Mary in West New York, New Jersey to serve as its pastor.  

 

The Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch had its birth in the United States in 1919 in West Hoboken, New Jersey. Church services were held in Aramaic, but the divine liturgy and most of the masses made the transition from Aramaic to English by the late 1960s. Census takers and immigration officials in the United States often confused Aramaic-speaking ethnic Assyrians with Arabic-speaking Syrians and the fact that Assyrians immigrated from Turkey, Syria, or Iraq further complicated their identities in the minds of most people in the United States. Moreover, some Assyrians, like many Near Easterners, were multi-lingual and could have spoken both Aramaic and Arabic thus complicating things further. Nevertheless, Rev. Elias Sugar administered scores of weddings, funerals, and other services in Aramaic for congregants.  As his children grew old enough to attend grade school, the family settled at 539 39^th Street in North Bergen, New Jersey, not too far from where musician, composers, and former record-label-owner Alexander Maloof lived by the mid-1930s. By the 1940s and 1950s, a dozen or so musicians performed at festivals, celebrations, anniversaries and mahrajan connected to the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the Virgin Mary. For instance, when in 1953, Djamal Aslan, Leo Budway, and Russell Bunai played at the twenty-five-year anniversary of Rev. Elias Sugar’s elevation into the priesthood. Reportedly, “a large crowd of friends and well-wishers from all of the” United States and Canada planned to attend. Similarly in 1954, Mike Hamway, his son, Thomas, and Edward Tashji performed at the post-Christmas Mass hafla at Assyrian Apostolic.

 

In 1940, Joseph and his brother attended local schools and eventually attended Union High School; here Joseph excelled. Known to his classmates as “Sugar,” Joseph sang in the “Mixed Chorus” and “Senior Chorus.”  He played trumpet in the school band and was a member of Union’s Orchestra. Fellow band members elected Sugar vice president. Outside of music he became a member of the Spanish Club, the Junior Red Cross, and served as manager of the school’s baseball team and chaplain of the Hi-YMCA. To students at Union, Sugar was the class clown, a natural comedian, friendly, talkative and all-around happy and likable guy with aspirations to go to music school after graduation in 1946.

Joseph Robert Sugar in Union High School yearbook. 1946. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

After high school, Joseph enrolled at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus in a bachelor of music program. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force was stationed for a time in Colorado Springs and played in the Air Force Band and Air Transport Band in 1950 and 1951 respectively.  After a brief stint in Indianapolis, where he played in the city’s symphony, and enrollment at Indiana University, he returned East.  He later enrolled at Columbia University Teachers College in the music department where he played trumpet and string bass. At Teachers College, too, he met his, Clara Steele, who studied vocal music. Joseph Sugar found work as the Director of Instrumental Music in Matawan, New Jersey. Clara managed to secure employment in Matawan also as a supervisor of vocal music. Two years after their meeting, the two music lovers, Clara and Joseph, married at the Assyrian Apostolic Church of the Virgin Mary, in West New York, New Jersey, on 26 December 1955. It, of course, was the church that Joseph’s father had been pastor since 1928. A reception at the Kohler Swiss Chalet in Rochelle, New Jersey, followed.

WWII Registration Card for Joseph Sugar. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

Where and how Joseph Sugar met Djamal Aslan and Hakki Obadia remains unclear, historians can only speculate based on limited availability of official documents related to Aslan’s immigration. Born in 1921, Djamal Aslan came to the United States around between 1949 and 1951. Some sources suggest he was from Iraq and others Lebanon, when his mother died in 1960, she passed in Aleppo. Married several times in the 1950s, Aslan’s daughter, Asmahan Aslan, was baptized by Rev. Elias Sugar at Assyrian Apostolic in May 1957. In the same month and year, Naim Karacand, Mike and George Hamway, and Djamal Aslan jammed for over 600 people at a mahrajan at Assyrian Apostolic Church. Perhaps Joseph Sugar and Djamal Aslan connected here. Within a few years, Joseph Sugar, Joe Cotton, Ahmed Abdul Malik, Naim Karacand, Hakki Obadia, Eddie "The Sheik" Kochak, Louis Karam, and others formed the ensemble that backed Djamal Aslan on his 1959 album Lebanon: Her Heart, Her Sounds on the Twentieth Century Fox label. The project would turn out to be Djamal Aslan’s only album. Joe Sugar (spelled Shugar on the back album cover) played cello accompaniment. 

Djamal Aslan's Lebanon: Her Heart, Her Sounds included a host of musicians including Ahmed Abdul Malik and Joseph Sugar. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. https://youtu.be/uwyTBRNjVj0

In a little over a year, Hakki Obadia and Joseph Sugar paired up, conducted, and recorded with their own 33 1/3 rpm album 10 Nights in a Harem on MGM. The studio released two versions of 10 Nights in a Harem, one in mono (one channel signal to both or multiple speakers) and the other in stereo (two channel signals, one to each speaker). The cover of the mono version #E3857 included the album’s title in red, and the stereo version’s #SE3857 title is yellow. The stereo version also sold for one dollar more. By Fall 1960, the LP’s demand increased exponentially. 

 

10 Nights in a Harem by Hakki Obadia and Joseph Sugar in 1960. Richard M. Breaux collection.
https://youtu.be/ZY11VsPlNGA

As Arab American and Near Eastern music moved more into the night club, Sugar continued on as a teacher with a host of professional memberships that allowed in develop professionally. He earned professional certificates at Hofstra University and Teachers College and joined New York State School Music Association and Music Educators National Conference. For a period, he served as President of the New York State School Music Association.

Hakki Obadia & Joseph Sugar, The Caravan, 26 August 1960. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

Outside his work in academia, Sugar led a band and small orchestra that played throughout New Jersey and New York in the 1980s and early 1990s, but mostly in Nassau County. On May 2, 1980, Joe Sugar’s Big Band played the Adelphi Calderone Theater in Town of Hempstead on Long Island. By August of the same year, the Joe Sugar Orchestra rocked a night gig in the Bellmores. Near the decade’s end, Joe Sugar’s Orchestra played the same venue in the Bellmores’ “Dancing Under the Stars” series. During the course of his career, Joe backed Vic Damone and Eddie Fischer.

 

As Joe entered his 60s, Joe Sugar applied for and gained a position at Long Island University CW Post campus as director of music education in 1990.  Joe’s Big Band packed a venue in East Rockaway in 1991 and regularly jammed at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow from 1994 to 2001. If you thought seventy, would slow Joe Sugar down, it did not. In 2001, Joe became an adjunct professor at Long Island University CW Post campus.

Joseph Sugar. Courtesy of the Sugar Family.

Joe Sugar died at the age of 80 on November 1, 2009, but his musical legacy did not end there. Thomas Elias Sugar, one of his sons, took up music composition and in the same year his father passed released compositions including “Bell Are Ringing Now,” “Home to Oyster Bay,” “If I Could Give the World a Gift,” “If I had Three Wishes,” and “I’ve Got thinks to Give.”  With that, the sweet sounds produced by the Sugar family continues on into the twenty-first century.

 

Richard M. Breaux

© Midwest Mahjar