In the great cities of the Middle East, the coffeehouse was never merely a place of transit: voices, poetry, storytelling, and the news of the day intermingled there with the scents of the space and the lingering smoke of evening gatherings. It is this living memory that Al Qahwa, the house of coffee, revives: a Toronto-based ensemble whose music crosses borders with rare ease.

On riqq and qanun, Maryem Tollar deploys a vocal artistry shaped by years of study under the great masters of classical Arabic song, from Syrian muwashahat to Sufi devotional melodies. Her voice, at once precise and deeply inhabited, carries forward the legacy of an East that refuses to remain fixed in the past.

Around her, Ernie Tollar on wind instruments, Demetri Petsalakis on oud, Naghmeh Farahmand on percussion, Waleed Abdulhamid on bass and vocals, and Lauren Barnett on vocal harmonies and saxophone weave together a repertoire in which original compositions and beloved Arabic classics converse with one another, from sacred incantations to the popular melodies of Egypt's golden age.

For the space of an evening, Montreal becomes, in turn, Al Qahwa, a place where one comes, as in times past, to hear the world recount itself through music. Voices answer one another, instruments enter into dialogue, and within this suspended space, each listener, for the duration of a song, is drawn a little closer to the other.