Medhi Hamdad and his band perform at Elmdale House Tavern. The Ottawa-based musician recently released his debut album Luminata.
Regardless of whether Mehdi Hamdad takes the stage for music, theatre or spoken word, his approach is always the same.
“I don’t have any talent other than enthusiasm,” says Hamdad, the primary creative mind behind local folk-funk band, the Mehdi Cayenne Club. “Things that stem from love inside me are the things that I’m likely to do in the best and most sustainable way.”
The Mehdi Cayenne Club recently released its first album, Luminata, a full-length studio-recorded project that Hamdad began working on nine months ago. The 13-track album was conceived in Hamdad’s Spruce Street bedroom and retains an organic feel in its unique mixture of folk, funk and spoken word poetry. The album has been received extremely well by both English and French local music critics, and its early success is a testament to Hamdad’s reputation as a diverse, bilingual artist.
Born in Algeria, Hamdad grew up in Montreal and Moncton before coming to Ottawa and has garnered a dedicated following among both French and English fans. However, Hamdad insists his goal isn’t to create a distinction along lingual lines.
“It’s not so much that I want to pander to a target market,” says Hamdad, whose album combines both French and English lyrics. “I’m just doing my best to be sincere with myself and to the cultural ambiguity that I find is my lot.”
It is this quest for self-discovery that has led Hamdad to delve into many different creative areas. Aside from his musical abilities, Hamdad is also a playwright, an actor and an accomplished spoken word poet.
“He’ll always have his hand in everything,” says Sean O’Gorman, Hamdad’s former roommate and a popular local poet. “He can act, he can sing, he can play music, he can do spoken word – he can probably paint, he just hasn’t shown it yet.”
Hamdad says he began honing his artistic talents at a young age in a household that encouraged him to explore different areas of creativity.
“Even though art classes couldn’t really be part of our financial planning so to speak, culture has always been a big part of my upbringing,” says Hamdad. “Early enough I realized that if I didn’t use my creativity and follow what made me come alive, then I would go insane and be zombified, as is often the case in our world.
“I kind of felt like I would be lying to myself if I didn’t keep pursuing that – that being the practice of growth in artistic process.”
However, Hamdad stresses that his choice to chase his dreams doesn’t make him any more enlightened than other people.
“I don’t have the pretension of saying the rest of the world is zombified and I’m not,” says Hamdad.
“I think my emotional travails are the same as other people. I think what inspires me is caring about life . . . I’m inspired by joy and love but I’m also inspired by the fact that joy and sadness can coexist within the same space.”
This humility is what helps Hamdad connect with his audience and allows him to develop as an artist, says Sergio Herrera, who works with Hamdad as a spoken word workshop facilitator. “It’s the fact that he genuinely loves himself and if you love yourself you’re gonna do what brings you alive,” says Herrera. “He’s focused on the greatness within. He will . . . always have that Mehdi touch and you can’t separate that from the guy.
“It’s like if you put cayenne pepper on your food – you can cook it or do whatever, but at the end, you’ll still taste that cayenne pepper."