Poet in an Arab garden: Suheir Hammad to perform at Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture concert

'We like to experiment," says Hanna Khoury. "We're always looking for new challenges - and this is going to be an especially interesting one."

Khoury is music director of the Arab Music Concert Series, put on by the West Philadelphia-based nonprofit Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture. Friday's concert, at Trinity Center, 22d and Spruce Streets, features a resident takht ensemble playing traditional Arab music, one in a series with guest soloists.

Friday's guest will be not a traditional musician but the much-praised Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad. She often reads to music - but this time, she'll deliver her distinctive, hip-hop-inflected verses, in English, in a bed of traditional Arab music.

A surprising combination? Khoury likes it.

"One of the pieces she is doing, 'Gaza Suite,' treats a topic that brings in many different elements from home," Khoury says. "So having traditional music performed with it makes a lot of sense, as she speaks of Gaza and Bethlehem. It goes very well with the music of the region."

Hammad says by e-mail that "it will be a new experience. My poems have accompanied several genres over the years, and I'm hoping both the music and the poems will birth new sound and meaning by coming together. Let's hear what happens."

Khoury, born in Israel, is a rarity - a violinist exquisitely trained in both Middle Eastern and Western classical music. He has played with and for everyone from Daniel Barenboim to Shakira to Mandy Patinkin to Youssou N'Dour. "When my family and I speak of 'classical music,' we mean Arab traditional music," he says. "When we want to talk about Beethoven, we call it 'Western music.' "

Hammad was born in Amman, Jordan. When she was 5, her parents moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., and from there to Staten Island, where Hammad grew up hip-hop.

So the keynote is diversity, with an eye on bringing Arab music to a wider public.

Al-Bustan means "The Garden" in Arabic. Founded by Hazami Sayed in 2003, it has gone from a summer camp to a center for year-round arts programs dedicated to presenting and teaching the Arab language and culture. Khoury began a series of small-group Arab music concerts last spring, and in May, a grant of $50,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation enabled Al-Bustan to take the next step: a concert series to bring audiences the music on a regular basis.