A few days ago, skywatchers spotted the star Suhail in the night sky. Today, we tend to see its appearance as a sign that summer is finally on its way out. Hundreds of years ago, though, it meant something rather more important: for pearl divers out at sea, Suhail was a sign that it was time to start making their way home.

Before oil transformed the region’s economy, pearling was fundamental to life along the coast and on the islands. In fact, more than 90% of the population worked in professions connected to the sea — pearl diving, fishing, sailing and shipbuilding among them.

And when you spend weeks at sea doing exhausting physical work, what do you do? Well, you sing. This is where Fidjeri comes in — a tradition of men’s sea songs associated particularly with pearl divers. But the music wasn’t simply there to lift spirits. Different songs and rhythms accompanied different jobs, from rowing and setting the sails to pulling up the anchor, turning music into part of the rhythm of work itself.

Typically, one man would begin as the lead singer, with the rest answering or joining as a chorus. Listen to it. What do you hear? Probably those huge, almost hypnotic collective vocal passages. But once you know where they came from, they sound a little different: this is music that grew out of a communal, physically demanding working environment — not something originally written for a stage or concert hall.

And that is what makes Fidjeri particularly fascinating. It isn’t simply the music of pearl divers; it is a kind of living archive of the region. It carries traces of how people worked, travelled, depended on one another and built communities around the sea. And perhaps most beautifully, it preserves something very simple: the power of people singing together.