Sunday's Syrian picnic at Cascade Park wasn’t exactly an international stage.

But that was OK with Amin Sultan. He had a great time anyway.

“I’m a big family supporter,” said the man whose band provided the Middle Eastern music for the gathering at the park pavilion. “I love it when I see people come out with their families.”

Sultan’s music is known around the U.S. and throughout the Arabic world, where his songs and videos get regular airplay. Yet despite such renown, the Lebanon native who now lives in West Seneca, N.Y., is up for a party with regular folks just as often as he can.

“I’m not a nightclub kind of guy,” he said. “I hate performing at nightclubs because of the drinking and the atmosphere. It’s not my type.

“I love parties that have families and children. I like to see children dance, I like to see children running around. It’s something I enjoy the most. Picnics, they’re not something that I always do, but I always enjoy them.”

Yesterday, the feeling seemed entirely mutual. As the band began its first set, Al “Hatchet” Hasson, who flies in every year from California, led about two dozen men and women in a dabke, a traditional folk dance.

“It’s changed a lot since the beginning,” Hasson said of the picnic’s roots. “I think the first year I came, it was just a trio. Now they have all these instruments and synthesizers you didn’t have back then.

“I tell Allen Deep every year, ‘Make sure you get someone who plays music you can dance to. Sometimes, they come in and play funeral music. These guys are good.”

Deep, one of the organizers from St. Elias Orthodox Church, said bands from Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland and Pittsburgh all have performed at the picnic.

“This year,” he noted, “we went big time.”



EARLY DAYS

Sultan was a 9-year-old in Lebanon when he began playing the piano and singing. He moved to the U.S. as a teenager, where he got involved with various bands as a keyboard player and backup vocalist.

Though his roots were in Middle Eastern music, “I was very interested in Western music,” he said. “I loved Elvis, some of Led Zeppelin, Elton John. I listened to that stuff when I was young. I had a lot of Western music that I loved.”

So much so that Sultan infused much of his early music was with Western flavors, including some of the Latin beats that were becoming popular in the late 1990s.

His 1999 video “Wailek” won a Telly Award for best video production. The awards, according to the organization’s Web site, recognize excellence in local, regional and cable television efforts, as well as film and video and Web productions.

Word of his award, Sultan said, earned him a trip to an Arabic TV station broadcasting out of Italy and opened the door for “Wailek” to be seen worldwide. MTV Europe also played it, and “ever since then, every new video that I’ve done, I send it to all these stations, and they are pretty excited to play them.”

According to his Web bio, Sultan had hoped to build on the inspiration he took from Latin artists “to pioneer the music industry and put Arab music on the American pop charts and in every music store.”

By the dawn of the new millennium, Sultan believed he was well on his way to doing that.



ON THE WAY UP

Sultan cited the success of Sting’s “Desert Rose,” a 1999 song that climbed to No. 17 on the U.S. charts, as evidence that Western music was ready not only for a Latin influence, but also an Arabic one. Sting recorded the song with Algerian-born singer Cheb Mami, and the result was a rock offering that pulsated with Middle Eastern sounds and rhythms.

“Arabic music had really started to rise up,” Sultan said, “and a lot of the nightclubs, in the rap music, they were using a lot of Arabic songs and would blend them in.”

Recognizing that trend, and with his international connections in place, Sultan was positioned for a climb to the top.

“My goal was playing a variety of Middle Eastern music and blending the Latin and the Western music, and to go international with it,” he said. “That was my goal, not only singing for the Arabic world, but going worldwide with it, and I got very close with it. I was very happy. I was playing everywhere.”

Then came 9/11.

“What happened then,” Sultan said of the 2001 terrorist attacks, “was that people took the wrong impression of the Arab world, and it kind of started going downhill.”



FALLOUT

Sultan recalled a 2000 video that he submitted to an international film festival in New York City, which he said did “really well.”

“But in 2002, I had my second video in it, and that one I even shot in New York, and you could see there was a little bit of distance,” he said. “Nobody wanted to touch it, nobody wanted to come near it because they didn’t want to involve themselves in it at that time.”

With his vision of mainstream acceptance sidetracked, Sultan had no choice but to downsize his dreams, at least temporarily.

“It did affect my career,” he said. “So I went back to my roots. I went back to performing for the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Egyptians.”

Even that career track, though, still takes Sultan all over the U.S., performing one night at a concert and the next at a wedding or picnic.

He continues to put out CDs, including his latest, “Old Is Gold,” a collection of traditional songs beloved by “the older generation that came to this country from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt.”

To date, his lyrics have been strictly Arabic, although he does have an English language project that he hopes to release in a year or two.

“I have the songs ready,” he said. “It’s just a matter of making the move. I feel like I’m just not ready to put my heart and soul into it yet.”

In the meantime, he’s waiting for the day when Middle Eastern music once again will begin to assert itself in Western pop culture.

“It is very, very good music,” he said. “It goes back 2,000 years. It was around in Jesus’ time, and ever since then. We just modernized it, that’s all we did.

“I think it will make it to the mainstream of world music again. I really have that feeling it will.”