As of last Thursday, this space was supposed to be filled with a story about the Tabadol Project, a two-week, five-city concert series being produced by composer/improviser Gene Coleman, which would have centered on four events this weekend in Philly. The project, named for an Arabic word meaning "exchange," would have brought four Lebanese musicians — trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, bassist Raed Yassin, altoist Christine Sehnaoui and oud player Ziad El Ahmadie — to the States for concerts and discussions with local improvisers. The rest, as they say, is history.

The flurry of e-mails began on Thursday night, after Israel destroyed the runways at the Beirut airport, with Coleman hopeful that the musicians could still make it out somehow. After all, the project was co-sponsored by the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. That office had proved instrumental in obtaining visas and overcoming bureaucratic obstacles that likely would have proved insurmountable otherwise. On Thursday and Friday, there were plans brewing to helicopter the musicians into Syria, fly them from Damascus to London, then on to the States.

BREATHE OUT: "I'm watching the news very closely and just holding my breath," says Coleman. His Lebanese collaborators are still in harm's way.

In the end, it was the musicians themselves who decided to pull the plug. Not just fears for personal safety, but concerns for family and the uncertainty of being able to get back into the country led to the postponement — not a cancellation, Coleman insists. He is currently in touch with all concerned and is hopeful that a fall date can be worked out.

I sat down in June with Coleman and Dustin Hurt, whose one-man experimental music booking organization Bowerbird was putting together a who's-who of local improvisers to perform with the Lebanese quartet. At the time, Coleman was looking at the project optimistically, in the context of a bigger sociopolitical picture, positing Beirut as a potential model for the rest of the Middle East. "You have the very conservative Christian and Muslim communities there," he explained, "and then you have people who are trying to forge a more secular kind of everyday society, culturally and socially. Just the general notion that people from traditional societies could somehow come to accept very nontraditional forms of artistic practice has implications larger than the activities of a handful of people."

That idea has now come under very real threat. When I spoke to Coleman this week, idealism had turned to frustration. Lebanon, he reiterated, could be "the one place that might represent a kind of liberalization of the Arab cultural and political and religious perspective on things. Lebanon could be a case study for a more tolerant, liberal Arab society, and ironically, this is the country that's being hammered right now." He sees the struggle as "another situation where the extremists in the world seem to be grabbing power. I feel that way about our government here, I see that kind of thing in North Korea, I see that with the government in Israel and the government in Iran. I look around and see people with extremist points of view that don't really represent what the average person is thinking or desiring, and these are the people at the steering wheel right now."

The whole world is watching anxiously, but for Coleman this experience "puts another layer of meaning on the whole thing for me personally. I'm watching the news very closely and just holding my breath a little bit."

There will be a concert on Saturday, to "send the word back to our Lebanese friends that we're thinking about them and that we look forward to the time when they can be here with us." Coleman will be joined by several Philly musicians, as well as Swiss violist and electronic musician Charlotte Hug and Argentinean Leandro Barzabal, who performs on his own invented instruments. Both musicians were scheduled to be part of the original project.

Coleman reports that all four Lebanese musicians are safe for the time being. Kerbaj, who besides being a trumpeter is also a comic book artist, has been steadily updating his blog (mazenkerblog.blogspot.com) with a stirring series of sketches and text detailing the experience on the ground. Often terse, it is by turns frustrated, angry, frightened and darkly satirical, pointing up what Coleman refers to as his "wicked sense of humor." One entry simply mentions watching SpongeBob SquarePants with his son; another cackles at a George Bush quote; others debate whether or not he should escape the country. One particularly passionate entry urges readers, "Speak. Speak about the shit happening here. Speak with your family. With your friends. With people you don't know. In a bar, a restaurant, at work. With the people in the streets. Talk to everybody. Talk to buildings. From here, it seems for us that no one in the whole world cares for those fucking burned children corpses."

Gene Coleman and others, Sat., July 22, $10, Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., www.tabadolproject.org/philly.