hawgblawg

Um Kalthum, early in her career.  Publicity photo from Odeon.  Courtesy Akassah , Center for Photography, NYU Abu Dhabi.

My apologies to whomever I grabbed this from off the web. It was over a year and a half ago and I can't remember where I got it fro...

Another one from 2001. dZihan & Kamien Refreaked (Six Degrees) by Ted Swedenburg PopMatters Music Critic e-mail this ...

(The reviews I did for PopMatters have disappeared from their website, so I'm using Wayback Machine to recover them. I think this is the...

I wrote a number of reviews for PopMatters back in the day, and most of them have now disappeared from the PopMatters website. So I've ...

Our Middle East Center organized a great conference , plus a keynote and a concert, last month at the University of Arkansas. It fea...

 I gave a paper at the conference last December, and posted last month a bit from my paper, about Khidr and his song, "Ismi Hunak....

Khidr al-'Attar When I lived in Cairo (1992-96), and once work on my book on Palestine was wrapping up, I started doing research o...

On March 3, NPR's Eyder Peralta reported on the song that is the anthem of the protesters in the current struggle in Sudan, aimed at ta...

Chris Silver is blogging for Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Here he takes up recordings from the t...

Latest blast from Toukadime, a tribute to Mohamed Mazouni.

The divine Shadia, who passed away in November 2017, performs a song composed by Munir Mourad (Leila's brother), "Ya Habibi Oud Li ...

A friend recently posted a link to my blog, which prompted me to think that I should put up some new content. Resolution to self: more blog ...

Ramy Essam was at the University of Arkansas campus on January 22, courtesy The House of Songs Ozarks (based in Bentonville). He did a jam a...

Terrific ten track mix of Sudanese music from back in the day, with Abdelkarim Al-Kabli, Al Bilabil, Sayed Khalifa and Khogali Osman, who ...

I've been reading Margaret Farrell's excellent dissertation ("Aspects of Adaptation in the Egyptian Singing Film", CUNY 2...

Early August 1966. I was 16, on "home leave" from Beirut with my family, staying with friends in Los Gatos, where we had lived ...

Just published. Read it here . And my advice to you: buy the album!

Back in late May, I reviewed Spain-based Sahrawi singer Aziza Brahim's fourth album, Abbar el Hamada , for RootsWorld . Read it here . A...

"get to know what fadoul sounded like when he was playing around with rapping, disco from egypt, coladera from algeria, an arabic take...