Midwest Mahjar: The Recorded Sounds of the Arabic-Speaking Diaspora in the United States at 78 RPM

  How Boston's Little Syria and it's Music Scene Gave Birth to  Tony Tawa & his Near East Caravan  Tony Tawa, circa 1964. Boston Globe 7 July 1964. Newspapers.com Research interest in Boston’s Little Syria and Arab Boston metro area has skyrocketed in the last four years. Some of this interest springs from academic and public history seeking to document the long history of Arab immigrant and Arab American community building, cultural expression, employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, night clubs, and labor histories. At Midwest Mahjar we have profiled or featured several Arabic-speaking musicians from Boston and a few half-dozen more who resided in Massachusetts at various points in their careers. There was, of course, Russell Bunai , Tony Abdelahad , Lila Stephan , and Ronnie Kirby , who were in the state for most of their lives. Others like Rev. Theodore Ziton and Rev. Ilyas Kurban spent a portion of their priestly careers with brief stints in and around Bo...

  Ronnie Kirby: Boston Metro’s Go to Derbake Player Ronnie Kirby. From the back cover of  Anton Abdelahad's  Middle East Fantasy  LP. Courtesy of Richard Breaux collection.   At Midwest Mahjar we have been blogging about Arab American music for almost five years and we have featured very few percussionists, especially, derbake, doumbek, or drum players. The most well-known drummers to come to mind were Mike Hamway and Eddie Kochak . Anne K. Rassmussen’s work reveals that mahrajan and hafla organizers paid drummers or derbake players least of all. Yet the rhythmic, pulsating, thump of the derbake became a mainstay in the post-acoustic, electrical recording era Arab American music. During the early years of the mahrajan and hafla circuit, members of a traveling singer’s ensemble might come from a local community; however, over the years singers like Hanan and Tony Abdelahad demanded their own ensembles and accompanists travel along with them on the mahrajan cir...

  Rev. Ilyas T. Kurban: The Recording Legacy of a Tirelessly Working Musical Metropolitan Ilyas T. Kurban from the Caravan, March 21, 1957. Courtesy of Newspapers.com On a mild fifty-degree day in Brooklyn, New York, in December 1956, the Archdeacon Ilyas T. Kurban (Elias T. Korban) made his way to the nearest United States Post Office and mailed a handwritten addressed box to Mr. Lee Beshar Cohlmia at 1932 University Avenue in Wichita, Kansas. The parcel, marked FRAGILE BROADCAST RECORDS, contained four shellac 78 rpm phonograph discs recorded and produced by Sidney Feldman’s Mastertone Recording Studios label in their production facilities at 709 Eighth Avenue, Suite 36, in New York City. The discs contained liturgical and religious singing by Ilyas Kurban. Mastertone likely produced vanity recordings for interested parties who paid for studio time. Vanity pressing arrangements did not bind performers to long-term contracts with record companies. Those with enough money paid fo...