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

George Marge: The Lebanese American Woodwind Musician You Didn’t Know You Knew George Marge, Albany High School yearbook (1952) p. 30. Courtesy of Ancestry.com Few Arab American musicians featured on Midwest Mahjar have more recorded music credits to their name than George Marge.  No single blog-post could ever do George Marge's life or career justice. Here, however, is a snippet. That I know, George Marge never released any wholly solo projects or albums. He backed and accompanied several musicians featured on our blog including Eddie “The Sheik” Kochack and Lila Stephan , and recorded with a who’s who of popular, jazz, and R&B musicians in his relatively short fifty-two years. With over two hundred recording credits to his name, let’s relay some of what we learned about oboist, flutist, saxophone and clarinet player George Marge. George Marge was born to Charles and Victoria (Arwady) Marge on 19 June 1933 in Albany, New York. Charles immigrated to the United States from Beir...

  What’s in a Name? In Search of John Hidar, Derbecki Player A rare photo of John Hidar. Caravan newspaper. Newspapers.com Ever since we researched, composed, and posted the story of Jeanette Harouni, aka Hanan or Hanaan , in 2019, we have known the name John Hidar. According to the album credits on Hanan’s  The Arabian Nightingale  released in 1959, John Hidar [spelled Hyder] sat in as one of two featured drummers along with Ezra James as Hanan’s records transitioned from recording on 78 rpm to 33 1/3 LP. Other musicians in her ensemble included Philip Solomon , Jack Ghanaim , Ray Beilouny, Hakki Obadia, and the great oudist Wadih El-Safi. Hidar’s name rarely, if at all, comes up in discussions about Arab American music, yet his appearance of The Arabian Nightingale was not his only recorded performance. To be sure, in 1962, when Lila Stephan’s   Lila: A Thousand and One Nights  hit record stores, it too, included John “Hidar” on derbecki joined by Mohammed El...

  Sam Fackre: An Underrated Riqq Player and Percussionists   Rare1966 Photo of Sam Fackre. Courtesy of Skye Fackre Gibson. Sometimes the difficulty with locating biographical information about Arab immigrants and Arab American musicians depends on the various ways their names transliterate from Arabic to English. The Arab American English-language press, in the form of The Syrian World magazine or Caravan newspaper, used multiple spellings for a host of early and middle-period musicians. One article in the Caravan highlighted this fact noting Khouri, Khoury, Cory, Corey, Kori, Koury, Khourey, and other variants on the spelling constituted the same surname. These differences in transliteration and spelling extend beyond those we can attribute to vowel variance or double consonants – Hemway/Hamway, Bedway/Budway, Hanan/Hannan/Hanaan, and Khaddaj/Kadaj/Kaddaj. The Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System can’t always help one determine how a particular family decided to...