John Nazarian: From the Hafla Stage to the Halls of Academia
John Nazarian: From the Hafla Stage to the Halls of Academia John Nazarian, 1968. Courtesy of the Rhode Island College Review , vol. 17, Fall 1968. p. 12. Only a few musicians we’ve featured on Midwest Mahjar were still alive at the time we embarked on writing their profile. Several of these have died in the last two years, Lila Mazloom , Fadwa Abeid , Laurice Peters , have all passed on during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, others, to our knowledge, such as Emil Kassis and Lila Stephan , remain with us. Among the living middle-period musicians from the latter 78 rpm era, was oudist John Nazarian. Zakie Nazarian and Amenia (Nahas) Nazarian had John Nazarian 6 September 1932 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. John was one of his father’s eleven children. Zakie Nazarian, a half Arab and half Armenian emigrant from Aleppo, immigrated to the United States from Ottoman-controlled Greater Syria in 1912. He married Selma Nahabit on 3 May 1916 in Manhattan, New York. Zakie and Selma move...