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

  Garam Chiba: A True Mahjari Musician Garam Chiba, 2 December 1954. Courtesy of El Mundo Arabe .  I have written previously about how stage names and pseudonyms can cause a biographer enormous headaches when attempting to locate subjects. Musicians of Arab descent who lived portions of their lives in the Levant, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, the United States and other countries remain particularly difficult to track down and locate. For several years now this was the case with our locating oudist and vocalist Garam Chiba. Ever persistent, I did not throw in the towel and with a deeper dive, I found a bit more than just the three articles - one in Arabic, one in Spanish, and one in Portuguese - I had uncovered previously. Garam Chiba was born Andre Joubran Chaibe to Maubaraque Khairallah and Joubran Chaibe on 22 October 1919 in the Sour municipality of Tyre, Greater Syria (today Lebanon). Tyre sits 50 miles south of Beirut and emerged as a Lebanese cultural hub where the first ...

  On Radio & Record: The Pioneering Piano Music of Elizabeth Awad Elizabeth Awad, 1925. In 1928 and 1929, Columbia Records 50000-X series of Arabic-language 78-rpm shellac discs recorded in the United States. Today, collectors rarely, if ever come across these exclusive discs. A few by Aziza Helmi, Prince Mouhadin , and Nahim Simon, have surfaced but others remain rare and/or unseen by living collectors and researchers. One musician we’ve discussed before, in our profile on Abraham Messadi , was oudist Toufic Moubaid. We mentioned the musician Moubaid collaborated with on radio and several early recordings, Elizabeth Awad, in passing. This post, however, hopes to shine a spotlight on pianist Elizabeth Awad.  Before they made their way to Columbia Studios at 233 Broadway in Manhattan’s Woolworth Building, Toufic Moubaid and Elizabeth Awad regularly appeared together on radio and one of the first radio programs to feature Arab immigrant and Arab American musicians on the a...

  Louis Kawam: Jamming with Arab American Musicians Old & Young Some of the best musicians ever, never front their own band. They are not among the orchestra or ensemble leaders, and if we’re fortunate enough, they have left behind a piece of their creative genius in a credited or uncredited recording. Perhaps their names escaped mention in the liner notes, or their surname shows up on a label suggesting they composed, wrote, or performed a piece, if for nothing else than pure posterity. Most of this is true for oudist Louis Kawam. Born 18 or 20 July 1913 in New York City, Elias Bashir Kawam entered the world one of three, and the only male child of his parents Bashir Abdallah Kawam and Assna Kawam. Immigrants from Aleppo and Damascus, Greater Syria in 1905, the couple crossed the ocean departing from Marseilles on board a shipped named the Roma and settled on the main west-east corridor of New York’s Little Syria two – Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. There at   178 Atlantic ...