Jazz & Blues

Jazz, blues and their Arab crossings, including oud-led playing and improvisation built on maqam.

Jazz arrived in the region through several doors at once. Lebanese musicians folded it into Arabic song from the 1970s onward, most famously in Ziad Rahbani’s arrangements, which treated jazz harmony and Arabic melody as one vocabulary rather than a fusion of two. Khartoum’s 1960s and 1970s dance bands built something different again, brass-led and guitar-driven, that Sudanese musicians still call jazz.

Maqam and jazz improvisation turn out to fit each other well, which is why so much of the contemporary playing here is oud, qanun or ney against a rhythm section, and why the region’s jazz festivals in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and Tunis book so many artists who would be filed under classical Arabic music anywhere else.

Blues sits under this term too, including its Saharan cousin, though the Tuareg guitar tradition has its own archive under Desert Blues.