Hamza El Din - Biography
By J Poet
Hamza El Din was a world music giant, an international emissary of Nubian music and culture and an artistic pioneer in the recording of world music. While many may know him from his collaborations with The Grateful Dead, Mickey Hart and The Kronos Quartet, El Din had a long history of performing and recording. Music of Nubia (1964 Vanguard) was the first authentic recording of Afro-Arabic music to be distributed to the Western market and a timeless classic. He was widely acknowledged as the planet's premiere oud player and almost single-handedly creating modern Nubian classical and traditional music, as well as preserving his people's ancient musical traditions. A long time Oakland resident, El Din taught several generations of musicians how to play oud, both in the United States and during extended residencies in Japan. He recorded infrequently, but everything he put on wax is mesmerizing. He died in 2006 from a gallbladder infection.
Hamza El Din was born in 1929 and grew up in the small village of Toshka, Nubia without any intention of becoming a musician, although he was surrounded my music as a child. In Nubia (which had been absorbed by Egypt years before his birth, although it retained its own culture) music was a group effort, everyone clapped hands, sang, and played drums as well as oud and other stringed instruments. Growing up there was no radio, but everybody knew the songs, the rhythms, and the lyrics and participated in the music. El Din never heard a radio until he got to Cairo as an engineering student in the late 1950s.
The British drew the border that erased Nubia from modern maps in 1898, after a long struggle between the indigenous people, the Ottoman Turks, the British and the Sudanese. El Din grew up in a comfortable family that would be called middle class by American standards. He was raised in the countryside, but started going to the city for schooling when he was a boy. Nubia, the kingdom once called "The Gateway to Africa" by the ancient Egyptians, today lies underwater in Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan, flooded by the Aswan Dam.
When El Din got to Cairo, to study engineering, he realized his country was going to vanish when the Dam was built. He felt the need to warn his people, and since they had an oral culture, he picked up the oud. At first Hamza tried composing in an Arabic style, writing songs about the Dam and the effect it would have on his country, but he found Middle Eastern music didn't fit the taste of his people, so he began to collect traditional music.
In the beginning, Hamza couldn't read or write music, either in Arabic or European modes, so he made up his own system of notation. For the next three years he wandered his homeland collecting traditional music. He owned an oud, a saddle, a pair of saddlebags and donkey. Half of the saddlebag had papers and pens, the other half donkey food. Despite the difficulty, Hamza found the work a joy, and discovered a great variety of music. Amazed at the diversity of music within his own country, El Din returned to Cairo to study classical Arabic music and hone his oud technique.
Despite his growing interest in music and Nubian folklore, El Din was still considering an engineering career, when he had an inspirational experience. On a visit home, sitting alone on a sand dune with his oud, and a soft desert wind hit the strings. In the distance, he heard a singer, and the wind hitting the strings of the oud made a chord that was in harmony with the far away voice, like the echo of a forgotten music. He decided in that moment to see how far he could follow this “invisible music." He returned to Cairo and studied Classical Arabic Music. After graduation, already famous for my playing, he was offered a scholarship at the Academy of St. Cecelia in Rome by the Italian Consulate in Cairo. It was in Rome that El Din began his life's work, a synthesis of Arabic, Nubian and Western music.
Near the end of his schooling in Rome, El Din met Gino Foreman, who had connections in New York City's folk world. He introduced El Din to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, who took a recording El Din had made to Vanguard Records. El Din made two albums for the label Music of Nubia (1964 Vanguard), the album credited with creating modern Nubian music, and Al Oud (1965 Vanguard). He next recorded Escaley: The Water Wheel (1971 Nonesuch) the album many consider his masterpiece, for the then new Nonesuch label, Elektra’s world music subsidiary. In 1992 The Kronos Quartet recorded “Escaley” on their album Pieces of Africa (Nonesuch) with El Din sitting in.
After the Aswan Dam flooded most of Nubia, El Din became a wandering minstrel, and because of his albums became a teacher, college professor, and lecturer on Arabic and Nubian music, as well as performer. In the late 70s he started playing shows with the Grateful Dead, most notably at Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza. In the early 80s, El Din went to Japan to investigate the connections between the oud and the Japanese Biwa and Chinese pipa. He found Japanese culture so interesting he stayed there 15 years. In Japan El Din made many recordings for Japanese labels, some of them later reissued in the US, including Eclipse (1989 Rykodisc), Songs of the Nile (1982 JVC), A Journey (1990 King Japan), Nubiana Suite – Live in Tokyo (1990 King Japan) which includes El Din playing with taiko drummers, and Muwashshah (1995 JVC). Muwashshah is a short song form which teaches the student how to sing maquims, the scales Arabic music is based on.
In the mid 90s, El Din moved to Oakland California, taught at Mills College and continued recording and performing. His last three albums are Lilly of the Nile (1995 Water Lilly Acoustic), is all live in the studio, a spare tour de force, Lotus (1996 Available Sound/Darius) is the soundtrack El Din composed for Peter Sellars multi-media show The Persians, and A Wish (1999 Sounds True) an ode to his lost homeland that features some interesting fusions with western music.
