في ذكري رحيلك الاول دندنة بالعود الذي عشقته ياحمزة علاءالدين

Quote: Egyptian musician who fused Nubian and Middle Eastern influences Jon Lusk Tuesday May 30, 2006 The Guardian In the early 1960s the Egyptian musician and composer Hamza El Din, who has died aged 76 following complications after surgery, moved to Italy. There he studied western music and classical guitar at Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and later in Milan. While in Italy, he met the American student Geno Foreman, who passed on a tape of Hamza's music to his friend Joan Baez. In 1962 this precipitated Hamza's move to New York City and, in 1964, the recording of his Music Of Nubia album for the Vanguard label as well as his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. So began an illustrious musical career. Hamza possessed a distinctively light touch on the oud (the 12-stringed instrument at the heart of Arab classical music), a gentle singing style and a spiritual philosophy that sprang from his Sufi roots. There were to be 14 solo albums, the most iconic of which was Escalay: The Water Wheel (1971). The title track was later reinterpreted by the Kronos Quartet on Pieces of Africa (1992), and Hamza performed with them several times. He also collaborated with the Grateful Dead, facilitating their 1978 Egyptian tour through his association with their percussionist Mickey Hart, who had just produced Hamza's Eclipse album. That September they appeared on the same bill at the Great Pyramid of Giza during a total lunar eclipse. In addition, Hamza's music featured on several movie soundtracks and was used by many ballet companies and in a theatre production. Neither his family nor the Nubian culture into which he was born encouraged music as a vocation, but Hamza was drawn to it after the flooding of his home town of Toshka, by an expansion of the Aswan dam system, forced his family to relocate to Cairo in 1934. There, he first heard the greats of Egyptian classical song such as Umm Kulthumm and Mohamed Abdalwahab, whose mighty wails haunted every street, thanks to the new medium of radio. He studied electrical engineering at King Fouad University but later took up the oud at the Popular University and Ibrahim Shafiq's Institute of Music. His developing political consciousness found expression in his music, which he used to draw attention to the plight of the displaced Nubian people. He was always adamant about his Nubian identity and would later be claimed by Nubians on both sides of the Sudan-Egypt border. After graduation, he worked for the state railways, but his passion for music prevailed. He pioneered a genre that combined the propulsive rhythmic and vocal elements of Nubian (African) culture with the more formal aesthetic of Middle Eastern classicism. Then, after briefly living in Sudan, came the move to Italy and on to New York. Parallel to his recording and international touring career, Hamza also taught ethnomusicology at the universities of Ohio (Athens), Washington (Seattle) and Texas (Austin). In 1981 he went to live in Tokyo, beginning a love affair with Japanese people and their culture, and teaching as a professor of Nubian music at Tokyo University. Initially prompted by a comparative study between the oud and its local relative, the biwa, this move eventually resulted in several recordings, participation in TV commercials and the publication of his autobiography, Journey: As the Nile Flows, in Japanese. It was also there that he met his wife, who adopted the Nubian name of Nabra. He returned intermittently to the US, eventually settling in the San Francisco Bay area. His album, Muwashshah (1995) included Gala 2000, a "letter of apology to the earth" for "our planet's degradation". On his final album, A Wish (1999), he revisited the theme of Nubia and its vanishing culture. He illustrated the CD booklet with his own paintings, which re-imagined the lands of his childhood, and lamented their loss in the liner notes. Hamza was a humble, open-minded man with a warm smile and a generous spirit. The journalist Ken Hunt corresponded with him for many years without ever meeting him, but in 1996, when Hamza heard he was unable to write after the death of his wife, he spontaneously sent him a few hundred dollars. As Hunt recalls, "He was a complete gentleman of a kind we won't see again." • Hamza Alla Eddin, musician and composer, born July 10 1929; died May 23 2006,