Hamza El Din

▪ 2007

      Nubian musician, composer, and musicologist (b. July 10, 1929, Toshka, Egypt—d. May 22, 2006, Berkeley, Calif.), gained fame playing Nubian folk-based compositions on the ʾud, or oud (a short-necked lute), and was recognized as one of the first practitioners of World Music (before the advent of that term). Although he was an electrical engineer by training, he went on to study Arabic and Middle Eastern music at the Shafiq Institute of Music and the King Fouad Institute, as well as Western music in Italy and the Japanese lutelike biwa in Tokyo. He also traveled by donkey through Egypt and The Sudan collecting traditional Nubian songs. In the mid-1960s he immigrated to the U.S., where he taught at several universities. He was long associated with the Grateful Dead, with whom he played in 1978 at the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and the Kronos Quartet. El Din was especially remembered for his albums Escalay: The Water Wheel (1971) and Eclipse (1990).

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