Thread: Oud player in Albuquerque NM

Is this guy so widely known there? I would seek him out... Anala you're in Albuquerque, aren't you? Or are you from Alamogordo (which is about 40 minutes from my home town El Paso!)?

Video - Breaking News Videos from CNN.com

This is an article about him. It is so sad. I have one of his CDs. The music is beautiful but not dance music. He may or may not be open to working with dancers.
Greetings,
Jalilah


STRIKING A SOUR NOTE IN IRAQ..OUD GOES UNDERGROUND <
MUSIC JUST FOR THE JOY OF LISTENING AND PLAYING IS THE LATEST CASUALTY
OF RELIGIOUS MILITANTS, AND THE HISTORIC OUD GOES UNDERGROUND

STRIKING A SOUR NOTE IN IRAQ
ERICA GOODE NEW YORK TIMES
BAGHDAD – Dhia Jabbar hides his oud in a sack when he walks the street in his Baghdad neighbourhood.

Rahim Alhaj, an oud player, in Albuquerque, N.M. is up for a Grammy.

He used to teach students in the back room of a photo shop, where the
sound could not be heard. But last week, militia gunmen invaded the
store, destroying his instrument and ordering him to stop teaching. He
had dreamed of a performing career, but now he has lost hope. “Iraq is dead,” he says. Seven thousand miles away, Rahim Alhaj, who fled Iraq in 1991, carries his oud
without a second thought through the streets of Albuquerque, N.M.,
where he now lives. In New York, Washington and other cities, he plays
for audiences of hundreds. An album he recorded was recently nominated
for a Grammy Award.

The two musicians are bound by their passion for the oud, a pearshaped instrument whose roots run deep in Iraq’s history. Some say that in its music lies the country’s soul.


Both men trained at the same prestigious conservatory in Baghdad. Both have a deep love for traditional Iraqi melodies.


But Jabbar, 29, and Alhaj, 40, are also tied together by having watched
– one from close up, one from far away – their country’s descent into
sectarian violence.

Alhaj worries constantly about his mother and brother, who still live
in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighbourhood, in a house without electricity or
running water. When there is fighting between Mahdi Army militia
members and American and Iraqi forces there, as has been the case
virtually every day in recent weeks, he calls his family frantically.


“It’s hard because I’m so far away from them and so far from their struggle, and I feel helpless,” he said.

The violence he reads about in the newspaper stirs troubled dreams:
images of being tortured, as he was in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein’s
government, or of seeing people being executed.

In 2004, he returned to Baghdad to give a concert at his family’s
house. The friends he grew up with, he said, wore beards and felt
uncomfortable listening to him play. Secular music was considered
“haram,” forbidden. An oud maker he knew was forced to build his instruments secretly in a tiny workshop on his roof.

Wow...who knew? I had no idea that we had such a wonderful musician close by here. I am in Alamogordo..about 1.5 hours from El Paso and 3.5 from Albuquerque.