gr

Salo

'Ilham gave us a chance to taste the sweetness of life again,' writes a young Iraqi fan on the aramusic.com website. The comment neatly encapsulates Ilham Al Madfai's extraordinary significance. From the moment he picked up a guitar and formed The Twisters, the Middle East's first rock'n'roll combo, back in 1960s Baghdad, this maverick Arabic musician has been giving his peers reasons to dance, to dream, to keep struggling and to 'taste the sweetness'.

Ilham's own struggle has been fierce and intense. First he had to do battle with the expectations of his wealthy family, who decried his choice of a 'socially inappropriate' career. Then he had to fight against the combined might of the Iraqi media and the guardians of Arabic music's classical purity, who were shocked by his use of electric guitars, drums, bass, piano and other alien intrusions. Leaving his Baghdad home, under the pretext of pursuing architectural studies, Ilham had to struggle with loneliness and exile in the headwhirl of swinging London, where he hung out at the Baghdad Café with the likes of Paul McCartney, Donovan and Georgie Fame. All the while he was bringing the recondite wonders of Arabic music to the attention of a whole new generation of fans.

The struggling eased when Ilham returned home to Baghdad in 1967 and formed a new band, 13 1/2. He began to blend other flavours, such as flamenco, with the time-honoured motifs of Iraqi folklore and Arabic taarab and for a short time during the glory years of the 1970s, when life in Iraq was relatively stable and plentiful, Ilham became the most popular musician in the country. But it couldn't last. In 1979 he left again and wandered for more than a decade before returning to form another group, Firqat Ilham, which continued to work on his signature blend of eastern and western influences. More recently, an eponymous album was released on Virgin / EMI and went platinum on its way to becoming one of the most popular Arabic music releases in recent decades. Ilham's songs seem to provoke realisation and bring solace in equal measure. Whilst he has been building bridges between previously alien musical cultures, his music has itself acted as a bridge over troubled waters for millions of fans in Iraq and the wider Arabic diaspora.

Link:

Sitemap