Thanks for posting this reminder of Egypt's recent cultural legacy. (Egyptians used to arrive in Mecca for the haj playing music, until the Wahhabists succeeded in banning it.) She was awesome. It's just as well she didn't live to see the Mubarak era.
I first bought a recording of this piece in the mid-80's, hipped to her music by the singer in my then band, a Jewish woman who had grown up partly in Israel and had heard the music constantly on the radio there. (It's usually transliterated as "Inte Omre" (or Imre) or similar. "Inte" - the masculine singular form of "you" - the title meaning "You are my life", IIRC - is how I was taught to render it in Roman script in the brief period back then when I studied Arabic, at the suggestion of my singer, with a brilliant, fiery feminist, multilingual woman from Baghdad. Wafa'a, our teacher, did point out that the Egyptian dialect was quite distinct from others and from the classical Arabic she was teaching us, with some significant vowel shifts and some consonants, notably the hard "g", not found in other dialects. She noted that nonetheless it was fairly well understood throughout the Arab-speaking world, since Egypt was then the film and music capital of it.)
Back in the late 70's, the jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul was asked in an interview why his band Weather Report didn't have a vocalist, and if there was anyone he'd consider as an exception to the tacit all-instrumental rule he and Wayne Shorter had established with the group. He replied half-seriously, "Well, there was a singer in Egypt who died recently..."
Posted by: Kai Matthews | Jan 30, 2011 11:18:50 AM
Kai, that's fascinating! I wonder who has heard Ghada Shbeir -- I think she has the most beautiful voice I know of in the Arab World.
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Thanks for posting this reminder of Egypt's recent cultural legacy. (Egyptians used to arrive in Mecca for the haj playing music, until the Wahhabists succeeded in banning it.) She was awesome. It's just as well she didn't live to see the Mubarak era.
I first bought a recording of this piece in the mid-80's, hipped to her music by the singer in my then band, a Jewish woman who had grown up partly in Israel and had heard the music constantly on the radio there. (It's usually transliterated as "Inte Omre" (or Imre) or similar. "Inte" - the masculine singular form of "you" - the title meaning "You are my life", IIRC - is how I was taught to render it in Roman script in the brief period back then when I studied Arabic, at the suggestion of my singer, with a brilliant, fiery feminist, multilingual woman from Baghdad. Wafa'a, our teacher, did point out that the Egyptian dialect was quite distinct from others and from the classical Arabic she was teaching us, with some significant vowel shifts and some consonants, notably the hard "g", not found in other dialects. She noted that nonetheless it was fairly well understood throughout the Arab-speaking world, since Egypt was then the film and music capital of it.)
Back in the late 70's, the jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul was asked in an interview why his band Weather Report didn't have a vocalist, and if there was anyone he'd consider as an exception to the tacit all-instrumental rule he and Wayne Shorter had established with the group. He replied half-seriously, "Well, there was a singer in Egypt who died recently..."
Posted by: Kai Matthews | Jan 30, 2011 11:18:50 AM
Kai, that's fascinating! I wonder who has heard Ghada Shbeir -- I think she has the most beautiful voice I know of in the Arab World.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 30, 2011 12:59:57 PM
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