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Iraq

Two songs, almost nothing else

Sayed Abbood

Almost nothing is known about Sayed Abbood beyond two recordings. They were made when the British Gramophone Company (later folded into EMI) sent engineers to Baghdad between 1925 and 1929 to capture the city's popular singers for its new Middle Eastern catalog. According to ethnomusicologist Yeheskel Kojaman, Baghdad's professional instrumentalists in that era were overwhelmingly Jewish, part of a multi-confessional musical culture that labels were only starting to document commercially. The original masters sat in EMI's archive outside London for decades, among nearly a thousand Baghdad recordings from the period. Then the label Honest Jon's put a fraction of them onto 2008's Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted. For singers like Abbood, who is otherwise missing from the historical record, that compilation is the only audience left.

An Iraqi rhythm, and its compilations

Choubi Choubi

Choubi is a fast, driving Iraqi dance rhythm built around a small hand drum. Traditionally it is the pulse of wedding and celebration music, layered with fiddle, oud, and vocal improvisation in the ornamented mawal style. It's also the name Seattle label Sublime Frequencies gave a compilation series that did more than almost anything else to put Iraqi pop and folk music in front of Western listeners. Mark Gergis assembled 2005's Choubi Choubi! Folk and Pop Songs from Iraq from cassettes and LPs tracked down in Syria, Europe, and Detroit's Iraqi diaspora, mostly from the 1970s. A second volume in 2013 reached into recordings made under Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s and '90s. Coming out in the years after the 2003 invasion, the series worked as preservation as much as listening. It documented a musical culture whose home context was being actively disrupted even as the records circulated abroad.

The Collection