The Nubian oud master
Hamza El Din
Hamza El Din was born in 1929 in Toshka, a village near Wadi Halfa in the Nubian homeland that straddles the modern border between Egypt and Sudan. He trained as an electrical engineer before studying music in Cairo and at Rome's Santa Cecilia academy. The Aswan High Dam's reservoir drowned his village, and that loss became a central theme of his oud playing and singing. The West heard him through the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, albums for Vanguard, and 1971's Escalay: The Water Wheel on Nonesuch. Later he played with the Grateful Dead at the Pyramids in 1978 and with the Kronos Quartet, taught ethnomusicology in the US, and died in Berkeley in 2006.
Bombay Café