What's So Funny About Ahmed Adaweya?

  “The Sah Al-Dah singer proposes to the girl of his dreams” from the February 7, 1974, issue of Al-Mawa’id Composed by accordion player and dance-music composer Mohamed Asfour with lyrics by our old friend Hassan Abu Itman, the A side is a solid entry into the singer's early canon, but it's the mawwal on the B side that hits you in the guts. Ahmed is at his most anguished, most adamant, most pyrotechnic -- and the ensemble is absolutely on fire. A clipping posted by  Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji to his website suggests that, in early 1974, Ahmed Adaweya was engaged to marry the daughter of a kebab seller, 17-year-old Hanim Morsi. Naji notes that, other than this clipping, we never hear about her (or her father, for that matter) ever again. Ahmed himself never seems to mention her; however, he later recalls that, during his years of apprenticeship and struggle on Mohamed Ali Street, he had fallen in love with girl who lived with her parents and, in an effort to woo her int...

Kolo Ala Kolo cover from the Discogs site (my copy of the single is coverless)   In the way that punk made music accessible (how many accounts of singers and musicians seeing their first punk show, saying to themselves and their friends, "We could do  that, " and subsequently starting their own band have we read?), there is an accessibility to this music, an almost "colloquial" (let's call it) vibe overall. Farouk Salama and Hassan Abu Itman, who collaborated on " Salamitha Oum Hassan " (music and words, respectively) team up again to provide Ahmed with another track that will hit the charts and survive the ages, "Kolo Ala Kolo," or "Everything on Everything" ( Andrew Simon 's translation), another likely colloquialism that Google translate wants me to change to "All in All." Watch Ahmed perform both Salama/Itman tracks in this wild 1980 performance Andrew Simon: "Adawiya again engages someone who is better off th...