What's So Funny About Ahmed Adaweya?

  Their applause and exhortations are so aggressive you wonder if it's not meant for Ahmed but for his haters. This feels more like a sporting event than an hour of music. Before the first track officially kicks in, there's a rousing all-woman chorus sing-cheerleading the album's title: "Bis! Shouf! Adaweya Amil 'Iyh! Bis! Shouf! Adaweya Amil 'Iyh!" The word "album" in regard to recordings dates back to the 78 RPM shellac era, when it meant literally a number of single 78s collected together in a physical album, similar to a photo album. For people of my generation in America, it meant long-playing, 12" 33-1/3 RPM vinyl records, generally, though it could also mean an implied cohesiveness or unifying concept, the live album, for instance, or the experience, for want of a better word, of Pink Floyd's  Wish You Were Here . In 1970s Egypt, most 12" LPs were simply collections of songs, many earlier released on singles; however, increas...

  "This is history. I am a whole history. I am king of saltana" In 1975, the last year Ahmed remains a bachelor, he releases three albums: An Evening with the Best Songs of Ahmed Adaweya  (LP) and But Check Out What Adaweya Is Doing  (cassette) on Sout El Hob and An Evening with Ahmed Adaweya  (LP) on Moriphon. I don't have a copy of the Moriphon. On its Ahmed Adaweya page , belly dance website Gilded Serpent spends some time unpacking the term "saltana." It's a word Ahmed uses to describe himself and his facility with the mawwal.  "What exactly is Saltana?" Gilded Serpent contributor Amina Goodyear queries. "Nothing is exact in Egypt. The word evokes derogatory connotations of a drugged state. This is how people perceived Adaweya, whether he was awake or asleep. To get Saltana takes time—in performance, sometimes hours. If Tarab is ecstatic joy, then Saltana is the ecstasy of creation. Time passes, and you don’t feel it." Goodyear note...

  Adaweya's phenomenal success, despite rejection by much of the music establishment, owed almost everything to the cheapness and ubiquity of the cassette. Ahmed didn't need to be on the radio. The first cassette published in Egypt, if Discogs is our evidence, is Sono Cairo's 1971 edition of Oum Kalthoum's Ho Sahih El Hawa Ghalab, with music by Zakaria Ahmed and lyrics by Tunisian Egyptian poet Bayram al-Tunsi, both of whom had passed away in 1961. According to Virginia Danielson , Zakaria Ahmed had played a critical role in helping Kalthoum establish herself in early 1920s Cairo. Discogs lists two cassettes published the next year, 1972: A collection of songs on the Randophone label by newcomer Ahmed al-Soumbati (Riad al-Soumbati's son) and the debut collection by Afaf Rady on Soutelphan, who had launched her recording career in 1970 with the release of three singles. Discogs catalogs seven cassettes in 1973, including Warda's magnificent Khalik Hena and the Be...

  “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...

  Still from the 1974 film "Al-Fatina Wal-Sa'look" "A Little Bit Up, A Little Bit Down" was, according to the singer himself and those who appreciated him, "a sincere comment on class disparities resulting from Egypt's economic opening." However, some of Ahmed's critics deemed the song "nonsense" and the singer himself, in the words of one journalist, "a foul outcome of the infitah, not one of the phenomenon's most astute observers." Ahmed releases another three 45 RPM 7" singles in 1974; he also cameoes in two films and likely releases two cassettes through Sout El Hob. Mohamad al-Masri, who wrote 1973's "Aha Ahu," pens his first huge hit for Ahmed, "Haba Fouk We Haba Taht," the first of the three 1974 discs listed by Discogs,  As Andrew Simon explains, "A Little Bit Up, A Little Bit Down" was, according to the singer himself and those who appreciated him, "a sincere comment ...

Cover image not mine; I pulled this from Discogs Ahmed Adaweya scores another monster hit in 1973 with "Salamitha Oum Hassan," or "Get Well, Mother of Hassan," about a woman who undergoes an unsuccessful zar. A zar ceremony is a form of de-spiriting someone possessed by jinn, or as Nicholas Mangialardi explains in this Smithsonian Folklife article : When jinn inhabit people, they’re believed to remain with the hosts forever, inducing erratic behavior every few months or years. A zar exorcism is then held to treat the individual, and only by playing specific drum patterns or khuyut (literally “threads”) can the jinn be called forth and appeased. In the song, Ahmed exhorts: "Get it together, Mother of Hassan, wake up ... the zar isn't working out." ( Read two English translations of the lyrics here .) The song is composed by accordion player and composer Farouk Salama with lyrics by Hassan Abu Itma, leading one to wonder just how self-referential these l...