Soumeya Abdelaziz | Chante Nazem Al Ghazali

 
Listen to "Tihi ala Araji al Wouroud" 

Get it all here. 

Half of me believes I found this CD at Princess Music on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; the other half is convinced I plucked it from a CD stall in the Jamaa el Fna in Marrakech. Where I found it changes not one iota the hair-raisingly gorgeous voice of this Moroccan singer, born in 1957 in Salé, the oldest extant city on the Atlantic. This album was recorded in 2005, when the singer was, what--48? 

Feeling lucky, punk? Ask yourself: How badly do you want your ass kicked? Do you want, like Ernest Hemingway, to spend the next few nights writing your brilliant but pared-down short-stories standing up? Then, you go right ahead and download this CD, champ. Because you aren't going to be comfortably sitting down any time soon after you listen to it.

Nazem Al Ghazali, whose songs Abdelaziz updates here for the 21st century, was a Baghdad-born Iraqi singer who lived from 1921 to 1963 and who is considered to have been one of the most popular singers to have ever come out of Iraq.