Salon Jewish Studies Blog

"Tuning Baghdad brings together a growing archive of rare video footage, audio clips and historical information on Iraqi Jewish musicians and the music scene that was displaced from Baghdad in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The last generation of Iraqi Jewish musicians who performed in Baghdad, now in their 70s and 80s, represent an era when an unusually large number of the Iraqi-Jews were composing and performing Arabic music. For decades, these musicians were the national teachers and beloved performers of Iraq’s traditional maqams and modern compositions on Iraq’s National Broadcast Station.
Many of these Iraqi musicians and enthusiasts now live in Israel, England or North America where they trade home-made cassettes and organize musical parties at which this international community comes together. The musicians continue to play and produce an Arabic repertoire of Iraqi folk songs, popular Egyptian and Lebanese songs as well as Iraqi-Jewish ceremonial songs at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs. The video chapters on this website feature intimate performances, conversations in Iraqi-Jewish dialect, and rehearsals with key musicians, fans, historians and ethnomusicologists. They also feature home-movies of ‘Charlghis’ from the 1970s until today. The podcasts and links accompanying each video act as tangents, providing an expanded layer to the performers, the songs, and their lyrics. To accommodate this complex scene, the audio/visual component will be regularly updated with donations of rare cassettes and footage."

Up to now, following podcasts including additional audio material are available in the categories (no direct links available) listed below:

1) Audiotopia ("various Arabic music jam sessions by Iraqi-Jewish musicians now living in Israel") - fifteen audio-tracks of Imam and Naim;

2) On the maqam ("records some attempts to explain the eastern scale of music called the ‘maqam’, to Western listeners") four audio-tracks of Yair Dalal, Elias Shasha and Abraham Salman;

3) Musicans in Iraq ("a chapter narrated by Yeheskel Kojaman one of the few ethnomusicologists who has first-hand experience and knowledge of the popular music scene in Iraq before the emigration of the Jewish population") two audio-tracks of Rashid Al-Qundarchi and Yakub Al-Imari

4) Life of the party ("a compilation of excerpts from home movies taken at ‘charlghis’ or house-parties in the [Jewish] diaspora from the 1970s until the 2000s")four audio-tracks (incl. mixed tapes) of Sol Basha and Abdel Halim Hafez

5) Other features a radio interview with Regine Basha and Julieta Aranda about Radio Baghdad as well as two recordings "Babylonian Selihot" produced by Yakhin Hakal

(tuningBaghdad.net via http://twitter.com/teruah)