Fathers of Modern Iraqi Music: The al Kuwaiti Brothers
From the World Jewish Congress
Many musicians and listeners consider the brothers Saleh and Daoud al Kuwaiti the founders of modern Iraqi music. Their songs are still played on radio stations across the Gulf and Iraq, yet for decades their names were left off them, because the brothers were Jewish.
Beginnings
Two young musicians in Kuwait
Saleh (1908 to 1986) and Daoud (1910 to 1976) were born in Kuwait City to a family of Iraqi Jewish origin. According to family accounts, an uncle gave the boys a violin and an oud when they were about ten and eight. Saleh was soon recognized as a prodigy, and the brothers' early arrangement of the Kuwaiti song “Wallah Ajbani Jamalak” is still popular on Gulf radio today.
Baghdad
Stars of the golden age
In the early 1930s the brothers moved to Iraq, drawn by its lively music scene and its large Jewish community. Saleh blended traditional Iraqi melodies with influences from Egypt and with European instruments such as the cello. The brothers performed for King Faisal I and his son Ghazi and worked with the greatest singers of the Arab world. Umm Kulthum commissioned a song from Saleh during a visit to Baghdad in 1933, and the Egyptian composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab became a longtime friend.
Erased
Leaving Iraq
After 1948, rising hostility toward Iraq's Jews ended the brothers' careers there, and they left for Israel with most of the community between 1949 and 1952. In Iraq their recordings stayed on the air but were labeled folk music, with no credit to the composers. In 1972, Saddam Hussein ordered their names removed from official publications and from the curriculum of Baghdad's music academy. In Israel, they kept a devoted audience among Iraqi Jews and had a weekly radio program, but they never regained the fame they had known in Baghdad.
Rediscovered
A grandson brings the music back
In 2011, Saleh's grandson Dudu Tassa, an Israeli rock musician, began performing the brothers' songs with his band, Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis. The project inspired the documentary Iraq'n'Roll, and the band now brings the brothers' music to festival audiences around the world.
Read the full article at the World Jewish Congress →
This summary was written by JIMENA and is based on “Fathers of Modern Iraqi Music” from the World Jewish Congress series on the legacy of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa. The original article belongs to the World Jewish Congress.
