Rahim Al Haj : a RootsWorld interview
“Music is like a clock, it moves around in a circle,” declares oud master Rahim Al Haj, sipping tea on the patio of an Albuquerque coffee shop. Al Haj is an innovative musician, and his own life has been formed by cycles of music, indeed. He has travelled in his person and in his music from his homeland into exile and then back home again as a true messenger of hope.

A Baghdad native and a serious student of the classical and folk music of his native Iraq, he was imprisoned twice by the regime of Saddam Hussein, in part for refusing to compose musical tributes to that regime’s military adventures during the 1980s. His life came under threat by the Saddam regime at the time of the First Gulf War. With great difficulty, Al Haj escaped in 1991, eventually making his way as a political refugee via Syria and Lebanon to New Mexico in 2000. Here, in relative poverty, he began the long process of learning English, adjusting to a very different culture, and re-establishing himself as a musical authority, performer and composer.

Click on the link above to read more. You can find some of Rahim’s music in our ListeningLounge.
Thanks Barrett

Dig this:

Rahim objects to the common use of the term “world music”, declaring, “There is nothing that is really Western or Eastern music–we made that all up. What is so-called “world music”? That completely depends on your perspective, where you are located yourself. What is exotic in one place is commonplace or traditional in another. There is only the world, and there is only music.”

Right on Habibi!