Ragab and the Cairo Jazz Band, Salah - Present Egyptian Jazz: Ramadan in Space Time
SKU
05-ARTYARD006
Very excellent and musically interesting and unusual recordings by the most famous jazz group in Egypt of the late 1960s into the 1990s. Most westerners had only heard of him in connection with the album he did with Sun Ra, but as this shows, there was much, much more going on in Egypt musically than we might have suspected. "Salah Ragab formed the first jazz big band in Egypt (The Cairo Jazz Band) in 1968, he was also the leader of the Military Music Departments in Heliopolis. Some of the best musicians in Egypt of that time were members of the band such as Zaki Osman (trumpet), Saied Salama (tenor sax), Khamis El -Kholy (piano), Ala Mostafa (piano). On this recording, The Band consists of five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones, piano, bass, drums and percussion. The opening concert of The Cairo Jazz Band was in Ewart Memorial Hall at The American University on 2/23/1969. Salah Ragab accompanied the great band leader and composer Sun Ra on a tour in Egypt, Greece, France and Spain in 1984. He also studied jazz theories and improvisation with the jazz musician and composer from Kansas City, Osman Kareem, with whom he formed the first Jazz Quintet in Cairo in 1963, recording with the Radio Service of Cairo. He gave a series of educational lectures about jazz history at the German Culture 'Goethe Institute,' and wrote the only jazz book in Arabic, Jazz Music: The Roots and Future. These recordings present Salah Ragab and The Cairo Jazz Band's definitive work, recorded in Heliopolis, Egypt between 1968 and 1973. Western jazz musicians have been fascinated with the world of Islam for many years, for religious, spiritual, musical and sociological reasons. It was therefore inevitable that musicians of the Arabian North African area would play a part in the interaction of these two musical cultures. The compositions correspond to the crossover of musical styles at the time of the recording, 5000 miles away across the Mediterranean and Atlantic in New York with releases on Moodsville by Yusef Lateef and RCA by Ahmud Abdul-Malik. This record represents The Cairo Jazz Band responding to the American jazz scene of the '60s and '70s with influences from Mongo Santamaria to Randy Weston and Sun Ra. These tracks were first presented by The Ministry Of Culture in Cairo as a Prism Music Production and released with an additional disk by the composer Soliman Gamil. This release marks the first time Salah Ragab and The Cairo Jazz Band's definitive works are presented to the West."