Mohammed El-Bakkar & His Oriental Ensemble - Sultan of Bagdad (1958 Audio Fidelity LP)

As I mentioned in my post from August 5th about my trip to Italy to attend the International Music Festival of the Adriatic, while I was there, I bought two LPs at a bookstore in Trieste - this album being the second one. (The other album was The Art of Lucrezia Bori.)

Mohammed El-Bakkar (1913-1959) was a tenor vocalist, oud player, conductor and actor. During his relatively short life, he gained fame in his home country of Lebanon before moving to Brooklyn, New York in 1952. There, he performed in night clubs and at Arabic music festivals before attracting the attention of Broadway director Joshua Logan (1908-1988), who cast him as the singing oriental rug salesman in the first production run of the musical Fanny. He performed the role from 1954 from 1956, and was so admired by Broadway audiences (and fellow performers) that he was immediately signed afterwards with the folk/exotica label Audio Fidelity Records. His albums (seven in total, with Sultan of Bagdad being his second) coincided nicely with the calypso and folk music craze of the 1950s, and were immediately greeted to both critical and commercial success. He continued to record, and even appeared in the 1957 Egyptian movie version of Tarzan opposite Arabic film superstar Tahia Carioca (1915-1999) before suddenly dying of a brain hemorrhage during a private performance. He was just 46 years old. 

How exactly this album found its way to an Italian bookstore is something I am not able to answer, but I am certainly glad I found it! Although I don't remember it, I must have heard of or read about El-Bakkar when I was younger, as I had a strange feeling when I first picked this record up that it was likely by "that Arabic guy who died young." A simple Google search confirmed my suspicion, and the flamboyant cover alone was worth the €2.50 I paid for it. When I returned to Minnesota and put the needle in the first track ("Ya Habibi") to hear what it sounded like, I was completely floored by El-Bakkar's fantastic singing and memorizing oud playing!

This album is essentially Arabic-language party music, and features none of the cheesy arrangements/sound effects that were so common in other folk/exotica albums of the time. El-Bakkar's voice rivals that of the purest muezzin, and his incredible agility (particularly in "Why Why Fatima" and "Zenat El Haflat") is something unforgettably prodigious for the ears to behold! While his oud is not particularly loud or has any solo passages on any of the tracks, it blends nicely with the rest of the ensemble and adds a mysterious, wandering troubadour-like quality.

Check out this clip from YouTube to hear it for yourself!

The songs on this album are as follows:

1. "Ya Habibi"

2. "Why Why Fatima"

3. "Ana Winta"

4. "Laysh Laysh"

5. "Raksat El Sahara"

6. "Yalla Yalla"

7. "Sultan of Bagdad"

8. "A-la-Elwadee"

9. "Zenat El Haflat"

10. "Albak Ya Asmar"

11. "Salamat Salamat"

12. "Ya Shara"

Download (34.1 MB, 128 kbps)