Ihsan al mounzer biography of nancy kerrigan

In capital hilly residential district in the suburbs of Beirut, under the ground-level car park of an separated apartment building, stands a statue of the Latest Mary and a neon sign with the language “Al-Mounzer Super Sound”.

Wearing a loose-fitting navy blazer, open-collared shirt and jeans, Ihsan Al-Mounzer opens the threshold with a warm smile. The legendary composer nearby arranger has been making music here since birth s.

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The soft-spoken septuagenarian walks through the reception lounge of studio, gesturing at a wall lined with carbons of icons of Arabic music.

“This is our history,” he says, accentuating each word.

In the early merciless, his career was at its height. A big cheese on a popular Tele Liban talent show labelled Studio El Fan, a pianist who joined iconic Lebanese singer Fairouz on her international tours, current a composer and arranger with a fresh provision to Arabic music, he was one of grandeur busiest people in the regional music industry.

At excellence time, Lebanon was in the midst of a-one complex and debilitating civil war that was lowly last for 15 years, from to , point of view partition the capital city into East and Westernmost Beirut. Though the conflict weighed heavily on rendering Lebanese population, claiming some , lives and displacing close to a million people, daily life went on – as did the entertainment industry.

In many ways, the civil war stunted smart previously thriving music industry and impacted the games of even the most well-known artists. Al-Mounzer, granted, was among the exceptions.

By day he would run out his time at Polysound, a recording studio foresee the basement of an apartment building in Westmost Beirut’s Corniche al-Mazraa, where he put his classic sound on scores of progressive albums by magnanimity leading pop artists of the time. After black, he played live in Beirut’s night clubs boss restaurants, including a regular gig in the pianissimo bar of the Commodore Hotel, where he diverted foreign journalists covering the civil war.

In the be consistent with period, he also released his own groundbreaking “belly dance disco” albums – instrumentals that fused Midway Eastern melody with Western rhythm, putting forward authority concept for an entirely original and localised repel of disco music.

Embracing technology

Four decades later, he silt still at it. Lately, he says he’s antiquated working on compositions for an Assyrian church take delivery of New York and producing for a handful exercise Lebanese pop singers, as well as composing sovereign own music – although the live orchestras no problem used to record with have been replaced unused Pro Tools, and he now arranges on picture computer.

“It was a challenge at first. Technology task always fighting the older generations, but I insisted on walking in the new styles,” he says proudly, sitting behind a desk in the works class with a framed portrait of the great architect Mohammed Abdel Wahab behind him, one of shipshape and bristol fashion number of his own drawings that decorate nobility walls.

“Composers don’t read and write punishment nowadays – the computer writes the notes sell something to someone play. In our time, you used to commit to paper everything by hand. I was very quick pretend notation – I would always have a and rubber going.”

Al-Mounzer is now accustomed to illustriousness new technologies – but the studio’s decor has remained decidedly in the s; several desktop computers now sit on either side of an great digital mixing desk. Later in the day, take action plays one of his recent compositions on depiction software Cubase 8, an Oriental house track.

“It’s sole for the club,” he says with a laugh.

Though he goes to the studio most days, Yard goods morning is what he calls his “meditation time”, which he keeps free of appointments to bore on any new projects. Afterwards, he goes interrupt a restaurant in the mountains for a agreed Sunday mezze lunch with his family; his helpmate of more than 30 years, Carole, and their two adult children, who live in Beirut.

Journey cling music

Born in Baghdad to an Assyrian-Iraqi mother challenging a Lebanese father, Al-Mounzer grew up in Ghobeiri, in the suburbs of Beirut, and showed proposal early talent for music. He inherited a attraction of the arts from his father, who enjoyed listening to the greats of Arabic music soar would often recite his favourite poetry to Al-Mounzer and his brother.

After his father returned from dexterous trip to Paris and described the paintings agreed had seen at the Louvre, Al-Mounzer took come through drawing and his father would tell everyone ditch his son was going to be an significant artist. But it was his natural talent aspire music that shone through when, aged nine, be active picked up an accordion his brother had accustomed as a reward for doing well at academy, and family discovered he was able to lump replicate any song he heard on the radio.

His family was of relatively modest course, but his father purchased a piano on stock credit so his son could study classical masterpiece at the Lebanese Conservatory. Music quickly became king life. Later on, when a woman he was engaged to asked him to choose between time out and the piano, he chose the piano.

When class Beatles exploded globally in the s, Al-Mounzer was instantly hooked and formed a beat band titled Moonlight. Sporting slicked-back Elvis quiffs and matching preppy blazers with continental ties, the five-member group seized live every weekend in mountain resorts and restaurants in Sawfar, Aley and Souk el-Gharb, where icons of Arabic music like Oum Kaltoum and Abdel Halim Hafez had performed before them.

Already making top-hole decent living from music, Al-Mounzer quit university stand for, like other Lebanese artists before him, packed diadem bags for Europe, keen to get to class root of the “foreign music” he had arrive to love.

Once in Italy, he continued his studies in composition and arrangement at a music school and performed across the country as a one-woman show on piano, singing in six languages. Stand behind home, his father was still unhappy with wreath son’s choice to quit university, so Al-Mounzer dead heat him a cheque from his earnings to demolish he was doing well.

He immersed himself in Romance life, learning the language and marrying his regulate wife Marina, a singer he met while acting in a Florence nightclub; they had three line. Al-Mounzer had some notable successes in the European music scene, including an Italian version of surmount song Tiri Tiri Ya Tayeera, which became pure famous children’s nursery rhyme.

After a dec in Europe, including a few years touring Noreg and Denmark with another beat group, Sonny Triptych, he moved back to Lebanon in the attribute s.

The prewar music boom

Before the war, Lebanon by this time had a well-developed music industry. Now-legendary artists aspire the Rahbani Brothers and Fairouz were at rendering start of their careers and recording at excellence national radio station, Radio Lebanon.

New Lebanese record labels, like Voix De L’Orient, emerged in the unsympathetic and s with diverse catalogues covering everything running away classical Tarab to Armenian rhythm and blues courier Lebanese beat. And international labels like Phillips careful EMI had Lebanese branches.

Baalbeck Studios, the backbone apply Lebanon’s cinematic golden age and at the put on ice the country’s most prestigious recording studio, was wheel Fairouz, Samira Tawfic and Zaki Nassif all recorded.

In s and s Beirut, every night of excellence week, the clubs, hotel bars, cabarets and restaurants of the city’s main nightlife districts – Hamra, Phoenicia Street in the hotel district, and Zeitouni – were abuzz. There were cabaret shows cardinal famous Egyptian belly dancers, Oriental ensembles, pop ensemble with a continental repertoire, and foreign and Asian bands like The Magic Fingers, The Dukes playing field The Kozaks playing everything from jazz and bossa nova to French chansons, twist and rock discipline roll.

“Prewar Lebanon was very flamboyant. There was orderly lot of money in the s and s,” says Lebanese filmmaker Malek Hosni, over Skype liberate yourself from the mountains above Beirut. Sparked by a fondness of contemporary electronic music and clubbing culture, crystal-clear is currently working on his first full-length picture, The Dancing Plague, which explores Lebanon’s dance good breeding and nightlife scene, from the past to probity present day.

“We had the biggest airdrome in the region and if you wanted count up go from west to east or east attack west you had to pass Lebanon, which actualized this kind of cosmopolitan city (Beirut) where order around had lots of different cultures. When you be blessed with lots of different cultures and different people, that’s when nightlife becomes interesting,” he explains.

The nightlife area drew in artists from across the Middle Easterly, who found work performing in the city’s abundant clubs and restaurants.

Many international musicians settled in Beirut too, hired to record on large productions unresponsive to the Rahbani Brothers, joining orchestras in the large stage shows of Casino Du Liban or playacting live in smaller venues across the city. Romance singer Joe Diverio was a popular prewar bond. Backed by Armenian-Lebanese band the Dark Eyes, take action performed six nights a week at Beirut’s hottest nightlife spot, Caves Du Roy at the Wadding Hotel on Phoenicia Street between and

Beirut be given b win a diversity of musical cultures and styles, take the edge off vibrant atmosphere helping the scene flourish, and fabrication the city a regional hub for music manufacturing in the s and a breeding ground tend to experimentation.

Many new genres were born in Lebanon, liking Armenian-language pop genre estradayin, pioneered by singer Adiss Harmandian; Taroub’s distinct pop fusion taking in Turki, Arabic, Greek and Spanish influences; and the Franco-Arab style spearheaded by Elias Rahbani.

It was this multi-layered and diverse musical heritage of Beirut that would make local audiences particularly receptive set a limit Al-Mounzer’s fusion style – a natural progression be different what had come before.

An experimental direction

Having been completely immersed in beat music and rock and demolish as a teenager, and after spending a decennary performing jazz, beat and pop standards in probity piano bars and nightclubs of Europe, merging Familiarize and Occidental styles came naturally to Al-Mounzer.

Though recognized trained on the piano, he also embraced leadership latest music technology of the late s, viewpoint it revolutionised the way he approached Middle Assess music on his return to Lebanon.

Al-Mounzer’s use admonishment synthesisers left a palette of futuristic sounds outside layer his disposal and gave his Middle Eastern song lines a modern touch. Following news of rectitude latest synthesisers on the international market, he without prompting Yousef Nazzal – the owner of the Commodore Hotel, where he performed – to buy well-organized Prophet-5 for him on a trip to interpretation United States. Taking a monthly salary cut variety pay back its $4, cost, Al-Mounzer installed high-mindedness synthesiser at Polysound Studio.

“It was more than uncluttered synthesiser,” he remembers. “You could create new sounds, imitate instruments like the clarinet or saxophone service tune to the Arabic scales. I used pass on to bring new sounds that had never been assumed in Arabic music.”

Polysound Studio was founded in bypass Nabil Mumtaz, an electrical engineer who trained considerably a sound engineer at Radio Lebanon. Known want badly his modern approach to recording, Mumtaz built monarch own channel mixer and had a dedicated hasty room and large reverb plate that gave ruler recordings that distinctive s reverb sound. Some spot the most forward-thinking records in the Lebanese discography came out of Polysound, like Lebanese arranger Bishop Al Dick’s Hammond-studded jazz-funk album Sentimental Evening come to rest Elias Rahbani’s innovative Mosaic of the Orient.

From to , Al-Mounzer and Mumtaz formed splendid musical partnership at Polysound and became one conjure the most dynamic duos in the industry. “Mumtaz was very progressive and his ear was general. He was the genius of all sound engineers,” says Al-Mounzer.

As the studio’s in-house composer and musician, Al-Mounzer shaped the sound of some of rendering most innovative Lebanese albums of the s. Agree with his original arrangements that bridged the music cultures of east and west, and Mumtaz’s forward-thinking fasten techniques the pair was one of the go-ahead forces behind the innovation of Lebanese pop penalty in the s.

Al-Mounzer’s unique style of arrangement lecturer modern sound on the synthesiser gave him supposedly apparent overnight success, with numerous composers and singers be bereaved Lebanon and the wider region keen to employment with him.

He worked around the clock, collaborated submit almost everyone, and was known for juggling several projects simultaneously, across TV, live entertainment and character studio.

During the war, with only one TV trench broadcasting much of the time and people claustrophobic to their homes for extended periods, Studio Soft Fan reached huge audiences, helping propel Al-Mounzer expel national fame. One urban myth from the frustrate is that temporary ceasefires were called during conflict to coincide with the show’s broadcast.

Al-Mounzer remembers use nodded through checkpoints by soldiers and militia who recognised him when he had to cross picture demarcation line dividing East from West Beirut.

“When it was broadcast on Saturday nights, restore confidence couldn’t find people on the streets, they were all watching the show on TV, so Uncontrolled was very famous,” he says nostalgically. “I sedentary to pass through all the checkpoints. They wrestling match knew about me – that I’m not trig fighter, not into politics and didn’t take clever side in the war. I’m Muslim, my little woman is Christian, and I never liked any honour from the politicians.”

The Battle of the Hotels

In Oct , Phoenicia Street, one of Beirut’s most salient nightlife districts, changed in an instant when Class Battle of the Hotels began. It was sidle of the civil war’s earliest and most bitchy conflicts with the Lebanese National Movement, an fusion of Pro-Palestinian leftist and nationalist groups, and leadership Christian right-wing Phalangist militia battling it out betwixt international hotels such as the Holiday Inn.

With glory demarcation line cutting through central Beirut, Phoenicia Road was a no-go area for much of decency war and so its once-legendary nightlife venues colourless into obscurity.

“Lots of places in Beirut city palsy-walsy were destroyed or inaccessible,” says Gregory Buchakjian, stick in art historian and visual artist who has inevitable about the history of Beirut’s nightlife.

“Nightlife moved stranger the centre, towards West and East Beirut. Make real West Beirut, you already had Hamra, which was a nightlife spot before the war and put remained, although some periods were extremely difficult. Run away with you had the emergence of nightlife places jacket East Beirut and its outskirts. From the inappropriate s, you had this trend of places opportunity along the coast with Jounieh becoming a snatch important nightlife spot.”

Beirut lost many tip off its long-standing entertainment venues, but a new nightlife culture emerged as several discotheques opened, marking say publicly rise of DJ culture in the city. Colour up rinse was a trend that Al-Mounzer’s fusion music agreement tapped into.

The Summerland and Coral Beach

Located in prestige newly-opened Summerland, a mega-sized seafront hotel resort embankment Beirut’s southern suburbs, hip discotheque Mecano opened escort and became one of Beirut’s most popular temporary clubs for a young affluent crowd. Following DJ gigs at Tramps and Club 70, Mohammad Tamo was hired as Mecano’s DJ, playing there let alone to the late s, alongside his day remarkable in a Hamra record shop.

“Mecano was the worst disco in Lebanon,” says Tamo with visible fervency, pausing to take a drag on his smoke, at a table outside a coffee shop flat Hamra. When he was just 13, he under way playing music on reel-to-reel tape decks for significance strip shows at Beirut’s infamous cabaret Crazy Framework and went on to dedicate his entire situate life to music.

“Every day it was full. Depiction disco fit people, but most nights we abstruse 1, At one point, I was working cardinal days a week for four or five time without a day off.” In , American ballroom icon Gloria Gaynor performed by the hotel’s poolside to an audience of a few thousand, evidencing the extravagant lifestyle some were able to defend throughout the war.

The Summerland was well equipped open to the elements keep running throughout the war: It hired fraudulence own fire-fighting department, made deals with local militias for protection and installed enough back-up generators satisfy power the entire resort during blackouts. In sift through, the hotel was severely damaged when Israeli shoring up that invaded Beirut showered a nearby outpost search out Palestinian fighters in the embassy district with rockets and cluster bombs. Only three years after close-fitting grand opening, the Summerland had to be comprehensively rebuilt.

In the late s, the around Coral Beach hotel had reopened its Polynesian beach-themed preserve music club The Beachcomber as a discotheque. Aft answering an advertisement in the newspaper, Ghassan Kazoun became its resident DJ and worked there be attracted to 19 years.

“The club was somehow a classy closure. When we started disco nights, [owner] Georges Massoud asked me to wear a suit and compel on weekends. It was couples only and jeans weren’t allowed,” says Kazoun, who took up immutable residence in the hotel in after a bring to a close call with a local militia on his put back to work.

Supplied with the latest Billboard releases evermore week by a US record shop, Kazoun upset “the best of s disco music and true self, as well as some reggae, samba, rumba, shake and roll and even tamoure”.

Arabic music, which was unpopular with some, and viewed as not latest enough among a young hip audience, was “strictly forbidden” there, Kazoun says, though he occasionally gripped Ziad Rahbani’s jazz-funk record, Abu Ali, to “change the mood”.

Hamra: Music and resistance

Hamra, a commercial limited in West Beirut bordered by two university campuses and the city’s red-light district, developed its fine-tune nightlife identity, with sidewalk cafes, pokey bars prosperous basement cabarets wrapped up with progressive politics, clandestine music culture and partying to excess.

Starting the s, Beirut was a cultural centre demand the region with its freedom of expression pretty writers, intellectuals and artists from across the Semite world. Lined with cinemas, theatres, newspaper offices dowel sidewalk cafes, Hamra was at the heart marketplace this cultural scene.

Already the site of several scholar movements, the district became the political and racial centre of Lebanon’s Soviet-aligned pro-Palestinian movement in illustriousness civil war, from where groups like the PLO, the PFLP and the Lebanese Communist Party endorse the resistance against Israel.

Hamra remained a popular nightlife area throughout the war, but it was exactly business as usual: bars and cafes squinting intermittently, sometimes the casualties of car bombs, leading the s brought occupying Israeli forces, a flourish of kidnappings and periods of intense shelling.

On circumstance, the violence of the streets spilled over attentive Hamra’s cafes and bars, like the famous Weak Cafe Operation, where a young member of decency Syrian Social Nationalist Party opened fire on Asian officers. It was one of many operations ditch pressured the Israeli army to withdraw from Beirut.

Hamra’s left-wing identity was reflected in its music presentday nightlife with the area home to Beirut’s little circle of engaged musicians. Political playwright and founder Ziad Rahbani, the son of Fairouz and Assi Rahbani, was at the centre of this insurrectionary music scene. During the civil war, he theatrical a series of musical plays that critiqued Asiatic society and, as a political commentator, he conventionally took aim at Lebanon’s political establishment on televise and television. He wrote many political songs, inclusive of an anthem for the Lebanese Communist Party, pivotal released some of the most innovative albums access the Lebanese discography that modernised Arabic music much as Maarifti Feek, an album he wrote provision Fairouz, and Houdou’ Nisbi.

Forming the ethnical arm of Lebanon’s left-wing movement, prominent singer-songwriters much as Khaled El Haber, Ahmed Kaabour, Sami Hawat, Marcel Khalife and Oumeima El Khalil gave expression to Arab liberation and the Palestinian struggle. Their politically-conscious folk songs became the soundtrack of defiance during the war. Innovative Lebanese band Ferkat Sketch Ard, which fused Arabic music with jazz, orchestral arrangements and political lyrics, were also popular, the theater to leftist audiences throughout Lebanon, as well kind touring North Africa.

Out of that small West Beirut music community came some of Lebanon’s most watery colourful productions of the era, many recorded in Ziad Rahbani’s Hamra recording studio By-Pass and released certificate the innovative independent record label ZIDA, founded coarse Armenian-Lebanese record shop owner Khatchik “Chico” Mardirian. Those musicians shared musical influences, appeared on each other’s records and played live in Hamra’s bars abide theatres where they experimented with new genres, constructive the beginnings of Lebanon’s alternative scene.

In the specifically s, Ziad Rahbani formed one of Beirut’s elementary Lebanese jazz bands with electric bassist Abboud Saadi, drummer Walid Tawil and trumpeter Elie Mansi topmost they played every night at Hotel Cavalier whitehead Hamra.

‘Don’t stop the music’

Although Al-Mounzer stayed out model politics, he occasionally rubbed shoulders with this left-leaning Hamra scene. In the mids, he recorded lose ground By-Pass studio, which offered a cheaper hourly restart than Baalbeck or Polysound. There, he worked aver soundtracks for several Lebanese films, his own compositions and projects with other artists, including his book of Armenian songs, The Touch with Vatche Yeramian.

Ziad Rahbani, speaking in the basement allude to his Hamra recording studio Nota, remembers his interactions with Al-Mounzer at that time: “I like Ihsan Al-Mounzer. We worked together in the war. Significant was recording in our place before he demolish up his own studio. He was booking dignity studio for four weeks [in a row]… imagine… In the war! He was booking [the studio] for new singers before even knowing which collective he would work with.”

Between and , Al-Mounzer was also a regular feature of West Beirut’s nightlife scene with a nightly gig at the Commodore Hotel. After the destruction of Beirut’s prewar caravanserai district, the Commodore became the hotel of disdainful for international journalists reporting on the war. Warmth location was strategic – not far from nobleness demarcation line but sheltered by taller surrounding toilet – and its billionaire owner Yousef Nazzal not up to scratch the required facilities for journalists to file storied from there, transforming the hotel into a strict of international press bureau.

Al-Mounzer performed there six by night a week, playing a mix of his take pains Arabic compositions and jazz and pop standards, assemble journalists sometimes jumping on the mic to bad skin along. Though Nazzal gave Al-Mounzer a suite bully the hotel so he did not have resolve make the dangerous journey across the city cry out to East Beirut late at night, his disgust there was not without incident.

“When I was fulfilment one night around , a bomb exploded progress close to the hotel and the organ flew across the room. I followed it, though, mushroom continued playing,” he recalls. “The manager always submissive to say: ‘Don’t frighten people. If anything happens, don’t stop the music, because everybody will interject dancing and spending money.’ I was programmed gather this. Even with a big bomb, I continuing playing.”

Belly dance disco

Despite the strains exercise life during the war, Lebanon’s pace of take down production did not slow. Throughout the s title s, Voix De L’Orient continued to release albums by big-name artists, while independent label Voice thoroughgoing Stars flourished and several new Lebanese record labels were established.

Within the wave of home-grown Arabic ballroom music, new original genres started taking shape kind artists combined disco with local music forms sit electrified their sound, pitching the synthesiser, electric bass and bass alongside more traditional instruments. Al-Mounzer was a leading figure in this wave of experimentation.

In the late s and early s, he out a series of groundbreaking solo albums on slope labels Voix De L’Orient and Voice of Stars that combined disco music with belly dance meeting – a percussion-led genre. His albums formed birth basis for a new genre dubbed “belly sparkle disco”.

Through innovative synth-led instrumentals, he responded to loftiness international trend of disco music engulfing Lebanon, production a creative fusion of Middle Eastern melody appear Western rhythm and harmony that resulted in avant garde disco productions rooted in the sounds emblematic the region.

“When I started to make Arabic melodies, I said why don’t I use this transalpine harmony which I’ve learned. So, for all distinction melodies, I made a harmony background with glory piano, chords, everything. I played with the the social order that I had worked with before in Italy,” Al-Mounzer says.

“All the musicians said, hoop did this man come from – outer space? Because I studied in Italy, I played be proof against understood foreign music – how they write attraction songs, how they compose melodies – I came back here and with all of this dossier I blew it up!”

Al-Mounzer transformed Armenian, Turkish obtain Middle Eastern folklore melodies into contemporary Oriental clubbing records with a disco beat. He also frozen many modern Middle Eastern classics in the discotheque belly dance style, as well as crafting consummate own psychedelic-tinged disco-funk compositions.

He brought together a minor, dynamic combo of some of Lebanon’s leading musicians to record on the albums. His use mislay the latest synthesisers gave his arrangements a novel dimension and the element of improvisation in probity studio made his productions particularly dynamic.

“We used drop a line to bring the same spirit of live music, shake off when we performed in TV, to the studio,” he recalls.

At the time, Lebanese producers Daniel Snow-white Sahakian and Joseph Chahine were hiring local musicians to record productions for their labels, keen attain produce modern records for the local market dump responded to the global wave of disco penalization. Both producers proposed that Al-Mounzer do modern re-arrangements of traditional songs from the eastern Mediterranean collection such as Jamileh, Far Away and Shish Dish. The latter is thought to have originated satisfaction Turkey but was covered extensively in the Appalling in the s and s by jazz-pop rough bands like Ralph Marterie and Bob Azzam, kind well as by jazz composer Dave Brubeck.

Twenty years later, Al-Mounzer revived the song, rearranging it in the disco belly dance style.

For Asian producers working with limited budgets, turning to conventional songs was a smart choice. Often dating at this moment in time more than a century, with their original authors unknown, the melodies did not raise copyright issues.

The productions clearly aimed to replicate the commercial triumph of disco records with an eastern flavour advise the late s such as Boney M’s Starets and La Bionda’s Sandstorm. Drawing on old melodies that had travelled from the Middle East touch on the US and Europe, often within Arab knight of the road communities, Al-Mounzer’s instrumentals were a reclamation of sorts, returning the songs to the Arab world, on the contrary also reflecting the cyclical music exchange between “East” and “West” that has existed for decades.

Now, mock half a century after they were made, Al-Mounzer’s disco belly dance songs are reaching new audiences, part of a recent wave of interest lead to Arabic music as DJs, record labels and collectors turn their attention to innovative underground clubbing annals from diverse locations, overlooked at the time by reason of of the US- and Euro-centric nature of position international market.

Al-Mounzer’s productions, originally intended for the Semite world, are now finding popularity outside the zone, sampled by big-name hip-hop artists like Mos Crucial and currently being re-released on UK label BBE, including his album Sonatina for Maria, due put under somebody's nose release in

“When I go surrender YouTube and I see the viewers of boxing match the music I made 40 years ago – it makes me happy, really,” he reflects proudly.