Another gem from Canary Records, as they return to Egypt, as quoted on their Bandcamp site:
“When disc recording technology arrived in Egypt in 1903, much of the Arab world around the Mediterranean had been experiencing a cultural, political, and social “awakening” (the “nadha”) that had been intrinsic to literary and artistic activities for over half a century. A flourishing trade in disc recordings in Cairo especially during the years preceding World War I documented the twilight years of this 19th century outpouring of highly elevated musical-poetic activity. Along with recordings made by the British Gramophone Company, the German Odeon label, and several smaller companies of street-level folk performers, the music of some exceptionally skilled singers working under the patronage of affluent were made available to Arabic-speaking listeners from a variety of social classes and backgrounds and in far-flung locations. So, it was possible, for instance, for the man born in Aleppo, Syria in the 19th century and living in New Jersey who collected the specific discs from which these restorations were made to have, at some considerable expense, stocked his household with the music of some of the greatest musicians of the Arab world and for his family to experience the pleasure of the sophisticated and complex art that might otherwise only have reached the highest strata of Egyptian and Ottoman society. The spread of sound recording technology and aesthetic choices made toward a popularizing and relatively simplified combined during the decades that followed these recordings so that when the generation represented here died off, the music changed significantly and was never really the same again.“
