Hamza El Din - Lily of the Nile (100% Pure Virgin Vinyl) Vinyl rip in 24 Bit/96 Khz + CD

One of the first African musicians to gain widespread international recognition, Hamza El Din is a Nubian master of the oud, or the fretless lute. Western listeners are as likely as not to have been exposed to his work via the Grateful Dead, who played with him on-stage occasionally. (El Din also helped arrange the Dead's tour of Egypt.) He played an integral role in modernizing Nubian music, using his work to both evoke and tell stories of Nubian life.

El Din was originally trained to be an engineer, but changed direction and enrolled in the Middle Eastern School of Music, where he began to compose his own songs. On a fellowship to study Western classical music in Rome, he met American Gino Foreman, who exposed Hamza's work to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. This resulted in a contract with Vanguard. His mid-'60s debut, Al Oud – Instrumental and Vocal Music From Nubia, was one of the first "world music" recordings to achieve wide exposure in the West. –Allmusic.

Mr. El Din's austere, hypnotic music was based on his research into the traditions of Nubia, an ancient North African kingdom on the upper Nile, which was a cradle of civilization.
Accompanying his reedy voice with concise, incantatory phrases on the oud, Mr. El Din created a meditative music that sought a timeless purity. He performed dressed in white, with a white turban. But he was also a cosmopolitan musician who taught ethnomusicology and lived in Rome, Tokyo and California.
–The New York Times.

Track listing:

1. Bint Baladna 6'25"
2. Annun Sira 12'45"
3. Shortunga 4'10"
4. Allah Hu Akbar 25'25"
5. Hamayala 7'35"

Hamza El Din: Oud - Vocals - Tar


"This is a pure analog recording done exclusively with custom-built vacuum-tube electronics with the exception of the microphones. The microphones were set up in the ORTF configuration. No noise reduction, equalization, compression, or limiting of any sort was used in the making of this record."