Tarek Abdallah

Tarek Abdallah is an Egyptian oud player, composer and musicologist who lives in France.

Biography Tarek Abdallah was born in Alexandria in 1975.

He had been attracted to the oud since his childhood, after having seen a comedian playing the instrument on TV, but due to the opposition of his family, he had to wait until he was 19 to touch one for the first time in his life.

Studying with the Alexandrian master Hazem Shaheen, he practiced 10 hours a day in order to enter The Arabic Oud House, an oud school created in Cairo by the Iraqi master Naseer Shamma.

It is based on the waslah form, which is a musical suite in one mode with varying rhythms. Some of the rhythms used in the album are very complex, some of them were used only once in the tradition, some of hem were invented. The French magazine Les Inrockuptibles praised Abdalla's “sober and refined way of playing, with a naked and very pure melody, indifferent to frivolity, of irreproachable ethics“.