Birth: NULL/NULL/1955 Death:NULL/NULL/NULL
Born in Tarshiha, Galilee, to a Palestinian Catholic family in 1955; moved with his family to Haifa in 1957; began playing the Oud at the age of five; studied violin at the Conservatory for Western Classical Music in Jerusalem as well as Arabic Literature and Music at Tel Aviv University; pursued his studies at the Academy of Music in Jerusalem in 1978 and was appointed instructor of Arabic music; moved to the US for his graduate studies in Performance at the Manhattan School of Music, and later at the Music Education at Columbia University; formed New York’s Near Eastern Music Ensemble (NEME) in 1982; received the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for Arts in 1994; formed the Qantara Arabic music ensemble in 1995; started the Annual Arab Festival of Arts, held in New York since 1994; co-founder of the Annual Arabic Music Retreat in New York in 1997 held in Mount Holyoke College; directed the Arabic string section that backed the duet ‘Desert Rose’ of singer Sting and French-Algerian vocalist Cheb Mami at the 2000 Grammy Awards; has contributed selections to soundtracks for The Sheltering Sky and Malcolm X , among others, has composed the entire soundtrack for the documentary For Everyone Everywhere (celebrating the 50th anniversary of the UN in Dec. 1998); among his recordings are Simon Shaheen: The Music of Mohammed Abdel Wahab (1991), Saltanah (1997), Blue Flame (2001) and Turath (2002); contributed cuts to producer Bill Laswell’s fusion collective, Hallucination Engine (Island), which was nominated for 11 Grammy Awards; tours on Qantara concerts in different countries and lectures in different American universities on Oriental Music.
