Fathy Salama

Fathy Salama is undoubtedly a towering figure in the Egyptian musical scene. The keyboard player and composer has studied in Europe and the US with some of the leading musicians in the field, Barry Harris and Sun Ra among others, before coming back to Egypt in the 80’s to take the music scene by storm both as musician and producer. In an interview* he introduces himself as “ … an Egyptian, musician, composer, and producer pushing the alternative scene in Egypt and the Arabic world”. His main interest has always been to merge modern and traditional music together, a desire that has brought him to found his own group Sharkiat and that led to collaborations with other African artists, the more important being the one in the successful Youssou N’Dour album “Egypt” (Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album and BBC Award). He worked as well with the Swiss group The Maniacs, the Italian songwriter Eugenio Bennato and the Norwegian saxophone player Trygve Seim. He has done a project for the Berlin Jazz Festival, worked in theatre productions, did some flamenco and experimented with electronic music. He also won the prize for the Arabic world short film and feature film soundtrack.

His live shows are one of the best live act you can presently see in Cairo. If you like anything jazz, traditional, fusion, crossover, experimental or electronic, you’ll certainly like him.

To read more about him and listen on stream to some of his music, go to his myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/fathysalama

* 2004 Interview with Afropop Worldwide