Boston Globe, April 27, 2012

WATERTOWN – As Anwar Souini describes it, he was browsing the North African section in a Central Square record store in Cambridge one day in 2006, when he came across a CD that intrigued him, by a group called Atlas Soul.

That the shop even had a North African section was refreshing for Souini, who left Morocco to study in the United States in 2001, arriving at the University of Wyoming, of all places, a few weeks before 9/11.

“I wasn’t lucky,” Souini says of the timing. Lonely and isolated in Wyoming, he had moved to Florida after two years, before finally landing in Boston — a place where, he found to his relief, many people had at least heard of his home country.

“So I called,” Souini says. “And half an hour later he was in my home.”

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Boston Globe, October 3, 2010

Palestinian artists abroad are used to bearing a heavy symbolic load, whether they like it or not. The history of their people, marked by displacement, occupation, and the endless peace process, imparts a certain intensity to even lighthearted work and invites controversies that might have nothing to do with the performers and their material.

But when the Paris-based Palestinian brothers known as Le Trio Joubran, virtuosos of the oud, the ancient Arabic lute, make their Boston debut at the Somerville Theatre on Thursday, their seriousness will speak to a more intimate loss: the death, in August 2008, of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

A leading light of world literature and a national hero who received a state funeral in Ramallah, Darwish was also a mentor to the brothers. Their tribute concert featuring recordings of Darwish reading turned into their third album, “A l’ombre des mots” (In the shadow of words), released last year.

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Boston Globe, October 10, 2008

NEW YORK – To enter the world of Simon Shaheen, the virtuoso musician and bandleader who has become Arabic music’s most prominent ambassador and most active educator in the United States, simply consider his principal instrument, the oud.

As Shaheen describes it, the elegant lute with its pear-like shape, fretless neck, and 11 strings – five pairs of two plus a single one at the low end – not only grounds Arabic music, but offers clues to the whole aesthetic of a culture.

“The oud is the center of the Arabic traditional small ensemble,” says Shaheen, who visits the Museum of Fine Arts tonight for a trio session of classical Arabic pieces and new works. “It has a very round, well-projecting sound. It has fantastic technical abilities. And like the piano in the West, it acts like the main instrument in the hands of composers and singers, to accompany themselves or use as a reference when they are composing.”

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