Ziad Rahbany and Expressing Beirut in Jazz

In the history of modern Arab music, jazz arrived less as a single genre than as a question. Could a music born out of African American experience, improvisation, syncopation, and blue notes find a meaningful home in societies whose own musical grammar was built around maqam, tarab, poetic repetition, quarter tones, and collective memory?

For much of the twentieth century, the answer was tentative. Jazz appeared in Cairo nightclubs, in radio orchestras, in cosmopolitan hotels, and later in the experiments of musicians who sought to reconcile Arab melodic systems with Western harmonic movement. But it was only with a generation of artists in Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, and the diaspora that “Arab jazz” became something more than an experiment: a language of modernity.

The name of Ziad Rahbany lies at the heart of the Arab Jazz story. The Lebanese composer, pianist, playwright, and political satirist who died in Beirut in July 2025 at the age of 69, was the son of two central figures in modern Arab music, Fairuz and Assi Rahbany, but his career was not a continuation of the Rahbani school as much as a rebellion inside it. Ziad created a distinct Lebanese sound from Western and Arabic musical roots, while his work during and after the Lebanese Civil War made him a sardonic critic of sectarian politics and social hypocrisy.

The term most often attached to him was “Oriental jazz,” a label both useful and misleading. It is useful because Rahbany did help popularize a fusion of jazz harmony, funk grooves, Arabic melodic lines, and Lebanese urban sensibility. It is misleading because his work was never merely “jazz plus oud,” or “Western chords over Eastern melody.” He was doing something more complex, relocating jazz inside the political and emotional life of an Arab city.

First Steps

Jazz had reached the Arab world long before Rahbany. Music writers trace its presence in the region to early twentieth-century encounters, including African American entertainers in Cairo in the 1910s, while other accounts note that jazz in the Middle East developed from at least the 1920s through recordings, performances, and local reinterpretations.

In Egypt, Salah Ragab became one of the central figures in building a local jazz scene. Arabic and English sources commonly credit him with founding the Cairo Jazz Quartet in 1968, often described as the first jazz band in Egyptian history, though some later Arab critics have questioned the mythologizing around his biography and titles such as “king of jazz” or “pioneer of Oriental jazz.”

It was a moment of world youth rebellion that acquired a special local stain in the Arab world due to the crushing defeat of Arab armies by Israel in June 1967. But the first Egyptian chapter remained isolated exposing that jazz in the Arab world was initially associated with cosmopolitan urban elites, clubs, hotels, and foreign cultural circuits.

In Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, and later Gulf cities, jazz could sound like modernity, but also like social distance. It belonged to the educated classes, foreign-educated musicians, night venues, and cultural institutions. What Rahbany did differently was to pull jazz out of that narrow social frame and place it in the middle of Lebanese speech, Lebanese satire, civil-war anxiety, and everyday political anger.

The Egyptian Jazz lived his golden age a decade later with the rise of the youth bands. Composers such as Yehia Khalil and Hany Shenouda entered the elite music in the pop song, finding out young voices like Mohamed Mounir to express the Egyptian youth’s frustrations and ambitions. Shababik, written by Magdy Naguib, composed by Yehia Khalil, and sung by Mohamed Mounir, is a classic for this age.

Rahbany’s Break

Rahbany’s breakthrough was more sociological than musical. He made jazz sound local by writing Jazz songs in the dialect of Beirut. He filled his plays and songs with clerks, party militants, failed lovers, hypocrites, petty officials, café intellectuals, and exhausted citizens. His music presented Lebanon as an argument; fragmented, comic, violent, corrupt, and still strangely musical.

This is why his relationship with Fairuz is so important to the story of Arab jazz. Fairuz had already become one of the most revered voices in Arab music, associated with the Rahbani brothers’ construction of a modern Lebanese musical identity. She has dominated the Arab vocal scene and was known in Lebanon as “the soul of Lebanon,” with a voice that became inseparable from national memory. When Ziad began composing and arranging for her, he did not merely give her new songs. He altered the atmosphere around her voice.

The first trials included his 1978 piece Abu Ali is often treated as a cult object in global reissue culture, being classified across funk, soul, folk/world, disco, and jazz-funk, and later reviews describing its Lebanese disco and cinematic qualities. It showed Ziad’s ability to make rhythm, suspense, brass, and repetition carry a political mood without lyrics.

1979 witnessed his first Jazz music for Fairuz through Wahdon (them alone!), written by Ali Haidar, composed by Ziad, and sung by Fairuz in 1979. Later he published his first Jazz music album, Hodou’ Nisbi (relative calm) in 1985. But the big move came with Ziad’s first Jazz album with Fairuz, Maarifti Feek (my relationship with you). The album was recorded in Beirut around 1983–84 and released in 1987, combining Fairuz’s voice with Ziad Rahbany’s jazz and funk orchestration.

Arabic music writing has similarly treated Maarifti Feek as a major turning point, presenting Fairuz through a radically different musical vision during the Lebanese Civil War. In these works, Fairuz was no longer only the morning voice of Lebanon; she became the voice of a bruised city, accompanied not just by strings and choral grandeur but by electric piano, bass lines, brass colors, syncopation, and harmonic ambiguity.

Audible contradiction

Much of what later became internationally legible as Arab jazz was oud-centered, especially through artists such as Rabih Abou-Khalil, Anouar Brahem, and Dhafer Youssef. Abou-Khalil, born in Lebanon and later based in Europe, became known for combining Arabic music with jazz, rock, and classical forms; accounts of his work emphasize collaborations with major jazz and improvising musicians and his role in placing the oud within global fusion and ethno-jazz contexts.

Brahem, born in Tunis in 1957, studied oud at the National Conservatory in Tunis and later became one of ECM Records’ most important Arab-world artists, developing a chamber-like, spacious meeting point between Arab tradition, jazz improvisation, and European contemporary music.

Youssef, also Tunisian, built a different path through oud, voice, Sufi-inflected singing, electronic textures, and collaborations across jazz and world music scenes.

Ziad belonged to the same broad historical arc, but he occupied a different position. The Tunisian and Lebanese oud innovators often entered the international jazz world through European festivals, labels, and transnational collaborations. Rahbany’s laboratory was Beirut itself. His jazz was not only a musical fusion; it was a theatrical and political method. It allowed him to break the solemnity of “high” Arab music, to insert irony into beauty, and to make contradiction audible.

Unlike later oud-centered jazz projects, Ziad was primarily a pianist and arranger. His Arabness did not depend on placing a traditional instrument at the front of the ensemble. Instead, it emerged through phrasing, melodic contour, dialect, rhythmic stress, and the emotional logic of his compositions. Rahbany’s W’Qamh music presents an example of maqam Hijaz used in a jazz-fusion arrangement using Arabic piano.

Politics of melody

For conservative listeners, jazz could sound like dilution being too Western, too unstable, too impure. For some defenders of classical Arab music, complex harmony and imported idioms threatened the authority of maqam and tarab. But for Rahbany, impurity was the point. Lebanon itself was impure, Arab and Mediterranean, sectarian and secular, village and city, leftist and commercial, wounded and theatrical. A pure music could not describe it.

His politics sharpened that aesthetic. Rahbany was a declared leftist, a critic of sectarianism, and a supporter of the Palestinian cause, though some of his later political positions remained polarizing. Rahbany’s jazz was not smooth liberal cosmopolitanism. It was not hotel music. It was conflict music: music of argument, class resentment, failed revolutions, and urban fatigue.

The Lebanese Civil War gave this sound its historical density. Rahbany’s plays and songs emerged from a society where public language had been emptied by militias, sectarian leaders, and ideological clichés. Jazz, with its improvisational looseness and harmonic instability, offered him a way to refuse closure. In a traditional patriotic song, the nation is often healed by the chorus. In Rahbany, the chorus rarely heals anything.

Ziad did not simply prove that Arab melodies could fit jazz harmonies, but also proved that jazz could carry Arab political modernity. In his hands, syncopation became social interruption; dissonance became a method of truth-telling; the electric piano became an urban narrator; and Fairuz’s sacred voice was brought down from the mountain into wartime Beirut.

Rahbany’s centrality was that he reached audiences far beyond the jazz public. Many Arab jazz innovators were admired by specialists, festival-goers, and global music listeners. Rahbany entered households. He reached people through theatre, political comedy, radio, cassettes, Fairuz albums, and later digital circulation. He made sophisticated harmony and irregular feeling part of ordinary Arab listening.