An Iraqi-American Jazz & Classical Trumpeter's Mission to Preserve Iraqi Music

Amir El Saffar, 27, does not seem like a natural crusader for Iraqi culture. He was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, by an American Christian mother, a professor of Spanish literature, and an Iraqi Shiite Muslim father, a physics professor. ElSaffar, who says he does not subscribe to any particular religion, learned only a smattering of Arabic and while growing up visited Iraq just once, with his father, in 1993.

But when he won a $10,000 prize for jazz trumpet in an international competition, he said, he decided to use the money to go to Iraq and learn its music. He added that only when he began to weep at the Baghdad airport did he realize he had been starved to connect with his father's country. In ElSaffar's first weeks in Baghdad in March 2002, as he listened to a maqam and heard the pain in the singer's voice, he felt something break open inside him, he said. "It sounded like crying to me," he said, a sobbing that became singing and drew him in. He said that he had also felt an intellectual fascination for the improvisation.

He learned to play a maqam on his trumpet and soon found a teacher of joza, a fiddle made from a coconut shell and the heart tissue of a water buffalo. The other instruments in a maqam ensemble are usually the santur, a kind of dulcimer; an Arabic tabla, a goblet-shaped drum; and a riqq, a tambourine.

By June 2002, when El Saffar returned to New York to play trumpet with Cecil Taylor, maqam music was influencing his jazz performance and he said he knew he had become obsessed. That autumn, he went back to Iraq to continue studying the maqam, and stayed until the end of the year.

Full story: One Man's Mission to Preserve Iraqi Music