Joseph Tawadros

Joseph Tawadros AM (born 1983 in Cairo, Egypt) is a Coptic Australian oud virtuoso.

Biography

His family emigrated from Egypt to Australia when he was three. Initially attracted to the trumpet, he decided to learn oud when he was eight, after seeing a movie about Egypt's famous musicien, Sayed Darwish. He is classically trained, having completed a bachelor of music at the University of New South Wales, where he was awarded a Freedman Fellowship for Classical Music. In the 2000s, he also studied in Egypt with violin player Esawi Dagher, son of the legendary violin player Abdo Dagher. During the years that followed, he spent three months a year in Egypt and learned to play other instruments: the bamboo flute nay, the Arabic zither qanun and the cello. He won the Australian Recording Industry Award in 2012 for the best New World Music Album. He had been nominated nine times before, without winning. He won it again in 2013 and 2014.

Style

Joseph Tawadros’style is described as very eclectic. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, "he has taken the oud out of its traditional Middle Eastern setting and into the realm of classical music and jazz". "I don't like to play in a particulare genre, I love all sorts of music", Tawadros explains. "I try to record an album a year and one that's totally different from the previous album". He has collaborated with musicians such as John Abercrombie, Jack DeJohnette, Roy Ayers, Bela Fleck, Joey DeFrancesco, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and The Academy of Ancient Music.

Joseph

"Joseph" is a masculine given name originating from Hebrew, recorded in the Hebrew Bible, as יוֹסֵף, Standard Hebrew Yossef, Tiberian Hebrew and Aramaic Yôsēp̄. In Arabic, including in the Qur'an, the name is spelled يوسف or Yūsuf. The name can be translated from Hebrew יהוה להוסיף YHWH Lhosif as signifying "JEHOVAH will increase/add".

In the Old Testament, Joseph is Jacob's eleventh son and Rachel's first (Yossef ben-Yaakov in the Jewish Bible). In the New Testament, Joseph is the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the New Testament there is another Joseph as well, Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple of Jesus who supplied the tomb in which Jesus was buried.

The form "Joseph" is used mostly in English, French and German-speaking countries. The name has enjoyed significant popularity in its many forms in numerous countries, and Joseph was one of the two names, along with Robert, to have remained in the top 10 boys' names list in the US from 1925 to 1972. It is especially common in contemporary Israel, as either "Yossi" or "Yossef", and in Italy, where the name "Giuseppe" was the most common male name in the 20th century.

World music

World music is a musical category encompassing many different styles of music from around the globe, which includes many genres of non-Western music including folk music, ethnic music, traditional music, indigenous music, neotraditional music, and music where more than one cultural tradition, such as when ethnic music and Western popular music intermingle. World music's inclusive nature and elasticity as a musical category pose obstacles to a universal definition, but its ethic of interest in the culturally exotic is encapsulated in Roots magazine's description of the genre as "local music from out there". The term was popularized in the 1980s as a marketing category for non-Western traditional music.Globalization has facilitated the expansion of world music's audiences and scope. It has grown to include hybrid subgenres such as world fusion, global fusion, ethnic fusion and worldbeat.

Terminology

The term has been credited to ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, who coined it in the early 1960s at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he developed undergraduate through the doctoral programs in the discipline. To enhance the process of learning, he invited more than a dozen visiting performers from Africa and Asia and began a world music concert series. The term became current in the 1980s as a marketing/classificatory device in the media and the music industry. There are several conflicting definitions for world music. One is that it consists of "all the music in the world", though such a broad definition renders the term virtually meaningless.

Roy Ayers

Roy Ayers (born September 10, 1940) is an American funk, soul, and jazz composer and vibraphone player. Ayers began his career as a post-bop jazz artist, releasing several albums with Atlantic Records, before his tenure at Polydor Records beginning in the 1970s, during which he helped pioneer jazz-funk. He is a key figure in the acid jazz movement, which is a mixture of jazz into hip-hop and funk, and has been dubbed by many as "The Godfather of Neo Soul". He is most well known for his signature compositions "Everybody Loves The Sunshine" and "Searchin". and is also famous for having more sampled hits by rappers than any other artist.

Biography

Early life

Ayers was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in a musical family, where his father played trombone and his mother played piano. At the age of five, he was given his first pair of vibraphone mallets by Lionel Hampton. The area of Los Angeles that Ayers grew up in, now known as "South Central" but then known as "South Park", was the epicenter of the Southern California Black music scene. The schools he attended (Wadsworth Elementary, Nevins Middle School, and Thomas Jefferson High School) were all close to the famed Central Avenue, Los Angeles' equivalent of Harlem's Lenox Avenue and Chicago's State Street. Roy would likely have been exposed to music as it not only emanated from the many nightclubs and bars in the area, but also poured out of many of the homes where the musicians who kept the scene alive lived in and around Central. During high school, Ayers sang in the church choir and fronted a band named The Latin Lyrics, in which he played steel guitar and piano. His high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, produced some of the most talented new musicians, such as Dexter Gordon.