عبده العماري

Abdou El Omari (1945, Tafraout - 2010, Casablanca) was a Moroccan musician, composer, keyboardist and producer. He is seen as one of the pioneers to merge modern musical styles with traditional Moroccan music. He belongs to a generation of musicians who revolutionized Moroccan music bringing it to wider horizons without altering the soul. From many, under the proposed sounds, he is considered a pioneer of Moroccan psychedelia. His musical career has developed at first fairly convectional. He was a member of several orchestras, including the most important was certainly the Royal Orchestra. He served for a time his own flair to the group "Al Ayady At Dahabiyya" (Golden Hands) of Casablanca before devoting himself to the realization of his original compositions. In 1976 he made his first and only solo album entitled "Nuits d'Ete" published for the record label Disques GAM. The album consists of seven pieces and offers an innovative sound to the Moroccan reality. The keyboard of Abdou El Omari takes on a real journey through the many traditional rhythms creating strange sounds taste spatial traits. To listen carefully it is clear that almost all the samples of what is the musical traditions of Morocco is represented here and manipulated through echoes and various filters. The album (highly sought and hard to find) has become over the decades a real fetish whose prices in the collectors' market have touched astonishing figures. From the album were extracts two 7 "respectively containing the songs" Fatine / Layali Saif "and" Rajaat Laayoun / Hind ". The solo career Abdou El Omari in fact ran out with this work. His activities in the field of music continued as researcher in the broad field of the Moroccan musical heritage and occasionally collaborated with some actresses and singers which include Laila Ghofran, Fatima Makdadi and Aicha El Waad. The most famous collaboration (and fruitful) still remains the one that occurred in 1977 with Naima Samih. The collaboration of these two artists has spawned two 7 " that have become over time (like his solo album) real collector's items. Remained for many years in the shadows, Abdou El Omari died in 2010 following a long illness. His body was buried at the cemetery Errahma in Casablanca at the presence of friends and family. "In 2016 and 2017 the Belgian record label Radio Martiko reissued Abdou's first solo album "Nuit's d'Eté" and two other unreleased albums, which were recorded somewhere between 1976 and 1980 in the Boussiphone studios in Casablanca. The first unreleased one is a full album with Naima Samih and some members of the National Radio Orchestra of Morocco and the other one is Abdou's second solo album "Nuits de Printemps", which is another experimental masterpiece. Gam Boujema, the owner of Disques Gam and producer of these records seemed to be uncertain about the recording dates. Also the line up of musicians playing on the 3 albums has remained in obscurity. Until now no reliable sources could be found to provide exact information. The second and third album were basically only released on a very limited amount of cassette tapes. The testpressings for a vinyl edition were produced, but never made it to an actual release, because the record industry collapsed in that specific period. Abdou's album with Naima Samih was distributed in Europe on cassette tape under licence of Boussiphone. A few very rare cassette tapes and reels with other unreleased recordings of Abdou El Omari are known to exist." (Fred Kramer - Radio Martiko).