Remembering El Rayes Zakaria, Egypt’s folk music revolutionary giant

Zakaria Ibrahim’s life saw the rise and fall of simsimiyya music in Port Said, before its reemergence in the revolution.

The ancient-looking PA system was not meant to handle the immensity of sound produced by famed Nile Delta folk music ensemble El Tanbura as they warmed up for a show on the streets of Ismailia on a warm summer night in 2019 – one of several shows in the Suez Canal’s major towns marking 30 years since El Tanbura’s founding.

The volume and distortion made for a mash-up of the traditional music of the Delta with the signature sonic footprint of mahraganat, the contemporary urban youth music that rose from outdoor weddings in working-class neighbourhoods to take Egypt and much of the Middle East by storm during the last decade.

Overseeing the warmup with his characteristic smile was legendary musician Zakaria Ibrahim – El Rayes (a ship captain or a boss in general), the “godfather of popular art”, the “Pyramid of popular culture” – who passed away in Cairo on February 12 at the age of 72.

Zakaria founded El Tanbura in 1988 after struggling for nearly a decade to find players of the simsimiyya, one of the world’s oldest instruments. Sometimes called a box lyre, the simsimiyya is the smaller cousin of the tanbura, a five-stringed lap harp with roots stretching from ancient Egypt – it appears on art going back to the Middle Kingdom, about 2000 BCE – to India.

Rayes Zakaria’s work to revive interest in ancient instruments made him a giant of Egyptian, African and world music.