"I am not the musician, He (God) is the musician," explains acclaimed oud virtuoso, Hamza El Din. "I'm just the instrument holder and he's playing the instrument." El Din's unlikely musical voyage began more than three decades ago, growing up the village of Troshka, in the Nubian region of Northern Sudan. It was there that he got his start in music, playing the tar (a round frame drum). He didn't begin playing the oud until much later, when he was an engineering student in Cairo. He studied music formally in Rome where he focused on composition, focused on learning how to make ancient instruments sound new and, upon his return to North Africa, began collection regional folk songs traveling through Nubia on the back of a donkey. "It was a most interesting and educational time in my life," explains El Din. "I was a kind of ethnomusicologist without knowing it." In that period, he began collecting lullabies and old folksongs from across Nubia. "I gained the indescribable joy of discovering a hidden treasure," he adds.

Well before there were any world music bins in Tower or the Virgin Megastore, before there were Tower Records and Virgin Megastores, and even before there were even world music bins, El Din got his break in the US market. The year was 1964 when the young Nubian was invited to perform at the Newport Folk Festival. It was there that he began attracting a huge crossover audience, including the Joan Baez and the Grateful Dead (El Din appeared on stage with the Dead countless times and even organized the Grateful Dead's Egyptian Tour). The event led to a recording contract with Nonesuch Records to produce The Waterwheel, and El Din has been on a roll ever since.

In the decades that followed, Hamza El Din has collaborated with Mickey Hart, The Kronos Quartet, and pianist W.A. Mathieu, expanding the horizons of the oud. His most recent CD, A Wish (Sounds True 1999) is based on one of El Din's lifelong desires, preserving Nubian culture. The album is dedicated to music of El Din's village, Troshka. After a career broadened by touring throughout Europe, North America, and Japan, and a variety of collaborations, A Wish is El Din's return to Nubia. One of the most personal songs on the recording is Gala 2000, El Din's apology for "our planet's degradation." A fierce opponent to the construction of the Aswan dam (and the countless homes and cultures displaced as a result of the project), protecting the environment has always been close to El Din's heart. "For centuries we had been so engaged in technological development that we had forgotten to think about the earth we we're exploiting," he explains. "Maybe it is too late to get back the old beautiful earth despite our efforts. 'Gala 2000' was written as an apology to the earth for this reason. I believe that the earth is not ours, we are just lent this earth from our ancestors for our future generations."

Contributed by: Dan Rosenberg