Traditional Saudi welcome song, Jeddah

Feb 12, 2021, 03:46 PM

On a trip to Saudi Arabia, we visited the KAUST university complex, about 90 minutes north of Jeddah. As part of the evening's entertainment, we were greeted by an hour or so of traditional Saudi music, driven principally by multiple drummers and two interacting singers running through a repertoire of what were apparently well-known songs. This, the first track, containing the English words "welcome, welcome" in amongst the lyrics, was a ten-minute song that goes through several movements, but with constant drumming and singing in hypnotic loops that became magnetising and trance-like the longer the piece went on.

Recorded by Cities and Memory, November 2019.