In Birzeit, I saw Ramzi for the first time in a long while. We grabbed two minutes to play through The Violin Player (an Oud-friendly version that THJ wrote for me years ago). It’s a nostalgic, yearning little piece.
A documentary-maker accompanying him snatched a few seconds of us reading it through.
At the show in Ramallah a few days later, we played a powerful full orchestra version of Bahar (The Sea), which took me straight back to Ramzi’s first recording of it – on his acclaimed 2012 album ‘Reflections of Palestine’.
It’s a plaintive, evocative instrumental track inspired by the vastness of the oceans. A year earlier, Ramzi and Dal’Ouna travelled to London and played it with us at the opening night of the Spitalfields Festival. Listening to it again now, after so much time and history have passed, brought back all sorts of memories.
Here’s the album: