Master musicians from the ranks of villagers, fishermen and Sufi mystics. The line-up consists of large tanbura and simsimiyya stringed instruments along with percussion, flutes and vocals. The group originates from Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal. Their music has achieved timeless perfection, with the album Between the desert and the sea appearing on the list of the 50 greatest world music recordings of all time.

Port Said lies at the Mediterranean mouth of the Suez Canal, 150 km north of Cairo. It was here that the style known as suhbagiyya, featuring the simsimiyya and tanbura stringed instruments, originated one hundred and sixty years ago. The makeshift quarters were then occupied by workers hired to build the canal. Two musical cultures clashed: migrants brought ethnically distinct music with instruments from the Egyptian South and the Red Sea coast, and these merged with the local cosmopolitan urban culture in Port Said. The founder of El Tanbura, Zakaria Ibrahim, was born here in 1952. Even at a young age, he was enchanted by suhbagiyya. During the Suez Crisis, refugees flooded the city and suhbagiyya became a voice of revolt, a situation repeated during the Arab Spring. Zakaria’s music led to social protest, and as a student activist he was even sentenced to 100 days in prison. Then in 1988, when he met a simsimiyya player, they put together a band. He spent his free time collecting songs, and funded ethnographic research out of his own pocket. Port Said then became a free trade zone, Zakaria opened a small workshop as a source of income and founded El Tanbura. Unlike other ensembles, the members do not wear matching costumes; the musicians present themselves in their everyday clothes as fishermen, repairmen or ordinary people who are also artists.