Abaji (Lebanese musician)

In 2016 the label 1 Revolution Music, directed by trailer music composer Yoav Goren, released Abaji's work called Middle East Soundscapes.

In 2010 Abaji played for the popular Tiny Desk Concert series by NPR Music at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

In 2009, Abaji released the album Origine Orients where he sings in five languages: French, Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Armenian. This album is recorded in two days with only one take per track. Abaji usually gets himself involved thoroughly in all of the process of recording, mixing, and mastering.

In 2003 he released his second album Oriental Voyage with Network Medien record label. This is a tribute album to his great-grandmothers from Armenia and Greece. In this album he plays the oud, harp-guitar, bouzouki, sitar-guitar, daff, harmonica and flute in which songs such as Raml (Sand), Maa (Water), El Wahha (The Oasis) and Nejmet (Stars) can evoke the sounds of the desert.

This debut album won him an invitation by guitarist Jean-Félix Lalanne to participate in the event “Autour de la Guitare” in the Olympia venue in Paris. Abaji also collaborated on the album Desert Blues 2 with the song "Gibran" in tribute to poet Khalil Gibran released by Network Medien record label in 2002 which becomes an international success.

Abaji's has a mix of Oriental and Blues music in his style. He writes lyrics in Arabic, English and French. His debut album Paris-Beyrouth was released in 1996 with Francis Varis playing the accordion. One of the album's songs, Zahra Hamra was chosen for the “Planète compilation” album by Radio France International.

In February 1976 when Abaji was 17, the war in Lebanon forced him into exile. Upon his arrival in France, he started at a boarding school in a neighbourhood near Paris. That is when he began to write songs. Abaji says he was born again from that moment. As a teenager he was inspired by Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Fairuz and Ravi Shankar. He sees in Jimmy Page the perfect guitarist, for being able to experiment with both electric and acoustic guitars. Being attracted by experimentation and discoveries himself, Abaji has always found fascinating the way Page could make percussion with the strings and produce aerial sounds on an electric guitar.

Abaji was born in Beirut, from a Greek father, who left the Greek city of Smyrna in 1922 and from an Armenian-Syrian mother from Istanbul.