Customer Reviews

Princess of Cairo

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I purchased this CD for my dance class, and was extremely pleasantly surprised by how fabulous it is! Although the music is older, the recordings are quite sharp and modern. The CD contains two full routines, one for Nagwa Fouad, the other for Souhair Zaki. You can actually see clips of these dancers dancing to this music on various videos. Each routine is about 20 minutes.

The Princess of Cairo routine has an air of a fabulous queen entering the stage. It starts with a short taxim and goes into a classical Arabic piece that can be used for an entrance. The first minute and a half are a great opportunity to enter with your veil and swish it around for a bit before getting into the meat of this song, which contains some gorgeous accordion baladi sections. It is followed by the rather odd Waves of the Sea, then a hauntingly beautiful Nay taxim. Next, a short Khaliji bit adds some real variety, as I haven't seen Khaliji sections in most Egyptian routines. Then there are two taxims, and finally Set El Hosen. The Kanoun taxim is actually a chiftetelli.

Banat Eskanderia is my favorite routine on the CD. It starts out with another beautiful Kanoun taxim, and then goes into the upbeat Sea of Alexandria. Like Nagwa's Music, this song starts out with an upbeat malfouf, but also has slow sections. Lots of great variety to show off your dancing. The Nay taxim is next, followed by the Music of Souhair Zaki, which reminded me of a little of Hassan Ya Ghoulli. I haven't fully formed my opinion yet on Sea Breeze, whether I like it or not. The Taksim Accordion is very juicy. My feelings on the Tabla Solo is that it's just too short for a drum solo. But at least this routine has a drum solo.

Overall, it's a great CD for dancing, and because the routines are cut into separate tracks, you can mix and match with your other music, or do what I did - make "minishows" with only sections of the routine.

If you like Arabic music, then this CD is a must have in your music collection.