Hotter Than July! Part I
#VictoriaInBeirut
On July 1, I flew to Beirut, Lebanon to perform with Maysaa Karaa, a Los Angeles based Lebanese-American Singer-Songwriter. She’s already had some success in the USA, as one of her recordings (an Arabic adaptation of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit) was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2015.
Mayssa and her producer / co-writer Rich Jacques recently completed her debut album, “Simple Cure“, and I was one of several artists invited to perform with her in concert in her home country. Her first concert. Sold out. Probably around 2,000 people. Pretty amazing success for an amazing young lady. Congratulations Mayssa!
The concert was held at the Zouk Mikael International Festival, in a stunning Roman-style amphitheater. The band was incredible, loaded with USA based musicians who’ve toured with some of the world’s greatest artists, including David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Stevie Wonder: Carmine Rojas (our MD), Scott Page, Marcus Nand, Rich Jacques and Neal Daniels. We were joined by a group of incredible Middle Eastern instrumentalists, including Naseem Alatrash, Layth Sidiq, Tony Barhoum, Gilbert Mansour and a few others, whose names I don’t recall…oops!
I had such a great time, eating delicious meals (with plenty of vegetarian options! I was so thrilled!), meeting beautiful, kind , music-living people (Mayssa’s friends and family are gems), and performing incredible music while singing background vocals in English, Spanish and Arabic. I felt so international! 😉
If you have a Facebook account, you can see part of the show here
and a concert news repot by FutureTV :: Group here
It’s in Arabic, but even if you don’t speak the language, it’s a cool video to watch, with snippets from the performance and interviews with Mayssa and the band.
Thank you, Mayssa, Michel, Mark, Salim and everyone at the Zouk Mikael International Festival for a most beautiful experience. I can’t wait to return to Beirut!
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2017 at 6:45 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.