Suleiman Al Shaar

Attabat & Mawaweel & Mijana

Artist Origin

More Info

Suleiman Al-Shaar was born in Fajleet village near the coastal city of Tartous, Syria. His name has been associated with attaba since his beginnings in the early 1990s. Across the many years of his career, he has continued to perform at weddings and public occasions throughout Syria. He has also recorded numerous albums, relying on the traditional melodic templates of attaba and folk dabke. Al-Arz Records, owned by Bassam Zidan, collaborated with Al-Shaar throughout his career in the 1990s – recording and documenting most of his live performances, and producing many of his original works. Al-Shaar has collaborated with a number of local attaba poets such as Talib Shahoud and Riad Al-Ahmad. There are no Dabke songs featured on this tape by Al Shaar. Rather, as the title shows, it features mawal, attaba, and mijana, which are considered different sub-genres in Syrian music, though all of them fall under the category of slow mawal. But the expert ear can distinguish between these subcategories easily, just as Al Shaar is able to perform them all perfectly. The mijana, for example, is a mawal divided into three lines. It always begins with the same word, and the first and third line end with the same rhyme (na). As for attaba in its traditional form, it consists of four lines, the first three of which share the same rhyme, and it breaks in the fourth line. In general, variations and violations of these rules sometimes occur in live performance, and not all shaabi singers abide by them.