Munir Bashir

Few oud players—or Arab classical instrumentalists of any kind, for that matter—have had the kind of influence that Iraqi musician Munir Bashir had during his lifetime. Bashir spent much of his life as a kind of global ambassador for and inveterate champion of Arab classical music in general and for Iraqi music specifically.

Born in 1930 in the city of Mosul in north Iraq to a family of mixed Assyrian and Kurdish heritage, Munir Bashir began to play the oud at a very young age under his father's tutelage. (His brother Jamil was also a noted oudi.) He went on to study for six years at the Baghdad Institute before moving to Budapest to complete a doctorate in musicology. An astonishing master of Arab classical music's maqamat tonal system, he was also a superb improviser who really played with the architecture of performance. Bashir was unafraid to extend performances to unusual lengths, to explore dynamic range or to confound listeners' expectations about the music's climaxes.

Bashir passed away in 1997. An excellent and relatively easy-to-find recording of his is L'Art d'ud (Art of the Oud), which he recorded for the French label Ocora. —Anastasia Tsioulcas