Episode: 52 — "It's Not Too Late to Start Now" · Full Episode #52
Date: Season 6
Language: English
Faraj Abyad (فرج أبيض) is a Syrian-American oud player, vocalist and composer based in New Jersey. He is a fourth-generation American whose family roots are in Aleppo (Halab). He works in the tradition of Tarab — the classical Arabic vocal-instrumental tradition associated with figures such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Sabah Fakhri — and has been described as part of a small generation of Tarab revivalists working outside the Arab world. At the time of recording he was in Dubai.
Despite the depth of his Halabi inheritance, Abyad has never visited Syria. He learned Arabic in adulthood, after his musical interest had already been formed.
Abyad grew up in the United States in a household where Arabic was not the daily language. His route into the language ran through music: he sang Tarab repertoire before he could speak the words conversationally. Formal study of Arabic came in adulthood. He framed the late start not as a limitation but as evidence that the door remains open. The episode title — "It's not too late to start now" — is drawn directly from his framing.
The pivot from interpreter to composer happened in a Brooklyn recording studio. Abyad was there to record existing repertoire. The engineer, watching the session, asked a single question: "Why don't you write a new song?" The question landed. Until that moment Abyad had understood himself as a custodian of an existing canon — singing what others had written, in a tradition where most of the great works were a century old. The engineer's prompt reframed his role: a tradition does not survive on reverence alone. It survives because new work is added to it.
See: The Brooklyn Studio
The first major composition that emerged from this redirection was a sung dialogue between two figures from eleventh-century al-Andalus: the poet Ibn Zaydun and the princess and poet Walada bint al-Mustakfi. Their relationship — recorded across the surviving fragments of their poetry — is one of the most discussed literary affairs of Andalusian history. Abyad set the exchange to music as a duet, building from the original Arabic verse. The choice was deliberate: a Halabi-American composer reaching into Andalusian repertoire, pulling forward a conversation that had been dormant in the canon for nearly a thousand years.
Tarab is not extinct. It is, however, marginal in the contemporary Arabic-language pop economy, and the technical demands — vocal control, knowledge of maqam, mastery of classical poetic meter — mean fewer practitioners enter the form each generation. Abyad places himself within a small group of musicians actively trying to extend the tradition rather than only catalogue it. His stance is conservative in form and active in production: the rules of the tradition are kept, but new compositions are written within them.
"It's never too late to learn." (EP 52)