A Rendezvous with Omar Souleyman

Omar Souleyman sits next to me, a complete Syrian mystery.

He doesn’t speak anything close to English, and the dark glasses and floor length robe he wears hides any sort of body language. The closest translator we could find drove up from Ithaca,and sits on the other side of the tight circle we’ve formed in the green room of the Paradise Rock Club in Allston, Massachusetts. Downstairs, a drunk post-gig crowd cheers at the Celtics game.

Souleyman began his career in 1994 as a wedding singer in the town of Ras al-Ayn, Syria, close to the borders of Iraq and Turkey. He teamed up with local keyboardist Rizan Say’id soon after, and the two began
making a heavy fusion of the traditional dance music of their country, Dabke, and western house, pop, and EDM. Over the next few years, he built a following through bootlegged performances of his wedding shows. Today, he says, he rarely leaves his home because of his popularity.

But here, in the United States, Souleyman is an unknown. The crowd at the gig is surprisingly small, and many of the Bostonians present find it hard to find their dancing shoes. However, the Syrian-American
immigrants in the audience went wild for the fast-paced, epic dance music.But Souleyman was subdued, smiling slightly as he overlooked the party.

In the green room after the show he sits, reserved, speaking conservatively and only when spoken to. He has a lot of family at home in Syria, and stays mum on the ongoing violence in his country. He’ll only comment that he has foregone recording for the last year. “I feel like it is not right,” he says.