Qaraami

Qaraami is the Somali love-song style that grew up around the kaban, the Somali oud, in the dance halls of 1940s and 1950s Mogadishu. *Abdullahi Qarshe*, the father of modern Somali music, introduced the kaban as a solo accompanying instrument and set the template: a lone singer-poet, gently plucked strings and long, ornamented melodies carrying lyrics of longing and devotion. Players such as *Ali Feiruz* and *Mohamed Nahari* refined the idiom, and its melodies later fed the electric bands of the 1970s and 1980s — *Iftin Band*, *Dur-Dur Band* — who fused qaraami with funk, reggae and disco on the famous Mogadishu hotel circuit.