Amir ElSaffar
Amir ElSaffar (born 1977 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American jazz trumpeter and vocalist. His compositions combine jazz, classical, and traditional Arabic music. Biography ElSaffar was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1977. His mother, Ruth Anthony El Saffar, an American, was a Cervantes scholar and Jungian analyst. His father, Zuhair El Saffar, is an Iraqi immigrant and physicist. He studied classical music at Depaul University in Chicago. In 2001, he won the Carmine Caruso Jazz Trumpet Competition and the International Trumpet Guild Jazz Improvisation Competition. He studied Iraqi maqam music in Baghdad and learned to play an Iraqi instrument, the santur. He began to weave traditional Arabic music into modern jazz trumpet. In 2007, he released his debut album, Two Rivers, for Pi Recordings. For the 2020-2021 school year, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. ElSaffar has created new techniques to play microtones and ornaments that are idiomatic to Arab music but are not typically heard on the trumpet. As a composer, ElSaffar has used the microtones found in maqam music to create a unique approach to harmony and melody. In 2002 he began studying the maqam tradition of music composition in Baghdad and London, with Hamid al-Saadi,