Snap shot about Ahmed Harfoush

With a long career emerging from the city of Cairo, Ahmed became the premier jazz vocalist and entertainer in Egypt.

Musical Niche:
Jazz, Egyptian pop classics, electro.

Artist’s Story:

Ahmed Harfoush is a London based Egyptian jazz vocalist. Spending most of his childhood in the United States, Ahmed listened to a lot of the classic American song book which started his love for jazz music, as well as listening to pop and rock music such as The Carpenters and Neil Diamond. He grew up in a musical house where his aunt listened to rock, his mother taught him how to dance the cha-cha and the tango, and his father bought him a keyboard to explore playing different melodies.

When he was 17, his father encouraged him to join a choir, so he started with a formation called The Cairo Singers. He learned how to read music, perform on stage, and was exposed to choral singing when rehearsing at the Italian Cultural Centre. Once he felt confident with his singing, Harfoush formed a band called The 12 Strings with a few guitarists, and it was at one of their performances at the University of Cairo that he caught the ear of the university’s music department head, Larry Caitlin, who then invited Harfoush to join his choir, the Osiris Singers, and it was here that he was introduced to musical theatre and jazz singing. This reignited his love for the jazz music that he’d heard as a child in the United States.

In 2001, the Cairo Jazz Club opened and Harfoush went to many gigs there and started to rub shoulders with some of Egypt’s best musicians. He was introduced to, and later joined, a band called Riff.  They eventually changed their name to The Riff Band and started booking gigs all over town.

Harfoush’s first international jazz performance was performing “The Cole Porter Song Book” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011. He recorded his first original song “Music Makes Me Swing” in 2007 with American producer Darryl Kennedy as part of a compilation album called Voices from the Sand.

Harfoush has performed in Paris, London, Berlin, Milan, Larnaca, Athens, Vienna, Slovenia, Budapest, Dubai, Prague, Damascus with New York City’s Chris Byars Jazz Quartet, Skopje with the Macedonia Philharmonic, and in Cambridge with the Cambridgeshire Youth Orchestra led by conductor Timothy Redmond.

In 2015, he founded the Harfoush Band whilst in London and then went on to form the Egyptian Jazz Projekt (EJP) in 2016 which features jazz arrangements of classic Egyptian pop songs mixed with the American songbook. He has performed with the EJP at various festivals and venues in London, Paris, and Egypt.

Studio Recordings:

• “Music Makes Me Swing” part of compilation album Voices from the Sand (2007)
• Tea For Two, The Riff Band, Cairo
• “Sweet Little Sin” single (2018)