"We are unskilful definers." --Emerson


"Umm Kulsoum was Edith Piaf and Maria Callas, Frank Sinatra and Luciano Pavarotti rolled into one. To 150 million Arabs she was the Star of the East, the Nightingale of the Nile, the Lady of Arabic Song. To Cairenes she was simply al-Sitt--The Lady.

For the thirty-seven years before her retirement in 1973, listeners across the Arab world tuned radios to Cairo on the first Thursday night of every month. This was when Umm Kulsoum broadcast live from the Qasr al-Nil movie theater, in marathon concerts that often stretched to six hours in length, ending at three or four in the morning. ...Her powers of improvisation were so great that it is said she never sang a phrase the same way twice. ...Her funeral in 1975 surpassed President Nassar's. ...the crowd kidnapped her body, carried it the full three miles from Tahrir Square to the Mosque of al-Husayn, and would have interred Umm Kulsoum next to the head of the Prophet's grandson if the imam of the mosque had not pleaded with them..." --Max Rodenbeck, Cairo (1998)


Tannu Tuva on Metafilter.


--And Sumerian.