Ihsan al-Munzir (Al-Mounzer) is a Lebanese composer and musical arranger and owner of Mounzer Super Sound.

Born in Baghdad to an Assyrian-Iraqi mother and a Lebanese father, Al-Mounzer grew up in Ghobeiri, in the suburbs of Beirut, and showed an early talent for music. He inherited a love of the arts from his father, who enjoyed listening to the greats of Arabic music and would often recite his favourite poetry to Al-Mounzer and his brother.

After his father returned from a trip to Paris and described the paintings he had seen at the Louvre, Al-Mounzer took up drawing and his father would tell everyone that his son was going to be an important artist. But it was his natural talent for music that shone through when, aged nine, he picked up an accordion his brother had received as a reward for doing well at school, and family discovered he was able to flawlessly replicate any song he heard on the radio.

His family was of relatively modest means, but his father purchased a piano on store credit so his son could study classical music at the Lebanese Conservatory. Music quickly became his life. Later on, when a woman he was engaged to asked him to choose between her and the piano, he chose the piano.

When the Beatles exploded globally in the 1960s, Al-Mounzer was instantly hooked and formed a beat band called Moonlight. Sporting slicked-back Elvis quiffs and matching preppy blazers with continental ties, the five-member group played live every weekend in mountain resorts and restaurants in Sawfar, Aley and Souk el-Gharb, where icons of Arabic music like Oum Kaltoum and Abdel Halim Hafez had performed before them.

Already making a decent living from music, Al-Mounzer quit university and, like other Lebanese artists before him, packed his bags for Europe, keen to get to the root of the “foreign music” he had come to love.

Once in Italy, he continued his studies in composition and arrangement at a music institute and performed across the country as a one-man show on piano, singing in six languages. Back home, his father was still unhappy with his son’s choice to quit university, so Al-Mounzer sent him a cheque from his earnings to prove he was doing well.

He immersed himself in Italian life, learning the language and marrying his first wife Marina, a singer he met while performing in a Florence nightclub; they had three children. Al-Mounzer had some notable successes in the Italian music scene, including an Italian version of his song Tiri Tiri Ya Tayeera, which became a famous children’s nursery rhyme.

After a decade in Europe, including a few years touring Norway and Denmark with another beat group, Sonny Trio, he moved back to Lebanon in the late 1970s.

Before the war, Lebanon already had a well-developed music industry. Now-legendary artists like the Rahbani Brothers and Fairouz were at the start of their careers and recording at the national radio station, Radio Lebanon. New Lebanese record labels, like Voix De L’Orient, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s with diverse catalogues covering everything from classical Tarab to Armenian rhythm and blues and Lebanese beat. And international labels like Phillips and EMI had Lebanese branches. Baalbeck Studios, the backbone of Lebanon’s cinematic golden age and at the time the country’s most prestigious recording studio, was where Fairouz, Samira Tawfic and Zaki Nassif all recorded.

Having been thoroughly immersed in beat music and rock and roll as a teenager, and after spending a decade performing jazz, beat and pop standards in the piano bars and nightclubs of Europe, merging Oriental and Occidental styles came naturally to Al-Mounzer.

Though he trained on the piano, he also embraced the latest music technology of the late 1970s, and it revolutionised the way he approached Middle Eastern music on his return to Lebanon.

Al-Mounzer’s use of synthesisers left a palette of futuristic sounds at his disposal and gave his Middle Eastern melody lines a modern touch. Following news of the latest synthesisers on the international market, he asked Yousef Nazzal – the owner of the Commodore Hotel, where he performed – to buy a Prophet-5 for him on a trip to the United States. Taking a monthly salary cut to pay back its $4,000 cost, Al-Mounzer installed the synthesiser at Polysound Studio.

“It was more than a synthesiser,” he remembers. “You could create new sounds, imitate instruments like the clarinet or saxophone and tune to the Arabic scales. I used to bring new sounds that had never been played in Arabic music.” Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.