the man with the guitar
And the more I love this instrument, the more it gives back to me.
The first time I learned of him, we were sipping mocktails at the Guilt and Co when my mother leaned over and whispered in my ear that the band on stage reminded her of Omar Khorshid. I’ll look him up, I said, transfixed by the people on stage.
They say he was the first to bring electric guitar sound to the Egyptian music scene but they mean that he was the first one to do it right.
The piano is part of the furniture in your childhood home and the old man himself is an artist, so it does not take long before you’re playing the guitar as a single-digited child.
Your fingers must cramp up for however long it is you are spending with it, day in and day out, when your mother comes storming into your room and sends it flying out from the balcony. It is your punishment for abandoning your studies to play such a silly instrument.
But there’s a local store waiting to rent out another guitar to you and there’s a school in London waiting to teach you classical music and there’s an orchestra in Cairo waiting for you to popularise guitar solos in the Middle East and there’s a Jimmy Carter in Washington waiting for you to play at a ceremony for the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
A man on a talk show asks Omar how he can get the guitar to play all these sounds, the classical and the Western and the Oriental. The scepticism is fair. We thought that the electric guitar was for people who looked like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.
“I really love the guitar”, replies Omar with a smile that makes me think that it was important for his first guitar to be thrown out from the balcony. “And the more I love this instrument, the more it gives back to me. And I also feel like it gives back to anyone who is truly devoted to their art”.
A sweet story, bittersweet only because he doesn’t get to learn what it’s like to turn forty and we don’t get to learn what else the guitar could’ve given back to him.
I’m thinking of you tonight, OK.