For a few hours in Greenwich Village last month, Raymond Rashid had a Rashid Music retail store going again.
The longtime Brooklyn-based Arabic music dealer, who shuttered his store last year to focus on Internet sales, had a table at the annual North African Arabic Professionals (NAAP) street fair on Great Jones Street. On display were some 75 CD and DVD titles from the approximately 840 carried online--along with flags and flag pins leftover from the store.
Artists featured included best-selling Lebanese pop songstress Najwa Karam, best-selling Egyptian dance-pop superstar Amr Diab, Arabic music/jazz fusion combo M'oudswing, and famed Lebanese female impersonator Bassem Feghali.
Rashid also showed some of the classical Arabic recordings his late father made in the 1960s.
Albert Rashid had established Rashid Sales Company in 1934 in Detroit. It remains the oldest and largest exclusive distributor of Arabic Music in North America.
But in addition to distributing Arabic music, the older Rashid also manufactured Arabic music product by buying the recordings of early Arabic musical melodramas and releasing them as records to Arabic communities in North America.
With his brother Stanley, Raymond Rashid grew the company's Brooklyn retail location, importing Arabic books and periodicals and also offering a wide variety of accessory items. It launched the first Arabic music website in 1995.
"We're hoping to put out remastered DVDs of Arabic film titles from the 1950s," says Rashid, "including a famous black-and-white Egyptian musical comedy my father had, called Treasure Amber. It showed at The Academy of Music in Brooklyn and The Institute of Art in Detroit and starred [legendary Egyptian singer/actress] Leila Mourad as Amber, the daughter of a wealthy man, whose jewelry people were trying to steal!"
Now called Rashid Music Sales Co., the online Arabic music supplier also stocks other Arabic classical greats like the one and only Om Kalsoum as well as contemporary stars like Karam.
Additionally, the company distributes its catalog digitally via CD Baby, Rhapsody and iTunes.
"I saw CD Baby had 200 downloads from Japan!" says Rashid. "Maybe next year they'll have a thousand. [Arabic music] may be a small market, but it's out there!"
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