EL MAHBOOB

Category: Black Life

  • Double Bar

    It’s a rare treat to get to the end of a to-do list. I have no gigs or commissions pending for 2026, and hopefully some space for some necessary personal work and growth. A five-year chapter as a composer has concluded. I had a wonderful chance to share my work broadly and be recognized for the first time. To finally be able to believe that the music I make is good.

    While I didn’t compose more frequently than I had prior to this chapter, a small handful of commissions and performances came my way. The gates definitely didn’t fly open. I still feel like an outsider, it’s not easy to shake my early experiences of exclusion and wariness of the cultural politics of classical music and organizations. But I had meaningful access to platforms that I didn’t before, and rewarding collaborations; it was proof of concept.

    I find myself needing to focus once again on survival. I’ve been working to pay the rent since I was 21 and that hasn’t changed, the bills are just much bigger with three kids, years of single parenting, and a ballooning wealth gap. And the gaps in academic training, a peer group, industry network and career experience I faced diving back into music during the pandemic made it infeasible to hustle for gigs on a level that would allow me to leave behind a 9-5 job. I’ve worked for a quarter century as an executive assistant, stuck under a glass ceiling, and those bills are no longer getting fully paid, I’m afraid to say.

    I’ll admit that as I approach 60, it’s tiring to talk about balancing: I don’t have time for a music career. I never had a music career in the first place. I can hold the idea of being an active, working composer lightly, and it will be enough. I want to compose, full stop.

    I ask myself whether I have the strength and courage to keep going as an artist. I’m composing less in recent years. I’m disinterested in aesthetic and technological flexing. It’s not the fear of failure anymore but the burning desire to take a long holiday and recharge after decades of being in survival mode.

    There are things I still want to focus on. I’ve wanted to make a professionally recorded album forever, probably more than anything else. I want to write an orchestral piece, one that sounds like me. I’ve never attended an artists’ retreat or an out of town residency; that may have to wait until I’m not juggling a day job and kids.

    I cherish the connections with performers the most, with those who have premiered my work or who I’ve performed alongside. Those who showed up to concerts. Musicians will always be my people.

    The moment in 2020 when it seemed the arts world had woken to its own anti-Blackness has long passed. I’m still here, and there are many more, incredibly gifted, queer and trans, neurodivergent, BIPOC creatives living with disabilities with us in the stream. It’s important for me to hold what came out of that moment with its full weight. I have the strength for that.

  • Kool & the Gang: Middle Years 74-78

    These are the years of Kool & the Gang you may not know as well. They’re just as monumental in shaping Black dance music, hip hop and sampling history as the early or peak years.

    Between the release of funk anthems culminating in the gold-certified Wild and Peaceful album and the start of a chart-topping, mainstream run with the platinum-certified Ladies’ Night, the band created some of their most refined, eclectic and inventive self-produced music. Sometimes they innovated; often, they borrowed from their contemporaries or leaned heavily on referencing earlier work, and they began to struggle for traction. Some critics didn’t get it. Throughout, the band’s work remained expertly crafted, soulful, joyous and stanky, with a positive spiritual message, all without a lead singer.

    While not easily defined as a style period, the middle years are fully evidenced in the six albums represented here. The band’s sound is saturated with influences, presenting new variations on other styles already in the air, then resolving back to their core jazz and funk roots. Virtually all of the music is driven by Robert “Kool” Bell’s bass, Ronald Bell’s (Khalis Bayyan’s) arrangements, tenor sax and spacy synths, George Brown’s solid, often-sampled drumming, and those signature horns.

    Everybody’s Dancin’ (excerpt) | Everybody’s Dancin’ (1978)
    L-O-V-E | Open Sesame (1976)
    Mighty Mighty High | The Force (1977)
    Universal Sound | Love & Understanding (1976)
    Ride the Rhythm | Spirit of the Boogie (1975)
    I Like Music | Everybody’s Dancin’
    Ancestral Ceremony | Spirit of the Boogie
    Gift of Love | Open Sesame
    Just Be True | The Force
    All Night Long | Open Sesame
    Summer Madness | Light of Worlds (1974)
    Here After | Light of Worlds
    Free | The Force
    Sunshine | Open Sesame
    Peace to the Universe | Everybody’s Dancin’
    Love & Understanding (extended version) | Kool & the Gang Spin Their Top Hits (1978)
    Spirit of the Boogie | Spirit of the Boogie

    All albums released on De-Lite Records

    Kool & the Gang: Middle Years 74-78

    Compiled 2021-22
    Lightly mixed tempos and keys, retaining original long fades
    August 2025

    Ibrahim El Mahboob

  • Perhaps Bells: New Piano Music by Bruce A. Russell

    Perhaps Bells: New Piano Music by Bruce A. Russell

    On November 16th, 2024, my second portrait concert “Perhaps Bells” will take place at Arraymusic, with much anticipated performances by the adventurous and multi-talented junctQín keyboard collective. This is a special program I’ve been hoping to hear since the start of my Array residency. It’s all piano solos and duos, all world premieres of work composed in the 90s and 00s when there were few audiences or concerts if any, and includes a new arrangement of Madra (originally for variable instrumentation). These pieces relate directly to my recent ones written for Array and other ensembles. They were created under the influence of American and Canadian minimalists, popular music in general, and a more expansive list that includes Wally Badarou, Harold Budd, John Cage, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Henryk Górecki, Kraftwerk, Arvo Pärt, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Erik Satie, Ann Southam, Linda Catlin Smith, and James Tenney.

    On the same weekend, Freesound will present their season opening program in the Array Space (“Music for Piano Quartet II,” November 15th and 17th), making for an exciting mini-fest of contemporary concert music.

    Stay tuned for another piano announcement (November is my piano month) and more.

  • Way Back When

    I began compiling the songs for this mixtape at the beginning of 2020, letting the playlist shift and grow over three tumultuous years. This is my “ultimate” mixtape; one that covers the formative decade of my childhood that began a half century ago (concentrating on the early 80s), and focuses on Black legends in the genres of R&B, jazz-funk, disco and boogie during the final period of analog recording. This is music that finds me most at home in my body, with familiar and positive lyrical themes. It’s a Black yacht rock movie dream.

    As with previous mixtapes, there is melodic and harmonic mixing as well as beat matching and a smooth tempo curve. I worked to create an occasionally seamless conversational flow from song to song, and was surprised that led me to include well-known anthems alongside my usual “rare groove” selections. The result is a more unified mood and less eclectic set. No effects have been used, and where possible, songs are segued naturally with little or no crossfading.

    PART I
    Barry White | Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up (1973)
    DeBarge | I Like It (1982)
    Wally Badarou | Preachin’ (1980)
    Gene Dunlap Featuring The Ridgeways | It’s Just the Way I Feel (1981)
    George Duke | Corine (1979)
    Syreeta | I Don’t Know (1977)
    Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson | Alien (Hold on to Your Dreams) (1980)
    Tania Maria | Come with Me (1983)
    Minnie Riperton | Adventures in Paradise (1975)
    Anita Baker | Do You Believe Me (1983)
    D Train | Children of the World (1983)
    Jeffrey Osborne | Ain’t Nothing’ Missin’ (1982)
    Herbie Hancock | Magic Number (featuring Sylvester) (1981)

    PART II
    The Jones Girls | Nights over Egypt (1981)
    Odyssey | Love’s Alright (1982)
    Billy Ocean | Everlasting Love (1981)
    Patrice Rushen | Get Off (You Fascinate Me) (1984)
    Brenda Russell | Way Back When (1979)
    Chaka Khan | I’m Every Woman (1978)
    Aretha Franklin | Jump to It (1982)
    Luther Vandross | I Wanted Your Love (1983)
    Bernard Wright | Move Your Body (1983)
    Dazzle | All (1979)
    Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly | Love Is the Key (1983)
    The Emotions | Here You Come Again (1981)
    Sylvia St. James | So I Say to You (1980)

    Ibrahim El Mahboob
    January 2023

  • Li’l Shadd: A Story of Ujima

    My music was included in a concert reimagining* of the picture book Li’l Shadd: A Story of Ujima, that paired the story with music by composers of African descent. The book was originally commissioned by the Saskatchewan African Canadian Heritage Museum, and the reimagining was created for the Regina Symphony Orchestra as an online education tool for their RSO in Schools program: “This story chronicles one of Saskatchewan’s first settlers of African descent, Dr. Alfred Schmitz Shadd. The concert features music by composers of African descent, performed by the Regina Symphony Chamber Players. The story is narrated by Sharon-Ann Brown. This education program includes the concert, which is available for online streaming, as well as a teacher’s guide with detailed background on the story, activities and information the contributions Black composers have made to classical music.” *The teachers’ guide download icon is below the video embed in the link.

    (Excerpt of Madra for string quartet, 3:42-4:47)

    I’m grateful to have been included in this project, and it was a special thrill to find my bio in the guide on the same page as the esteemed Florence Price!

  • Black History Month Soundstreams Feature

    As part of Black History Month 2021, Soundstreams highlighted my work. This included profiles of several of my compositions with newly written introductions by me (Kalimba Canon, Companion and Linea Nigra), which can be found here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3.