Described as “the celebrated trumpeter and composer who explores vital
connections between jazz and Arabic music” (New York Times), and “uniquely
poised to reconcile jazz and Arabic music,” (The Wire), Amir ElSaffar is an Iraqi-
American composer, trumpeter, santur player, and vocalist working at the
intersections of jazz, Western classical, and Maqam music of Iraq and the Middle
East. ElSaffar is an expert jazz trumpeter with a classical background, who has
created techniques to play microtones and ornaments idiomatic to Arabic music
that are not typically heard on the trumpet. He is also one of the few living
performers of the centuries-old Iraqi maqam tradition, which he sings and plays
on the santur (Iraqi hammered dulcimer). As a composer, ElSaffar has created a
unique microtonal language that merges the Arabic maqam modal system with
jazz and Western harmony, and has premiered new works at the Newport Jazz
Festival, Berlin Jazz Festival, Dream City Festival (Tunisia), Festival d’Aix-en-
Provence, Festival d’Avignon (France), Flamenco Biennale (Netherlands), and
the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, among others.

Over the past two decades, ElSaffar has worked tirelessly to bring the Maqam
music of the Arab and Muslim world, and one of the great musical legacies of
humanity, to audiences worldwide through various ensembles and collaborations.
He tours internationally with his six-piece Two Rivers and 17-piece Rivers of
Sound Orchestra, and has created works for symphony orchestras, string
quartets and small chamber ensembles, large and small jazz ensembles, Middle
Eastern music ensembles, as well as hybrid projects with Raga, Flamenco, and
Sub-Saharan African trance music, and was the composer-in-residence of the
Transcultural Music program at the Royaumont Foundation in France (2016-
2019). He has performed in the ensembles of Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Danilo
Perez, Vijay Iyer, and played Improvised Trumpet in Anthony Davis’s opera, X:
The Life and Times of Malcolm X at the Metropolitan Opera. ElSaffar is also the
santur player and musical director for the only living Maqam singer to master the
entire Iraqi Maqam repertoire, Hamid Al-Saadi.

ElSaffar’s awards and honors include the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award
(2013), United States Artists Fellowship (2018), and a Hodder Fellowship at
Princeton University (2020-2021). He has just completed an IDEA residency at
Opera America (2023-2024), in support of his forthcoming Maqam opera in
Arabic. In 2023, he began a new initiative, Maqam Studio, which has a mission of
preserving and fostering the development of Iraqi Maqam and related practices in
Brooklyn, NY, and in Iraq and the Arab world.