He tunes the oud again, and waits for the next listener no one else can see.
In Hijazi music, there’s a quarter-tone that exists nowhere on a piano—a note that slips between sorrow and longing. Western musicians call it a microtone. Locals call it the sigh of the Red Sea . Mutaz learned it from a blind virtuoso in Jeddah’s fish market, a man who claimed the note was discovered by a sailor who lost his twin brother to a monsoon. mutaz al hakami