Alsir Gadoar: A Treasury of Sudanese Lyric, Music
01 July, 2019
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - As the last days of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan slip by, viewers of the Blue Nile TV feel unhappy they are going to miss the month-long entertaining music program “Songs and Songs”, and the loud laughter of its producer and presenter Alsir Ahmed Gadoar.
In the daily month-long show Gadoar has been giving an authentic chronicle of the Sudanese lyric and music for over a decade now.
Each year Gadoar chooses to edify the viewers about some of Sudan’s lyric writers and singers.
With an iron memory, Gadoar (85) enthusiastically gives a review of the history of a lyric composer or musician, the history of some of that composer’s poems or songs, the people who attended their birth and how they found their way to the national media. All through Gadoar would ask a select of young singers to perform some of these songs, he himself joining the chorus with his coarse but acceptable voice.
By the result, many of the music and lyric lovers and specialists must have acquired a lot of valuable knowledge about who is who in the worlds of lyric and music in the Sudan.
Birth And Education
Born in 1934 at Aljubarab village of Addamar District in Northern Sudan, Gadoar did not have any formal education. But he learned the Holy Koran by heart and received religious lessons at his home village khalwa (seminary), then the self-made poet and dramatist soon developed a strong will to educate himself through heavy and wide reading. This vast reading has, in its turn, helped him to promote his writing skill.
Gadoar has grown up within a big artistic community of actors, poets and singers in Addamar, a town known for its renowned men of letters like poet Mohammad Almahdi Almajthoub and Linguist Abdallah Altayeb.
His father Ahmed Gadoar was a singer and performer of sermons praising The Prophet Mohammad, known as madeeh. Both his grandfathers (his mother’s and his father’s fathers) were poets also. The same applied to his twin aunts Um Alhassan and Um Alhussein, who besides composing verse, were singers and madeeh performers also. All his three older brothers Abdelmone’m, Omar and Mohammad Ahmed Gadoar were well known poets.
After the devastating River Nile flood of 1946 Gadoar moved with his family to the nearby village of Alsha’dainab and then to the City of Omdurman (across the White Nile from Khartoum).
In the early 1950s Gadoar made acquaintance with the symbols of Sudanese lyric at the time like Ibrahim Alabbadi, Obaid Abdelrahman, Sayyid Abdelaziz, Aljaghraiw, Mohammad Abdallah Alummi, Mohammad Waddalradi and others whose company benefited him a good deal.
Gadoar the Dramatist
Then Gadoar found his way to Sudan national radio and worked with a group of actors and drama producers in the presentation of radio sketches aired within other radio programs like the family, women, children, cooperation, agricultural extension and health education programs. The list of those dramatists included Osman Hommaida, Abdelwahhab Alja’afari, Alfadil Saeed, Ahmed Aatif and Ismael Khorsheed. And when the Sudan TV was launched in the early 1960s, Gadoar took part in the presentation of some drama sketches (on air at that time).
Gadoar had written a number of plays that include Almusmar (the Nail), acted by Ali Mahdi in the 1980s, beside ‘The Man Who Laughed Last’, and ‘The Fourth Honeymoon’. Within his acting and drama career, Gadoar in the 1960s joined many theatre troupes in regional tours when, beside his acting roles, he wrote descriptions of these shows in the press.
His Lyric
Besides, Gadoar had composed a lot of successful lyrics sung by leading singers like Ibrahim Alkashif, Salah Ibn Albadya, Mohammad Mirghani, Salah Mohammad Eisa and AlAagib Mohammad Hassan.
Algerian singer Warda Aljaza’eriyya had performed his poem ‘Ask the Rose’ and Syrian Singer Zaina Aftemyous had performed his poem ‘Asmar Jameel’, which was also already sung by Sudan’s iconic Singer, the late Ibrahim Alkashif.
In the early 1970s Gadoar moved to live with his Egyptian wife and his four daughters Thurayya, Amal, Zainab and Nabeela, working for the Sudan Voice Radio in Cairo. He is now on the shuttle between Khartoum and Cairo, in pursuit of his artistic career.
In the meantime Gadoar has published four books documenting and chronicling Sudanese lyric and music.
Gadoar is also a famed journalist, specializing in writings about drama, lyric and music and, very often, football.
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