In 2001 a friend handed me a copy of a disc by the violinist and composer Naim Karacand’s on the Alamphon label with his “Raks Araby” on the A-side and “Kamanagah” on the flip. That friend was so enamored with Karacand's playing — "like mother's milk," he once said — that when he traveled to Aleppo, Syria where Karacand was born on May 23, 1891, and where my friend's paternal family also originated, he had gone to the trouble of finding Karacand's baptismal certificate. With the massive destruction of Aleppo during the 2012-16 era of the ongoing Syrian Civil War, we could not guess whether that document still exists now or what else might remain there of the life that Karacand left behind when he emigrated at the age of 18. A significant number of puzzle pieces have remained in the United States and Brazil where he lived his extraordinarily productive life.

Karacand departed from Beirut on September 2, 1909, arriving at Ellis Island on October 10th. His younger brother Hicmat (b. Oct. 15, 1898) arrived a month later on November 27. By April of 1910, the two boys - Naim 18, and Hicmat 12 - were living at 51 Hick St. in Brooklyn in a boarding house run by Naoum Mrayatti (who was married with three children) on a block that was about half Syrian and about half Anglo-Irish. Naim told a census taker then that he dealt in oriental goods. Peddling was the first job of many Syrian immigrants of his generation.

In 1912 Naim married a woman named Najeema, and they had three children, Albert (b. July 25, 1913), Margaret (b. June 8, 1915), and James (b. Sept. 1917). By 1915, he had brought his mother Sucen (Susie) and father Abdullah to the U.S. In short order, Abdullah sued a railroad company for injury and was awarded $916.40 - over $27,000 in 2024 money. Within the next couple of years, Abdullah was occupied in the garment business, hemstitching. Hicmat wound up working in a silk factory. Syrians in Manhattan had established themselves in the garment trade with the Macksoud family in particular having earned a fortune in the first decade of the 20th century, having worked, litigated, and married themselves into the position of New York’s “lingerie kings.”

Naim Karacand’s first certain recordings were at a March 1915 session as an accompanist to the prolific singer Nahum Simon (b. 1891, Tripoli, present-day Lebanon) at Columbia Records Woolworth Building studio on Broadway, only a ten-minute walk from Manhattan’s Little Syria. By August 1916, he recorded for Columbia under his own name. It’s hard to be certain how many records he made since they were often issued anonymously, often simply as “Syrian Trio” on the labels of the discs, but his band with kanunist Shehade Ashear (aka Shehadi Ashkar) and oudist Abraham Halaby, both of whom were Halabi (Aleppan) Jews, or in some cases oudist Toufic Gabriel Moubaid (born ca. 1887-88 in Tripoli, Lebanon and then working as an elevator operator at the Faour Brothers’ Bank on Washington St. in Little Syria), certainly cut scores -- potentially hundreds -- of discs as an accompanist to the overwhelming majority of Arabic-language singers who recorded in New York during the period 1914-21.

The first reference that we have to Karacand as a live performer appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on January 20, 1919 and belies his prominence among his contemporaries and the charitable efforts that Syrian-Americans remained committed to in the wake of the First World War:
“An entertainment and dance was given Saturday evening by the Aleppo Relief Committee at Masonic Temple, Clermont and Lafayette Aves. The opening address was made by Gabriel Araktounji and a chorus chant, welcoming the guests, by a chorus of women’s voices.
A farce sketch called Camp Pain Meeting was much appreciated. Several numbers of Oriental music were rendered. Another feature everyone enjoyed was the clever dancing of Baby Billie Crampton. [...] The leader of the Oriental music was Naim Karacand and the leader of the singing was Constantine Soos.”

Syria lost over 18% of its population during WWI, the largest per-capita loss of life of any country during the war, much of it as a result of widespread starvation that killed half of the population of Mount Lebanon. Massive relief campaigns for the Armenian and Syrian populations of the Ottoman Empire were established in the mid-and late-10s in the U.S., providing the equivalent of millions of dollars in aid in the first significant public philanthropic effort for a foreign population by U.S. citizens.

Domestic strife, meanwhile, dominated Karacand's life for two years in clear view of his neighbors. In the Fall of 1921, Nejeema filed for legal separation. The following day, Naim filed for divorce. Then, on November 1, 1921, the Standard Union in Brooklyn picked the story up and ran a short column titled “Says Perfumery Man Stole His Wife’s Love.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran three more pieces in the next month and the lives of their family changed for the worse, irreversibly.

In early November of 1921, it was reported that Naim Karacand, a music professor of 129 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, was suing Charles Rahayel of 358 Flatbush Avenue, a perfumist connected to the Rahayel Freres of Paris and former business associate of Karacand’s, for the the “alienation of affections” of Karacand’s wife Najeema, now living at 101 Sterling Place, for $20,000 (over $250,000 now). Karacand alleged publicly that Rahayel “exercised mysterious influence” over her and “won complete control over her” and said that Rahayel advised him not to live with her “as her husband for a period of eight months, saying she was a very sick woman.” Karacand was further quoted as saying, “During this period, I afterward learned the defendant carried out the most extreme form of love with my wife and went to her alone in my home.” He said that Najeema was “charmed away by his secret and mysterious perfumes and love powders besides [Rahayel’s] lavishing more material gifts upon her.” Rahayel was wealthy. In addition to his connection with the Rahayel Frerers of Paris (established in 1901 and dealing in exotically named scents such as Imperial Turkish Bouquet, Lebanon Rose, and Assad Ben Harem), Rahayel had also patented a zinc soap in 1904 and a piano bench in 1905.

Within a few weeks, things had gotten ugly. Police arrested Naim from his bed and took him to jail for contempt of court after he failed to pay the court-ordered $ 20-a-week alimony to Najeema. Her lawyers announced to the press that Karacand’s suit against Rahayel and his divorce action were “actuated by revenge.” By the end of the year Charles Rahayel’s wife Adelaide told the press that he only gave her $10 a week for herself and 3 children and that Charles “has long been too friendly with” Najeema Karacand who “spends most of her time at Rahayel’s store and laboratory.” The Times Union wrote that the Rahayels spoke only through their eldest son and that Charles had forbidden Adelaide to read any books or papers “as she has enough to do around the house.” Rahayel arraigned a clerk in the office of Karacand’s lawyer for having supposedly falsified documents regarding Rahayel’s finances.

Naim and Najeema appeared in court twice in January 1922 before their divorce hearing was held on February 2. Najeema was carried into the courtroom and kept perfume-soaked cloths on her forehead, her head resting on her brother’s shoulder for the proceedings. Naim won the divorce.

At the beginning of April 1922, Najeema fought to overturn the divorce, accompanying her motion with a publicity campaign. She and her lawyers announced to the press that they have affidavits from landlords that she never lived with Rahayel, that she has affidavits from doctors stating that she was too ill to defend herself during the proceedings, that she had a letter written by one of Naim’s lawyers at his behest begging her to return to him after he had filed for divorce, and that one of Naim’s witnesses had been offered money to testify against her. Naim, she said, had perjured himself and had cheated on her. After another appearance by both of them, the divorce was finally settled on February 7, 1923, in his favor. There would, the judge said, be a later hearing to settle the custody of their daughter.

After the February 1923 divorce ruling, in the hallway of the courthouse, Najeema Karacand swung her handbag and struck Genevieve O’Connor, the secretary of Naim’s lawyer, knocking her down. Naim’s brother Hicmat then punched Najeema, knocking her unconscious. Two different descriptions of the scene, after Najeema regained consciousness, appeared in the press the next day. In one account both she and Hicmat were arrested on the spot. In the other, Najeema demanded that Hicmat be arrested and was told that she could file a complaint at another courthouse, where she was then transported.

We do not know where Albert, Margaret, and James were during this two-year trauma except for a brief notice on November 25, 1922, that eight-year-old Margaret had earned a place on the second-grade honor roll at the St. Joseph’s Home orphanage on Long Island. All three children spent time in Catholic orphanages in the decade that followed. Through the Depression, Najeema ran a boarding house at 336 51st St. in Brooklyn. The children were sometimes required to clean up after the boarders. There were times that they rummaged for food in the garbage. Najeema eventually remarried and had more children.

March 9, 1923, the court heard the case of Naim Karacand vs Charles Rahayel for $20,000. At the time of this writing, we have yet to see documentation of the outcome of that suit.

Throughout the divorce, Naim recorded dozens of performances for the independent Maloof and Macksoud labels that had started up on Washington St. in Manhattan’s Little Syria, accompanying popular singers including Selim Domani, Andrew Mekanna, and Louis Wardiny. Immediately following the Great War and the foundation of the state of Lebanon, those in the Syrian diaspora were given three years to declare their intention to repatriate to either Syria or Lebanon. Karacand chose to declare his intent to naturalize as an American citizen on July 10, 1923 with the oudist Toufic Moubaid and a dancer and actress named Anna Athena Arcus of 806 62nd St. Brooklyn signing the document as his witnesses.

Anna Athena Arcus was born October 26, 1885, in Mersin, Turkey, about 200 miles west of Aleppo. She arrived in the U.S. on June 15, 1900, from Liverpool, England with her first husband with whom she’d already lived in the Hebrides of Scotland. Her son Edgar Douglas Hamatie was born July 8, 1906, in New Haven, Connecticut a few months before her 16th birthday. She divorced her first husband and remarried an American citizen, Arthur Laurenson Arcus, a chief steward five years her senior within two years. In 1913, a West Hartford paper reported that her troupe in the midway of the Connecticut Fair “attracted the attention of the authorities. What was that strange music issuing from the canvas walls? Surely, such suggestive chords ought not to be allowed on the grounds, and the officials one and all, piled into the tent. The sight that met their eyes, they afterward said, beggared description. A sloe-eyed - no we can not call her a beauty - damsel was posturing in filmy draperies on a platform, making love, so ’tis said, to a snake, while another brunette, with a waist cut lower than even Newport allows, and well, practically a slit skirt, sang an air to the tune furnished by tom-toms. It was too much for West Hartford, though some of the officials admitted they had seen worse elsewhere, and they left the tent declaring it had got to stop.”

Anna made her own petition for naturalization on May 23, 1924, giving her occupation as “actress,” and she was granted citizenship in August 1925 at which point she was 39 years old and living with her 23-year-old son, a salesman, at 731 48th St. in Brooklyn. Naim was not one of her witnesses, but their lives remained intertwined for the next forty-five years.

In February 1925 Naim’s mother Sucen died, and then in August 1928, his son Albert died at the age of 15. He made no appearances on records and we have no other documentation of his activites during those years.

Princess Anna Athena Arcus, as she was billed, danced at the World Fair-style Pacific Southwest Exhibition in Long Beach California in August 1928. Karacand may have been with her then, but by 1930-32 they were both in Los Angeles, where Naim was a consultant in films, working on the musical arrangements for Renegade, The Barbarian, Mata Hari starring Greta Garbo, and Morocco starring Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich. (Footage shot of Anna Arcus dancing for Morocco appears to have been edited down to a single shot of her hands.) Meanwhile, Anna performed in L.A. nightclubs accompanied by Naim. By 1933 they were back in New York, where Karacand led the orchestra on WHOM and WWRL’s Friday night radio show “Arabian Nights,” which ran uninterrupted for over 25 years. During 1936-37 Naim went to Brazil for the wedding of his brother Chukri Caracante (b. 1896; d. 1971). Chukri, a musician himself, had arrived in Sorocaba, Sao Paulo, Brazil in September 1925, joining his cousin Jorge Caracante, after having spent 18 years in Sudan and one year in the U.S. (Jorge Caracante made a brief appearance in Brooklyn in January of 1925, performing a tango with a woman named Sarah Berk to a gathering of the Syrian Catholic Association.)  In April of 1937, six months before he returned to Brooklyn from Brazil, a celebration of Naim’s music was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At 45 years old, Naim was adored and missed in his adopted home.

Through the 1940s and ‘50s, Naim continued to perform on the radio and recorded for independent labels including Alamphon, founded by Fred (Farid) Alam (b. 1893) based a few blocks down from Naim’s old home on Atlantic Avenue. He played almost constantly alongside the big names of the Arab-American music world of the time: Naif Abgy, Anton Abdelahad, Eddie “the Sheik” Kochak, Mohammed el-Bakkar, Hanaan, Fatat Lebnan, Khraman, Karawan, etc. Joining by a rotating group of musicians including oudist Joe Budway (b. ca. 1926; d. 2000), drummers Mike and George Hamway, violinist Philip Solomon, kanunist George Ghanaim,  and Henry (violin) and George (oud) Raad, Naim played at the celebrations and gatherings of the Syrian-Lebanese community of Brooklyn, the hotels and resorts of Paterson and Asbury Park, New Jersey and the Catskills with periodic trips further afield to Allentown PA, Charlestown WV, and Palm Springs, Florida. Dancers appeared at most shows, including Lorraine Shalhoub, Samia Nasser, Fawzia Amir, and the Jamal Twins. When touring singers came to Brooklyn, as the great Odette Kaddo and Sabah did (in 1955 and ’56 respectively), Karacand was their accompanist. For a short while, in 1953-54, the scene was joined by an exceptional violinist with roots in Aleppo, Sami al-Shawwa.

Sami al-Shawwwa was born in Cairo in 1889 to a musical family. His grandfather Elias played kanun; his father Antoine (b. Aleppo 1850) was among the most celebrated musicians of his generation and is credited as having been one of the first musicians to introduce the European violin to Arabic music. Sami was about two years older than Naim when the family settled in Aleppo during their adolescence. By about 1903, Sami had proved himself to be a prodigy and moved back to Cairo, where was among the top rank of musicians of the Arab world, accompanying the greatest singers of the era, including Yusuf al-Manyalawi, Abdul Hayy Hilmi, and Zaki Murad, performing on hundreds of discs, both as a soloist and as an accompanist. He wrote two volumes of music theory, including material on Western notation in application to Arab music performance, and was a key figure in Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi music during the 1920s and 30s. He was an early and important promoter of celebrated composer and singer Sayyid Darwish.

Although their paths had diverged widely over four decades, Naim and Sami palled around for the months of Sami's 1953-54 tour, arriving together at weddings and jamming for the crowd. Sami made records for Alamphon and was featured in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, offering a hokum story about his violin having been made from “pharaonic wood” pilfered from the pyramids. It seems reasonable to guess that they had known each other as kids and that Sami’s father Antoine taught Naim as a teenager. It’s unlikely we’ll find solid proof, but there are performances of each of theirs from the 1910s, made thousands of miles apart, at a time when the violin was still not widespread in the Arab world, that bear a striking resemblance to one another. Sami died a decade later in Egypt in 1965.

In his 60s, Karacand appeared as an ensemble member on a string of related LPs during the period 1957-60, although the sequence in which they were made isn't entirely clear. Several things were happening at once.

A young, handsome, ambitious oudist and singer named Djamal Aslan (b. Feb. 1921; d. June 2000) arrived from Aleppo in 1950 and made a name for himself gigging around Brooklyn in the mid-50s, often working with Karacand. Aslan was married, divorced, and remarried during that period, and he apparently self-funded the recording of an elaborately produced LP that he sold to the short-lived record label subsidiary of the 20th Century Fox movie company. It was released in 1960 as Lebanon: Her Heart, Her Sounds but likely recorded several years earlier. And it included a circle of Brooklyn Arab performers including Karacand, drummers Mike Hamway and Eddie "The Shiek" Kochak, violinist Hakki Obadia, and a dozen others including a bassist named Ahmed-Abdul Malik. That same group, or some variation of it, also appears to have been the uncredited accompanists on the first two LPs by the singer and oudist Mohammed El-Bakkar — Port Said: The Music of the Middle East and The Sultan of Baghdad: The Music of the Middle East, Vol. 2 — both released in 1957 on the Audio Fidelity label.

The El-Bakkar LPs were runaway hits and the culmination of nearly two decades of Arab musical life in Brooklyn. El-Bakkar (b. 1913; d. 1959) had a couple of hit records in the 1930s in Cairo and appeared in a few films. In Brooklyn, the film importer and music store owner Albert Raschid encountered his music and charisma in 1936 and began negotiating a tour for El-Bakkar along with Sami al-Shawwa in 1939 but the plan was put on hold until after the Second World War. As soon as El-Bakkar arrived in the 1952, he began recording a string of 78s, and from 1954-56 performed in the hit Broadway musical Fanny. Raschid and the violinist Hakki Obadia worked toward the LP releases in 1957, and the resulting LPs with their lurid, overtly Orientalist covers set a standard for the idea of Middle Eastern music in America that persisted for decades.

Among the players on the Aslan and El-Bakkar records was a 30 year old African-American native of Bed-Stuy Brooklyn born Jonathan Tim Jr. who had joined the Ahmadiyya Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager in the 1940s and changed his name to Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Parallel to his work as a bassist in the 1950s with Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Don Byan, Zoot Sims, Coleman Hawkins, Jutta Hipp, Randy Weston, and many others, he was hired by the Audio Fidelity label to produce arrangements for the El-Bakar LPs. When in late 1958, he recorded his vision for an Arab-jazz fusion music for an LP titled Jazz Sahara, the band he put together included Johnny Griffin, who had already performed with the Armenian Udi Hrant, and Naim Karacand and Karacand's regular collaborators drummer Mike Hamway and kanunist Jack Ghanaim. On the sessions he cut for RCA Victor in March of 1959, he included Karacand on four tunes along with an expanded band including trumpeter Lee Morgan, resulting in the LP East Meets West. After two follow-up LPs (without Karacand), Abdul-Malik played on John Coltrane’s 1961 Village Vanguard live sessions. (At the risk of pedantry: Abdul-Malik remains credited as an oudist on every issue of the Village Vanguard material. He does not, in fact, play oud on those recordings, only bass. It's likely that the producers of the recordings didn’t know the difference between an oud and a tamboura, which appears on some recordings. The error has stood for decades.) Through the mid-60s Abdul-Malik played with Randy Weston, Herbie Mann (who also made east-west fusion albums, sometimes with the Armenian oudist Jack Ghanimian), and Hamza El Din before devoting himself to scholarship and teaching. He died on October 2, 1993.

In the '60s Naim reconnected with his two surviving children. Margaret had married an Italian man named Sam Marotta. In 1944, she enlisted in the Army, achieving the rank of Technician Fifth Class, the noncommissioned equivalent of Corporal. She remarried in 1947 to a man named John R. Schuster. They did not have any children before she died of cancer at the age of 50, in March 1966 on Glen Cove, Long Island. She is buried there at the National Cemetery as a veteran.

Naim's son James and his family visited Naim periodically in the '60s, and Naim regularly wrote to the Caravan newspaper in Brooklyn to update readers on his son’s accomplishments. James had enlisted in April 1938 at the age of 20, married Carmela “Millie” Ovale (b. 1919, an Italian girl from Brooklyn) shortly after his discharge in 1941, and by the early '60s had attained the rank of Major and was Chief of the Electronic Fundamentals Branch of the Air Force. He had served in Fort Dix, Taipei, Dayton, Crescent City, Wilmer, and Guam before he was stationed at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel along with Millie and their five children at Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi. Nancy Karacand, Naim’s granddaughter, remembers having met him several times, both in Brooklyn and Biloxi, where she encountered a soft-spoken, dignified, worldly man. She recalled that he brought Syrian treats - halva and dried apricots - and his violin, played for them, and left a violin for them. The family, having been soured by the stories of the treatment of the children during and after the divorce remained ambivalent about him and his “Turkish” bellydancer wife, eventually sold the instrument at a yard sale. Naim’s granddaughter Nancy keeps a photo of him — the same one on the cover of this album — on her wall.

On August 10, 1966 tragedy struck when James and his family were at the beach in Panama City. James saw two of his daughters in trouble in the waves. He swam out to help them but drowned. He was 49 years old. His 18-year-old daughter, named Margaret after his sister, dove in to help and nearly drowned herself.

Karacand did not record again after 1958. However live tapes traded among collectors and aficionados have been kept by the musician Raymond Nabba include a recording of Karacand playing at private parties. On one of them, made in New Jersey around 1958, the declamation of an audience member — “When Naim gives, he gives from the heart!” — provided this collection with its title. Truer words…

After his wife Anna died in 1967, Naim was alone. All three children had died. Around 1970, he wrote to his niece in Brazil, the singer Suzana Khlat, and described his despair. He told her he had given up the violin. He died in Astoria Queens in 1973 and was buried with Anna in Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where you can see the Statue of Liberty from the entrance. His legacy is expansive, significant, and musically deeply compelling but deeply and bafflingly obscure.