Cairo

Loop Lounge brings you its first City Soundscape Sample Library: the “Sounds Of Cairo”. Bring the vibe of Cairo into your productions. Be transported across time and space - we wish you a wonderful trip.

Drummer and multi-instrumentalist Salah Ragab was a central figure in the history of jazz in Egypt. A sometime collaborator with Sun Ra, Ragab founded the Cairo Jazz Band in 1968, the same year that he became the head of the Egyptian Military Music Department. The Cairo Jazz Band was Egypt's first big band, mixing American jazz with North African music, combining jazz instrumentation and musical style with indigenous melodies and instruments, like the nay (bamboo flute) and the baza (ramadan drum). Such musical cross-fertilization was not unusual in itself; American musicians from Sun Ra to Yusef Lateef had long been fascinated by the music of Islam and North Africa, incorporating both the instruments and musical forms of the Fertile Crescent into their work. But Salah Ragab’s music presents a topsy-turvied perspective, a view from the other side of the musical equation of West meets Middle East.

While Sophie Kohl confesses to her husband, a mid-level diplomat at the American embassy in Hungary, that she had an affair while they were in Cairo, he is shot in the head and killed. Stan Bertolli, a Cairo-based CIA agent, has fielded his share of midnight calls. But his heart skips a beat when he hears the voice of the only woman he ever truly loved. And then Omar Halawi who has worked in Egyptian intelligence for years, and American analyst Jibril Aziz who knows more about Stumbler, a covert operation rejected by the CIA, than anyone. As these players converge in Cairo in The Cairo Affair, Olen Steinhauer's masterful manipulations slowly unveil a portrait of a marriage, a jigsaw puzzle of loyalty and betrayal, against a dangerous world of political games where allegiances are never clear and outcomes are never guaranteed.