A chance meeting at the Alaskan Hotel & Bar in 1997 had me in Egypt a year later, sleeping in the sand next to a camel up a wadi with a family of Bedouins. It's a longer story than needs to be told here, but the short version is that Ben and I met over an Alaskan brew and after six months in Juneau and six months apart we met up again in Jerusalem, his hometown.

We listened to a lot of Israeli and Arabic-influenced music on the radio.

The music stimulated my interest in Egyptian singers, who are often accompanied by Arabic orchestras playing ancient melodies with those classic quarter-tone intervals. Very strange-sounding to the Western ear, but very cool.

I sought out other Egyptian musicians and discovered Hakim, Ali Hassan Kuban (the Nubian James Brown) and El Tanbura playing Sufi music with hard-hitting Arabian grooves.

Hakim is my favorite new find. His music blends traditional Arabic elements with innovative and contemporary sounds and themes. It's techno-sounding, at times, with special effects added to his voice and instruments. He uses traditional Arabic instruments, like the oud (Arabic lute) and daff (Arabic tambourine), blended with guitars, synthesizers and classic Arabic orchestra.

The musical highlight of the trip, though, was the flute playing of Hussan, a Bedouin dressed in a long robe and traditional red and white kaffia (headdress) who took us on camels from the Red Sea into the mountains to visit his family. It was a two-day trip through a labyrinth of wadis (canyons) ending at a small camp of two nomadic families, living in homes of wooden pallets draped with blankets. The families tended goats and moved frequently with the stock. We set up a camp a few hundred feet away on blankets, in the sand, next to the camels.

After a dinner of potatoes and fish with pita cooked over a campfire, we settled under the stars with Hussan and his women relatives and drank tea. The husbands were away somewhere. Had the men been around, the women wouldn't have joined us.

I think the experience is best explained from an excerpt from my diary (with edits):

"In the blackness we all sat together on the desert floor, Ben and me on one of the camel blankets, Hussan by himself on another and the women, covered in veils and long colorful fabric, sitting on the ground. One of them was carrying a metal flute. Hussan called it a 'shabbabah.' She pulled it up under her veil and started to play. Hussan sang along with the melody, each playing off the other and laughing in between songs. I had my tape recorder going. They played, I recorded, rewound and played it back so everyone could listen.

"There was a section of the tape where I had recorded our conversations over dinner. They totally got a kick out of that, passing the headphones back and forth, the women and Hussan, laughing at each other and what was said. Then, at one point, Hussan got serious and said, 'no Bedouin women on cassette.' He communicated in broken English and Hebrew that it was not okay for the women to have their voices recorded. He asked me to go back and record music over the talking. So I rewound. Hussan and one of the women then took turns playing the pipe. Light, sweet and breathy, the high-pitched sound danced like fireflies in the air above us, absorbed in the hot desert air. The women never showed us their faces. They stayed behind black veils, but their dark eyes showed us their smiles and the joy the music brought to them, and to us."

Much better than the radio.