Messaoud Bellemou ( ar, مسعود بلمو) is an Algerian musician and one of the most influential performers of modern

raï Raï (, ; ar, راي, Latn, ar, rāʾy, ), sometimes written rai, is a form of Algerian traditional music, folk music that dates back to the 1920s. Singers of Raï are called ''cheb'' (Arabic: شاب) (or ''shabab,'' i.e. young) as opposed ...

music. He is considered by some people like one of the fathers of Modern Raï Music. Messaoud began his career playing the

trumpet The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard ...

but soon became known for adding foreign instruments like the

saxophone The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to pr ...

violin The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...

, and

accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed ...

to the genre. He worked during the 1970s with different raï singers of his generation like Boutaïaba Sghir, Boussouar El Maghnaoui, Bouteldja Belkacem. In 1980s the term pop-raï has been used to describe the new generation of and (from the

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

for "young") introducing new instruments, and together with

Belkacem Bouteldja Bouteldja Belkacem (5 April 1947 – 1 September 2015 in Oran) was an Algerian raï songwriter, lyricist and composer. Biography Bouteldja Belkacem grew up in the El Hamri neighborhood of Oran in Algeria. He is considered a pillar of modern ra� ...

released one of the first records of the new genre.

References

Living people Raï musicians Algerian trumpeters 1947 births 21st-century trumpeters 21st-century male musicians 21st-century Algerian musicians 20th-century trumpeters 20th-century male musicians 20th-century Algerian musicians People from Aïn Témouchent {{trumpeter-stub