Bassam Saba (26 October 1958 – 4 December 2020) was a Lebanese musician and a promoter of Arabic music in the west.
[2] He played music with many established western musicians throughout his career, including Sting, Alicia Keys, Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones.
In 2018, he was offered a job as the president of the Lebanese National Higher Conservancy of Music,[5] for which, due to bureaucratic error, he was never paid.
[9] On 17 October 2020, Saba played the flute in a chamber piece by Telemann in the town of Bsharri in a church there as part of his work to raise money for the conservancy that had been damaged in the huge port explosion on 4 August 2020, which left 200 people dead and caused considerable damage.
[2] He was hospitalized and later transferred to the non-Covid ICU at the American University of Beirut Medical Center when he was considered no longer contagious.