Tarek Abdallah is an Egyptian oud player, composer and musicologist who lives in France.

[1] He had been attracted to the oud since his childhood, after having seen a comedian playing the instrument on TV, but due to the opposition of his family, he had to wait until he was 19 to touch one for the first time in his life.

[2] Studying with the Alexandrian master Hazem Shaheen, he practiced 10 hours a day in order to enter The Arabic Oud House, an oud school created in Cairo by the Iraqi master Naseer Shamma.

[1] He lives in Marseille since 2001 and conducts musicology research at the Lumière University Lyon 2, about the notion of virtuosity in Egypt between 1904 and 1932.

[3] The French magazine Les Inrockuptibles praised Abdalla's “sober and refined way of playing, with a naked and very pure melody, indifferent to frivolity, of irreproachable ethics“.