Abadi Al Johar Celebrates Five Decades at the Forefront of Saudi Music

As the final days of summer 2026 gave way to fall in Jeddah, the city seemed ready to tell its own story. Streets and public squares were awash in green for Saudi National Day, an occasion that led us to seek out an artist who did more than witness a golden age of Saudi music. He helped shape it, then continued alongside it into the present day, both a witness to its transformations and an active part of them.

That journey brought us to the majlis (guest room) of Dr. Abadi Al Johar, where he welcomed the Billboard Arabia team ahead of his September cover interview. But before he could begin telling his story, the room had already started telling it for him. The space felt like a window onto successive eras — a time capsule transporting visitors back to scenes now accessible only through photographs, memories and music.

On one wall hangs a photograph of Abadi alongside the late Talal Maddah and Mohammed Abdu. Elsewhere, a plaque commemorates his participation in a festival held in Egypt decades ago. In another corner is a portrait drawn by a fan in the 1960s — simple in execution, yet filled with the kind of pure affection and enthusiasm that existed before distance and barriers came to separate artists from their audiences. In the hallway, more than 40 oud instruments stand together, each carrying a story of its own, silent witnesses to the more than five decades their owner has spent as an ambassador for a distinctly Saudi musical tradition.

Something remarkable tends to happen in many of our conversations with musicians, almost without planning. We rarely begin with childhood, nor do we trace a career in strict chronological order. Yet somehow, we often find ourselves returning to a distant scene that changed everything. Perhaps decades of experience compel great artists to revisit the years before fame, rearranging those early images in their minds before calmly recounting the moment that set their lives on an entirely different course.

For Abadi, that moment takes us back to Jeddah in the 1960s.

An orphaned child, he would spend long hours alone in his room practicing the oud, determined to surpass his older brother, who had taken up the instrument before him. Then chance and fate converged in the same neighborhood. Living nearby was Lutfi Zaini, the poet and media figure who played an important role in enriching Saudi Arabia’s artistic scene. He heard the young boy play and recognized that beneath his determination was a talent worth seeing. So he took him to the greatest artist he knew.

Barely 14, Abadi entered Talal Maddah’s home and sat down to play for an artist who was then at the forefront of Saudi music as a singer, composer and performer. Talal listened and recognized the potential behind the teenager’s playing. That encounter opened a door through which Abadi would enter a world where he would eventually become a musician, composer, singer and ambassador for Saudi music.

“From that very first meeting, something happened — I don’t know what to call it. There was chemistry, there was affection. I remember that first meeting: he was so impressed with me. At that age, I was playing and singing — I was maybe 14. He immediately said, ‘Lutfi, let’s sign him to a contract, and I’ll compose two songs for him.’ From the very first meeting.”

Talal did not remain simply the man who discovered Abadi for long. Despite the age difference between them, their relationship quickly deepened. The child who had nervously played for him at home was soon singing Talal’s compositions. Years later, he would find himself on the other side of that equation: composing “Taweela Ya Droub Al Asheqeen” for Talal himself.

With palpable emotion, Abadi recalls how his first composition for Talal came to be.

“He gave me a great deal of space, honestly, to grow closer to him. During those six years [after we met], I was very close to him. I used to see him every day — genuinely, every day. After dinner, Mr. Lutfi Zaini, may he rest in peace, and I would go to Talal’s house. Every day. He allowed me to be that close. I was part of his inner circle; I was at his home every day.”

That closeness, Abadi explains, eventually gave him enough confidence to make a request of his mentor.

“I told him, ‘If you like what I do this much, then sing  a music composition of mine.’ He approved and sang ‘Taweela Ya Droub Al Asheqeen’ (Long Are the Roads of Lovers). That was in 1976.”

Their companionship would span more than three decades. In 2000, Abadi was beside Talal at his concert in Abha, becoming the last person to speak with him before he walked onto the stage, where he died after suffering a sudden heart attack — a moment etched into the memory of Saudi audiences.

Perhaps the cruelty of that farewell helps explain why the two names remain so closely linked in memory. Abadi does not shy away from returning to the story of his mentor, guide and friend, or to the night when one final gift was left undelivered.

That evening, Talal admired Abadi’s oud, which bore his own image, and asked to have one made just like it. His sudden death left Abadi with the regret of never being able to give his friend the instrument he had wanted. The oud remained untouched for more than 26 years, until Abadi brought it to Billboard Arabia’s cover shoot and played a few melodies for us. It was no longer simply an old possession. It had become a memory you could hear.

To speak of that friendship is to speak of more than two individuals. These were two pillars of Saudi music. One passed away; the other was destined to continue the journey, carrying with him the same sense of responsibility toward the art form.

Abadi’s influence, however, was never confined to Saudi Arabia or the Gulf. His compositions traveled through the voices of artists across the Arab world. Among the most notable is Assala’s “Qad Al Horouf” (As Many as the Letters) alongside compositions for Rabeh Saqer, Samira Said, Ahlam and many others.

Abadi describes these works as “Arab compositions”: Eastern music that can resonate with listeners from the Atlantic to the Gulf without abandoning the Saudi touches drawn from local heritage and the compositional traditions of the Arabian Peninsula. It is here that he forged his own musical identity — neither dissolving his local roots into a broader formula nor confining them within themselves, but instead turning specificity into a path toward a wider audience.

Across compositions for successive generations, concerts and albums, Abadi has built a catalog of more than 500 songs and compositions over five decades. It is a body of work that demonstrates what happens when talent meets discipline and creativity: the result is not a fleeting success, but a journey that eventually becomes a legacy.

When we asked him about the familiar phrase “art carries a message,” and about the distance between art that bears a responsibility and art created simply to entertain, the question seemed to return everything surrounding us to its original meaning: the photographs, the honors, the ouds, the hundreds of compositions and the decades that had passed without severing the connection between the artist and what he believes his art should offer.

“Here in Saudi Arabia, we have an extraordinary legacy of folk traditions — an incredibly rich heritage,” Abadi tells us. “I’ve said this before: we’ve only sung a small part of it. There is still so much for us to discover and explore.”

He continues: “At every event we performed at — myself, the artists who came before me and those who came after — whenever we traveled to any country, we insisted on presenting Saudi music with its identity intact: its identity in the lyrics, and its identity in its musical structures and rhythms. So, of course, we were ambassadors. That’s how Saudi music spread before social media — through concerts, appearances, cassettes and other means.”

After two days immersed in the creative process, a final day recording the episode and hours of conversation, we left the studio. Our car made its way through the streets of Jeddah, the city passing beyond the window in layers of old and new.

More than 50 years earlier, Abadi had walked these same streets as a child searching for a melody, a technique, or a word of praise from his brother and mother. Perhaps he imagined himself becoming an army officer, with no idea what fate had in store.

That child could not have known that he would become one of the pillars of Saudi music, and eventually an essential part of its collective memory — a witness to an era filled with the images, voices, melodies and figures that shaped the history of his city and his country.

He could not have known that the hours he spent alone with his oud would one day grow into a journey far larger than his own life, leaving its mark on Arabic music as a whole.

But as we drove away from Jeddah, its streets dressed in green, we had seen how the story of one artist could, in the end, tell the story of an entire musical tradition.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/abadi-al-johar-billboard-arabia-1236352561/)._