Saleh and Daoud Al-Kuwaity

The brothers were born in Kuwait in 1908 and 1910 to a Mizrahi Jewish family.[1][5][8] Their father, a Jewish merchant of Iranian ancestry,[12] moved to Kuwait from the Iraqi city of Basra.[3] Their family was part of the Kuwaiti Jewish community in the first decade of the twentieth century.[2][4][1][10]

Saleh began studying music from Khaled Al-Bakar, a famous Kuwaiti oud player in the early twentieth century.[3][2][4] He soon began to compose his own music.[3][2][4] Saleh's first song, "Walla Ajabni Jamalec" (By God, I admire your beauty), is still heard on Gulf radio stations.[3][2][4] While still children, the brothers started performing for dignitaries and Al Sabah ruling family members in Kuwait.[3][2][4][13]

Despite the constant state of war between Israel and most of the Arab world, the state-controlled radio in Kuwait and Iraq kept on broadcasting their music.[3][2][4] While earlier generations of Arab listeners had been familiar and comfortable with the brothers and their Jewish identity, Arabic radio after the 1970s, increasingly under the control of nationalist movements such as the Ba'ath Party, began to change this by omitting their name, their Jewish identity, or their Israeli citizenship from credits, causing this history to be forgotten; upon his ascent to power in 1979, Saddam Hussein had their names expunged from the Iraqi national archives, re-designating hundreds of their songs as anonymous "folk melodies".[14][15][16]

The brothers had a pioneering role in the modern music of Kuwait and Iraq.[3][4][10][7][11] They were widely considered among the earliest pioneers of the Kuwaiti sawt genre.[3][4][2][9][10][7][11] Saleh Al-Kuwaiti was considered the father of Iraqi maqam as he was the pioneer of its first song. He also composed for the most famous singers of that era in Iraq, Kuwait,[3] and in the Arab world, such as Salima Murad, Afifa Iskandar, Nazem al-Ghazali, Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab.[17][18]

In 2009, a street in the Hatikva Quarter of Tel Aviv was named Al Kuwaiti Brothers Street in their memory.[19][20]

In 2011, Daoud's grandson, Israeli rock musician Dudu Tassa, formed the band Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis to play his grandfather's and great-uncle's music. The band has released two albums and has toured in Israel and elsewhere, opening for Radiohead in their 2017 US tour.[21]

• History of the Jews in Kuwait
• History of the Jews in Iraq
• Culture of Iraq
• Culture of Kuwait
• Music of Kuwait
• Music of Iraq
• Music of Israel