Faraj Suleiman

A toy shop in Rameh, a piano in Haifa

Faraj Suleiman was born in 1984 in Rameh, a village in the Galilee, where his father ran a toy shop — the same shop that later gave his 2017 album Toy Box its title. He was sat in front of a piano at the age of three by his uncle, the artist Youssef Basila, who taught him for about three years. Then he stopped, and did not seriously return to the instrument for roughly fifteen years, picking it up again as a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2013 he moved to Haifa, which has been his base ever since, and began working as a musician properly. The debut album Log-in followed in 2014. His listening was rock, classical and jazz as much as anything Arabic, and he has named the Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan as a direct influence. The festival circuit came quickly: Montreux Jazz Festival in 2018, the EFG London Jazz Festival in 2019 and again in 2024, with a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in between. He has since maintained working bands in several countries at once — one at home, one in Paris, others in Switzerland and Berlin — which is less a flourish than a practical response to where the bookings are.

The records, and the decision to sing

Better Than Berlin, released in 2020 and written with the Haifa writer Majd Kayyal, is still the record that carries him furthest. Its song Questions on My Mind, built around homesickness and the ache of distance from people you love, has accumulated something in the region of 40 million plays and views on YouTube — a figure that put him in front of audiences who had never knowingly listened to Arabic music.

The move into singing had come with Second Verse, his sixth album and the first on which he used his own voice. The detail that mattered was the dialect: he sings in Palestinian Arabic rather than the Egyptian or Lebanese registers that dominate regional pop, a choice that narrows the market and sharpens the identity at the same time.

As Much As It Takes arrived in January 2024, issued through Two Gentlemen with Schubert Music Publishing and Seochan, with lyrics again by Kayyal and trumpet from Erik Truffaz. It follows a child chasing recognition on a world stage, alternating instrumentals with slower, heavier material about Palestinian circumstance, and it is the album where the piano most often works in dialogue with oud and electric guitar rather than leading. Asked about the pull of the melodic material, Suleiman has put it plainly: these Oriental melodies are simply in his head, and he cannot run away from them.

Maryam followed on 17 January 2025 — ten tracks, written with his longtime collaborator Amer Hlahel. It opens warm and energetic, then turns at the sixth track, and the second half is given over to grief: romantic loss, physical loss, and something closer to existential loss. The record was made across the before and after of the war on Gaza, and the title track deals directly with longing and despair. The instrumentation leans folk, with warm vocal harmonies, and the writing stays abstract enough that the subject never collapses into reportage.

Scores, a hotel, and other people's projects

A substantial part of Suleiman's output has been written for other people's films. He scored Maradona's Legs in 2018, Ameen Nayfeh's 200 Meters in 2020 — the film Jordan submitted to the Academy Awards — Firas Khoury's Alam in 2021, and Je te ferai un film in 2022. The score work explains a good deal about how his songs are constructed: motifs that repeat and mutate rather than resolve, and a willingness to let a passage sit unfinished.

Alongside that sit commissions and collaborations that are harder to categorise. He recorded music for Banksy's Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, worked with the director Bashar Murkus on the theatrical production The Cabaret, made a children's album, My Heart is a Forest, with Raneen Hanna, and contributed to The Trace of the Butterfly, the collective tribute to the late Palestinian singer Rim Banna.

2025 and 2026: Wembley, then Amman

The widest exposure of his career so far came on 17 September 2025, when he played the sold-out Together for Palestine benefit in London on a bill that included Adnan Joubran, Nai Barghouti, Elyanna and Saint Levant. The rest of that year was a steady international run rather than a victory lap: Jazzablanca in Casablanca in July, a UAE debut at the Red Theater at NYU Abu Dhabi on 29 August 2025 drawing on Better Than Berlin and Maryam, TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on 5 October and Village Underground in London on 19 October.

On 29 May 2026 he self-released Live in Amman — sixteen songs, sixty-nine minutes, taken from an open-air show in the Jordanian capital with Majd Kayyal's words at the centre of it. It is the first release to document what he actually does on stage. One review scored it four out of five and identified the difference from his studio work accurately: where the albums are layered and sculpted, the live recording foregrounds tension, spontaneity and the shifting relationship between piano and spoken word, with the songs left open and shaped as much by the audience and the acoustics as by the score. His playing, the same review noted, moves between percussive repetition and lyrical phrasing, and the contrast is sharper live — passages that are deliberately unhurried, interrupted by sudden bursts.

He went back to Amman on 6 August 2026 for a show at the Roman Theatre, where audience reaction was unambiguous and overwhelmingly positive. Around 5,700 people now track his dates through Songkick, with roughly 25 past shows logged there.

The show in autumn 2026

There are two distinct Faraj Suleiman shows in circulation at the moment, and they are billed differently. The North American run through MARSM Canada is advertised as Faraj, Piano and Mic — nothing on stage but a piano, a microphone and the songs — and takes in the Horowitz Theatre in Edmonton on 24 October 2026, the Jane Mallett Theatre at Toronto's St Lawrence Centre on 29 October and Le National in Montreal on 1 November, each billed 7pm to 10pm with tickets from around C$40 to C$90 and above. It is his first Canadian return in three years, after a sold-out debut there.

Six days after Montreal he closes Jazz Fest Sarajevo, playing the National Theatre at 10pm on 7 November 2026 — his first concert in the city — and that one is the band version, a French trio with Frédéric Chiffoleau on bass and Stefan Lucchini on drums. Further out, he returns to the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center on 26 March 2027.

The two formats are not interchangeable. The trio is where the jazz vocabulary gets room and the rhythmic writing bites; the solo show strips the arrangements back to the thing underneath, which is a singer-songwriter in Palestinian Arabic with unusually good hands. The Canadian theatres are the right size for the second of those.