Biography
Wisam Khassaf is an Iraqi saxophonist and maestro, celebrated for developing a unique personal style on the instrument and for performing alongside leading Arab artists of the first rank, including Mohammed Abdu, Abdul Majeed Abdullah, Rashid Al-Majid, Majed Al Mohandes, Abdullah Al Ruwaished, Nabil Shuail, Rabeh Saqer, Ahlam, Nawal Al Kuwaiti, Angham, and Sherine, among many others.
He comes from a long-established artistic family in Iraq — his father, Ali Khassaf, is a clarinetist, symphony orchestra conductor, and composer, from whom Wisam learned the fundamentals of music theory, while his uncle Jaafar Khassaf taught him to play the saxophone, honing his talent from an early age. He studied Western music at the Military Music School and Eastern/Arabic music at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, with his talent first coming to prominence in 1994.
He performed with many leading Iraqi artists — including Hatem Al-Iraqi, Haitham Youssef, Mahmoud Anwar, and Habib Ali — before relocating to Jordan in 1998, where his reputation began to spread across the Arab world, and then to Dubai in 2004, marking a new chapter in his career. Today, Wisam Khassaf is widely recognized across the region — known professionally as the "Iraqi Maestro" — for his soulful saxophone improvisations alongside some of the Arab world's biggest stars.
