Born and raised in Beirut, Tarek is a self-taught jazz pianist who has been dedicated to exploring relationships between African-American Jazz and Arabic rhythms/maqams which are most evident in his second album "Lisan Al Tarab: Jazz Conceptions in Classical Arabic", and in his newly released “Peninsular” which fuses jazz with the rhythms of the Arabian Peninsula.
Winner of the prestigious Thelonious Monk Jazz Composers Competition, Tarek has been fortunate to share the stage with luminaries such as Wayne Shorter, Richard Bona, Zakir Hussein, Esperanza Spalding, and Antonio Sanchez during the inaugural and the sixth editions of the International Jazz Day, at the UN Assembly Hall in New York and the Teatro de la Habana, Cuba, respectively.
Tarek is also an educator, writer of two self-published music books and a film score composer of films screened in 70+ festivals around the world and broadcasted on AMC network, BBC and Sundace TV.