Hisham Kharma on labels and legacy

🎶 Hisham Kharma doesn’t think in labels — not musical ones, not cultural ones, and evidently not career ones. The Egyptian composer and musician has spent nearly two decades building a catalogue that spans orchestral performances, television scores, and international collaborations, work that just earned him the Creative Fusionist award at the 2026 Niche Awards in Italy for his album Ufuq. Kharma was also honored at the Ebdaa Qadroon festival by Youth and Sports Minister Gohar Nabil for his work supporting talented individuals with disabilities, recognition that reflects a career built as much around who he collaborates with as what he composes.

EnterpriseAM sat down with Hisham Kharma LinkedIn to talk about the path from a childhood keyboard to Cairo, Miami, and Dubai, why he erased his own debut album four times before he found his sound, and what’s changed recently in how he defines success.

Chasing a global sound without losing the Egyptian identity

Kharma’s career — one that spans orchestral performances, television scores, international collaborations, and humanitarian initiatives — is less about collecting milestones than about connecting worlds that rarely share the same stage. His own journey started long before sold-out concerts and scoring television dramas. Music first entered his life at the age of nine, when his family bought him a keyboard.

What began as a childhood hobby quietly grew into something much bigger, even if it took years for him to realize it. “Any artist has a sound, and this sound is a journey that you build; it doesn’t just come overnight,” Kharma tells EnterpriseAM. “It’s a journey with challenges, success, travel, and everything in between,” he adds.

That same journey took him from Cairo to Miami, Hamburg, and Dubai, each city quietly leaving fingerprints on the music he would eventually create. Studying computer science at the American University in Cairo eventually gave way to a master’s degree in art direction in Miami, where exposure to the city’s melting pot of Latin music, street performers, galleries, and creative communities expanded his musical vocabulary far beyond what he had grown up listening to. Rather than imitate the sounds he encountered, they sharpened a different ambition altogether. “I wanted to make productions that have a global sound but inject our own sounds into them,” he says. “That way it becomes easier to introduce people abroad to our musical identity.”

Learning how to find his signature sound

That approach has since become his signature. The oud and nay sit comfortably alongside electronic production. Orchestral arrangements meet cinematic textures. Traditional Middle Eastern melodies coexist with lounge, ambient, funk, and contemporary world music without feeling forced into the same room. Ironically, finding that signature required years of deliberately throwing work away. Like many young composers, Kharma found himself heavily influenced by artists he admired. The challenge wasn’t learning from them. It was learning when to stop sounding like them. “I erased my first album four or five times because I was deeply influenced by other people,” he recalls. “It takes time until you reach a point where you say, ‘No, I want to have my own sound.’”

Today, he laughs that audiences often recognize his music before seeing his name in the credits — a compliment that once would have worried him. “At first, I was afraid people would think I was repeating myself,” he tells us. “But then I realized that’s the identity of any artist. There’s nothing more beautiful than having your own sound.”

Curiously, one of the biggest turning points in Kharma’s career happened while he was sitting in the audience rather than on stage. He was living in Dubai at the time, working as an executive creative director for a leading advertising agency. By most conventional standards, life was going exactly according to plan. The career was stable. The salary was enviable. The position was prestigious. Something still felt missing. A friend offered him an extra VIP ticket to a Yanni concert; he accepted, and the rest was history.

“When I saw an international artist connecting through music with people from all over the world, that was the moment I knew,” he muses. “‘This is what I want to do.’” Leaving behind a successful executive career to pursue music full-time wasn’t exactly a decision everyone around him celebrated. Walking away from stability in post-revolution Egypt while raising a family required a leap of faith few would willingly take.

Then came another full-circle moment. Only a year later, Sony Music invited him to represent Egypt on its Arabesque compilation alongside Yanni himself. “For me, it felt like a sign from God saying, ‘Keep going.’”

On scoring someone else’s story

That willingness to leap into unfamiliar territory continues to define how Kharma approaches composition today. His own albums are personal, built around emotional landscapes he hopes listeners will inhabit in their own way. Film and television scoring, on the other hand, demands an entirely different mindset. “When I’m making my own album, I’m responsible for the entire vision,” he explains. “When I’m scoring a film or series, my role is to help tell a story through a director's vision instead.” Rather than seeing collaboration as creative compromise, he treats it as creative expansion. Working on productions like Suits Arabia meant immersing himself in entirely new musical textures that eventually found their way back into his own work. Every project, he says, becomes another lesson.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who has spent his career blending musical traditions, Kharma speaks about collaboration less as a professional exercise and more as a philosophical one. “I hate labels,” he says simply. Whether those labels are nationality, religion, or background hardly matters to him. Music, in his eyes, remains one of the few languages capable of bypassing them altogether. “The beauty of music is that it’s a universal language. It’s very easy to convey messages of unity through it.”

Kharma beyond music

That philosophy extends well beyond the concert hall. Over the years, Kharma has become deeply involved with both Helm and Ahl Masr foundations, both of which are relationships that began through creative collaboration before evolving into long-term commitments. His work with Ahl Masr, dedicated to supporting burn survivors, started with composing a campaign song before growing into his role as Humanity Burnfree Ambassador. For Kharma, the campaign represented exactly what art should strive to do: communicate difficult truths without losing sight of humanity.

Helm struck a similarly personal chord. Originally introduced to the organization through its work promoting employment windows for persons with disabilities, he quickly found himself drawn to a much broader vision — one that approached inclusion through arts, sport, music, creativity, and culture rather than simply policy.

That idea — that perspective matters more than appearance — runs through much of Kharma’s thinking, both as an artist and as a person. It also explains why audiences often describe his concerts less as performances and more as experiences. “People enter my world, but then they translate it in their own way,” he says. Some listeners tell him his music helped them through chemotherapy. Some studied to it. Others simply found somewhere to escape for a while. Those stories matter to him far more than streaming numbers ever could.

Does the art define the artist?

If there’s one thing that has shifted recently, however, it’s how he defines success itself. Ask him today how he hopes to be remembered, and his answer is noticeably different from what it might have been only months ago. “Six months ago, I would’ve answered differently,” he admits. “Now I’ve realized I just want to be human.” It’s a deceptively simple statement from someone who wears more hats than most creatives could comfortably juggle: composer, performer, creative director, entrepreneur, mentor, humanitarian. Yet perhaps that’s precisely the point.

What’s next for the Egyptian artist: Kharma is quietly working on a new project related to the Pyramids of Giza, details of which he’s keeping close for now.