One of these is a leap-year baby. Khaled "Cheb Khaled" Hadj Brahim was born on 29 February 1960.

I think that means he just had Birthday Number Fifteen. He laughs about his leap-year birthday in the interviews I have read. No, I do NOT read Arabic. I read French; Algeria was a French colony (les "pieds-noirs"). That's why France has so many French citizens of Algerian descent, and why singers of rai, and Khaled in particular, have such sizeable followings there.

Frankly, it is sobering and startling to me that he is still alive. As someone's earlier post pointed out, making rai music can get you killed. Such happened to one Cheb Hasni, one of the rai singers; and then there was the record producer, not a singer himself, but he produced records for Khaled, for Cheb Sahraoui and Chaba Fadela (who are married to each other); he too was killed.

Khaled, however, got out with life and limb intact. He fathered a child or two, each with a different mother. Then he met a North African girl from a nice family, and did the whole formal respectable thing, having his family ask her family if she could be his wife....there was a "mariage en blanc" which got covered in the picture magazines with lots of photos. At last report, his family was not only outside of North Africa, but outside of France, even: he moved his household to someplace like Luxembourg, because he had enough wealth to afford it, and because it was safer for the children and their mother. Career-wise, though, his home base was Paris.

I have not heard recordings of his for years. It would be nice to believe that he can sing the way he did when he was young. This is, however, a burn-the-candle-at-both-ends kind of man. In a recent interview he said he had stopped smoking, not for the sake of his own voice, but for the sake of his two daughters! His boozing is notorious as well, and on some back-street cassette recordings he is audibly drunken.

Hadj Brahim adores African-American music of all stripes, from Ray Charles to James Brown. You can hear evidence, in some of his singing, that he must have worn their records out listening to them.