Idir, born Hamid Cheriet in 1949 in the village of Aït Lahcène in Greater Kabylia, was the artist who placed Kabyle song before a global audience and who shaped the contemporary Kabyle sound for half a century. The stage name Idir is the Tamazight word for "he will live," conventionally given as a protective name to children in fragile health.
His career began in 1973 with the song A Vava Inouva — "father of mine" — recorded for an Algerian radio programme as a substitute for an absent performer and released the same year. The track combined a traditional Kabyle children's lullaby with an acoustic-guitar arrangement and a soft male vocal in Taqbaylit; it became a transcontinental success, broadcast in over seventy-seven countries, translated into multiple languages, and adopted as one of the founding texts of world music.
The eight studio albums that followed — Ay Arrac Negh (1979), Les Chasseurs de Lumières (1993), Identités (1999), Deux rives, un rêve (2002), La France des couleurs (2007), Adrar Inu (2013), and Ici et ailleurs (2017) — moved between traditional Kabyle repertoire, original songwriting, and collaborations with Karen Matheson, Maxime Le Forestier, Manu Chao, Charles Aznavour, and Geoffrey Oryema. Idir lived in France from 1975 onwards and was a central figure of the Kabyle diaspora.
He died in Paris on 2 May 2020 of pulmonary fibrosis. His funeral procession through the streets of Algiers and his subsequent burial at Père Lachaise drew international attention; his songs continue to anchor the modern Kabyle musical vocabulary alongside those of Aït Menguellet, Matoub Lounès, and Lounis Aït Menguellet.