Permission to Evaporate. The Tawadros Quartet. The Street Theatre, Saturday, August 16, 8pm. Tickets $30. Bookings: thestreet.org.au or 6247 1223.

The title of Joseph Tawadros's 11th album is Permission to Evaporate. But Tawadros won't be disappearing any time soon.

For one thing, the 30-year-old Egyptian-born composer and oud player is touring to promote the new ABC Classics album, which was recorded in two days in New York in February during the depths of winter with American guests Mike Stern on electric guitar and double bassist Christian McBride as well as Joseph’s younger brother James Tawadros as hand drummer and Matt McMahon on piano. On this tour, the Tawadros brothers will be joined by McMahon and double bassist Karl Dunnicliff.

He says the music has a Middle Eastern background but also elements of jazz and is both joyous and spiritual in nature.

Permission to Evaporate was inspired in part by the "ethereal'' work of cartoonist Michael Leunig as well as Tawadros' own notion that "sometimes you just want to escape when you're caught up in times that are a little bit tough". But he says he isn't complaining about his life - "No, no, no. I've been lucky."

And it's hard to disagree - though obviously there's a lot of hard work involved, too. Tawadros came to Australia at the age of two when his parents emigrated in 1986, fleeing the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt. He graduated from the University of NSW with an honours degree in music.

Tawadros had brought with him a family musical tradition inherited from his maternal grandfather Mansi Habib - a composer, violinist and oud player - and uncle, Yacoub Mansi Habib, a trumpeter. He began exploring the possibilities of the oud and in December 2001 he returned to Egypt to study the Egyptian violin with Esawi Daghir. He also plays other traditional Arabic instruments including the nay (bamboo flute), qanun (Arabic zither) and the cello. But it is the oud in which he specialises.

"It's what I do."

Although he notes he waited nine years to get his first nod, all of his albums have been nominated for ARIA Awards and the last two, Chameleons of the White Shadows and Concerto of the Greater Sea, won ARIAs for Best World Music Album.

As well as a busy recording schedule - the 12th album is already in the works - he has toured extensively, not just in Australia, but in Europe, the US, Asia and the Middle East, and performed with artists from a range of genres including Richard Tognetti and the Australaian Chamber Orchestra, The Song Company and Neil Finn, among others. He's also composed for film and theatre including the documentary The last days of Yasser Arafat.