ANOUAR BRAHEM La Pas De Chat Noir… the sound of a Parisian café, pavements wet with rain, leaning back in your chair with a skinny cigarette and a glass of red wine… Anouar Brahem, Tunisia’s staggeringly talented composer and ‘oud player, enchanted the Barbican audience on July 1st with his latest trio, accompanied by Francois Couturier on piano and Jean Louis Matinier on accordion, as they carried the accent of Impressionism to the French colonies. Brahem is one of the few composers today who can seamlessly combine the traditions of Middle Eastern music with European instruments. His sound is continents away from the careless pastiche of fusion; instead pulsating with imagination and authenticity. La Pas de Chat Noir is a phenomenal album in which instruments take on fantastic sounds; sometimes cosmic, sometimes organic. The accordion stutters like a feeble heartbeat, its pitch bending, rising to a shrill peak then diving into a purr. The piano can whisper a lonely resonant trill, or meditate on dream-like arpeggios, then suddenly sway with a romantic midnight dance, drunk on red wine. Brahem conjures up scenarios so vivid they are almost unnerving (I’m looking out from the balcony of my New York apartment wondering in whose arms my wife will sleep tonight). Taking his inspiration from the classical masters of the ‘oud, Brahem adds to them a contemporary approach that can capture the essence of a building, or a moment in time, or the character of light dancing on white walls (Now I’m riding a bicycle through narrow cobbled streets, careless and in love). Brahem refuses to be defined. At times he teases the audience with references to familiar genres- perhaps the layering of a Bach fugue- but soon enough he abandons it and begins endlessly repeating a simple phrase as if in a trance (I’m in a cabaret show, mesmerised by the face of an anonymous dancer). As soon as you think you’ve found his hook, and you can tap your feet to the rhythm, he loses you. He evaporates into another story of early morning regret, or a surreal dream (I’m a child, watching a family fight and starting to understand the dark side of love for the first time). On stage, the three musicians remain oddly distant from one another. While their music gels expertly, they never interact- communicating only by notes and phrases. Brahem doesn’t say a word; his voice only rarely breezing in over the ‘oud , dislocated, to hum the melody. By the end of the night, though he has said nothing, we’ve somehow come to understand intimately the world he lives in every day and dreams of every night. © Saeed Taji Farouky 2006 Return to writing & journalism
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