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Jazz Albums with Chris Searle Four minds meet as one in joyful synthesis of Arab music and jazz

Anouar Brahem
Blue Maqams
(ECM)

BLUE Maqams is a brilliant amalgam of the Arab and jazz musical traditions, made by four veteran virtuosi who, despite or by virtue of the diversity of their origins, were born to make music together.

The quartet consists of oud player Anouar Brahem from Tunisia, Chicago-born drummer Jack DeJohnette, bassist Dave Holland, who hails from Wolverhampton, and Django Bates from Beckenham.

Brahem, writing about his first youthful encounters with jazz, emphasises its syncretic power.

“Jazz was an extraordinary field for experimental possibilities and fruitful ground for intermixing and crossbreeding. It was also a language naturally open to different cultures where I could find my place.”

And how Blue Maqams manifests that desire. On the first track, Opening Day, Brahem's lute-like oud begins in solitude before Holland and DeJohnette provide him with rhythmic company and Bates's gently running notes sound like a Pennine stream beside Holland's deep, dancing strings.

Bates and Brahem find a beautiful harmony in La Nuit and the title track forges a trans-Atlantic solidarity between the emotive reality of the maqam — the melodic mode used as a springboard for improvisation in Arabic, Persian and Turkish music, often the vessel of love, sadness or pain — and the US loneliness and critical muscle of the blues.

Here, it is one music of shared concord and skill as if the entire world were one, as DeJohnette's Southern and Chicago roots, Holland's Black Country blues and Bates's London laments fuse across oceans and continents. Sometimes, when you hear Brahem's oud, it's as if you're hearing the Louisiana guitar of Lonnie Johnson or Muddy Waters's Mississippi strings.

More so at the outset of Bahia, where Brahem's oud is accompanied by a wordless, grunting vocal, before Holland and DeJohnette add swinging vitality. Brahem's sheer fleetness of note-making is astonishing and the snapping of DeJohnette's snares are in absolute empathy with him.

Bates's gentle notes form the opening of La Passante and, as Brahem joins him, there's the sense of a lovers' tryst. There are moments in Bom Dia Rio where Holland's bass has so much levitation that it is as if all four musicians are yards above the floor of their New York studio.

Translucent dreams of the ancients are spun from Brahem's strings in Persepolis's Mirage and Bates's opening steps of The Recovered Road to Al-Sham radiate that very lyricism that impresses Brahem so much.

He writes that, as a young man, “jazz was associated with ideas of transgression and freedom for me.” Now, it seems that the same is true for all four of these veteran masters. Together, a new and unified music is born.

 

 

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