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Amir ElSaffar
Crisis
(PI Recordings)
“OUT of the ashes emerges a sound. Overtones, harmonising, becoming many. Intangible threads of humanity, too delicate to be broken or destroyed, emanating from a shared, infinite past that is our present.”
Such is the description by the Iraqi-American trumpeter born and raised in Chicago, Amir ElSaffar, of his Crisis Suite, composed in 2013 following a year living in Egypt and Lebanon with Syrian musicians who had been in the heart of civil conflict and destruction, and first performed at the 2013 Newport Jazz Festival.
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