Le Voyage De Sahar

Description

EDITORIAL REVIEWS Great Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem follows up his international bestseller 'Le pas du chat noir' with another mesmerising album of beautiful, evocative music performed by his unique trio with French pianist François Couturier and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier. It's similarly full of magic and mystery. "Echoes of Satie, Paris cafes, flamenco and Balkan music infuse the melodies. Brahem shifts time signatures and pulls away from dark Arab modes to weave melodies that are at once familiar and elusively exotic," said Acoustic Guitar magazine of 'Le pas du chat noir'. Anouar Brahem's 2002 album was one of the big hits of recent ECM history, outselling even some Keith Jarrett discs. This special group with its unique instrumentation - oud, piano and accordion - charmed audiences all over the world. Admirers were mesmerised by the album's gently-swaying insistence and the way it seemed to find points of contact with other music. Still rooted in Arab modes, it nonetheless hinted at affinities with Debussy, Satie, Gurdjieff, Arvo Pärt and more... 'Le Voyage de Sahar' goes further, with a more evolved improvisational component. In playing this work live, Brahem, Couturier and Matinier have opened up the music while keeping its mystery and magic intact. In addition to Brahem's beautiful, evocative new music, the CD revisits key pieces from 'Khomsa' and 'Astrakan Cafe', which are transfigured and transformed by this unique trio. Recorded 2005 Personnel: Anouar Brahem - (oud), François Couturier - (piano), Jean-Louis Matinier - (accordion) AMAZON.COM Recreating the ambience that made his 2002 outing, Pas de Chat Noir, so evanescent yet indelibly memorable, Tunisian oud master Brahem continues his by-now-well-established collaboration with François Couturier (piano) and Jean-Louis Matinier (accordion.) The trio's improvisations are miracles of weightless precision; while sounding like nobody else, they also evoke chanting medieval monks, Keith Jarrett's florid keyboard sagas, Parisian bal musette, the long-vanished Moorish kingdom of Granada via 20th-century Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, languid recollections of French impressionist Eric Satie plus dissonant gleanings from Astor Piazzolla's sardonic Argentinean neo-tangos. Despite this complex array of intellectual influences, which permeate the trio's constructions like smoke rings, their works come across as disarmingly simple and unpretentious, a tidily diffuse combination of Arabic modes, European classical disciplines and jazzy intuition. Liberated by sheer inventiveness, the trio's technical skill is so extreme that it has long since ceased to draw attention to itself. Instrumentalists of this caliber are long past needing to impress anyone but themselves. --Christina Roden