Anouar Brahem

Anouar Brahem is the oud’s conjuror, an authentic master at bringing out the acoustic magic which this age-old traditional Oriental lute carries inside its calabash: the musical heritage of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Brahem is a phenomenon, a concentrated mix of prolific paradoxes: he is a supremely subversive classicist; a solitary soloist, resolutely open to the world; and a "culture smuggler", a man ever inclined to venture beyond his own limits and push back musical frontiers… without yielding an inch to aesthetic standards forged across time and tempered with deep respect for tradition.

Because he has always recognized this fundamental complexity, it has become his strength. And because he’s sought to weave this abundance of influences and disparate passions inside the very material of his work and compositions for nearly forty years, Anouar Brahem now creates music free of any named traditional influences but rather in his own image, with the bewitching poetic colours of the oud to enrich a host of diverse musical canvases.

From the rich repertoire of Jazz – John Surman, Dave Holland, Jan Garbarek and Jack DeJohnette are just some of the leading players to succumb to Brahem's melodic spells – to the multiple and diverse traditions of Mediterranean and Oriental influence, (from his native Tunisia to the confines of India and Iran), his sensitive yet rigorous music constantly redefines a cleverly composite universe of poetry and culture, ever balancing between discretion and sensuality, nostalgia and contemplation.

Some landmarks…

Born in 1957 in Halfaouine, in the heart of the Medina in Tunis, Anouar Brahem was ten when he began studying the oud at the National Conservatory in Tunis, and later pursued his apprenticeship with the great master Ali Sriti; it was an entry deep into the art of the maqamat, highly complex, ancestral and modal, in the Arab tradition of classical music.

In an Arab musical environment where popular songs and crowded orchestras dominated – the oud was reserved for accompaniment – Brahem revealed his complex and multi-faceted personality by spontaneously undertaking a personal mission to restore the oud to the status of an emblematic solo instrument in Arab music, whilst at the same time breaking with tradition in his work as a composer by integrating elements of jazz and other musical traditions from the Orient and the Mediterranean into his new works.

In 1981, motivated by the desire to team up with other musicians from a variety of different aesthetic backgrounds, he moved to Paris for four years. It was to be a decisive period for him: he collaborated with Maurice Béjart and above all, composed numerous original works, notably for the Tunisian cinema and theatre. This was fertile ground for his orchestral experiments, because he introduced new ways of playing and even hitherto unknown instruments into the fundamental Arab tradition.

On his return to Tunisia in 1985, he continued to do research in the field of composition. The first performance of Liqua 85, an ambitious work that brought Turkish gypsy and Tunisian musicians and certain French jazzmen together (Abdelwaheb Berbech, the Erköse Brothers, François Jeanneau, Jean-Paul Celea, François Couturier and others…) earned him a major prize, the Tunisian Music Award, and with the subsequent acclaim, the offer of the post of conductor for the City of Tunis Music Ensemble. He remained at the head of this institution until 1990, opening minds and talents to creative innovation and improvisation, whilst pursuing some thorough work on the classical repertoire. Recognized by now as one of the most innovative of contemporary Arab musicians of his generation, Anouar became a reference with young composers and oud players. He had established a firm reputation with his peers and the public alike.

In 1989, Anouar Brahem experienced another decisive turn in his career when he met producer Manfred Eicher, who gave him the opportunity to record Barzakh for his highly prestigious ECM label. This first album was to mark the beginning of a particularly fruitful association which, in the space of almost thirty years, has seen Anouar Brahem in the company of some of the world's most talented musicians, whatever the genre or tradition: Barbarose Erköse, Jan Garbarek, Dave Holland, John Surman, Jack DeJohnette, and Richard Galliano, to name only a few. To date, Brahem has recorded no fewer than 11 albums, all of which have been acclaimed by the public and the international critics. This eclectic but coherent discography includes: Conte de L'Incroyable Amour (1991), Madar (1994), Thimar (1998), Le Pas Du Chat Noir (2002), The Astounding Eyes Of Rita (2009), Souvenance (2014) and today Blue Maqams (2017) – all innovatory and timeless albums, allowing Anouar Brahem to confirm over and over again his role as one of the rare composers and musicians able to create music both rooted in a highly sophisticated but ancestral culture and eminently contemporary in its global ambition.

Particularly interested in art in all its forms, Anouar Brahem composed parallel to his own works a great deal of music for cinema, theatre and dance in Tunisia during the 80s and 90s; then, in 2006, his love for films became tangible when he directed and coproduced his first documentary film Mots d'après la Guerre, made in the Lebanon following the war between Israel and the Hezbollah. The film was selected for the Locarno Film Festival.

In 2012, shortly after the revolution in Tunisia, he was named a Life Member of the “Beit El Hikma”, the Tunisian Academy for Science, the Arts and Literature, and two years later, the CD Souvenance was released – an ambitious double album that is both a luxury aesthetic synthesis of 15 years of experiment in quest of an authentic “meeting ground for reciprocal understanding” between Orient and Occident, and his offbeat response, highly personal and reflective, to the events in Tunisia early in 2011. An audience of no less than 7,500 gave him and his demanding music a standing ovation at its first public performance during the 50th anniversary of the Carthage Festival.

Today, more than ever, Anouar Brahem continues to make regular appearances on the most prestigious stages all over the world, as well as recording more enchanting albums, to the delight of an ever-increasing public as well as his many loyal “fans”.

Source: Anne-Marie Driss