Loading ...Ibrahim Maalouf Salutes a Great Arabic Performer
Ibrahim Maalouf took just one unaccompanied trumpet solo in his early set at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola on Monday night, but it was a depth charge, a flash immersion in the distinguishing features of his art. A moment earlier his band had been busy with a tumbling vamp in 7/8 meter, and he carried that pulse as he improvised, in dartlike bursts and a shadowy tone. At one point he segued into what sounded like a classical trumpet étude, exuding an impeccable control, before he moved on to a series of quavering embellishments and shivery incantations.
Mr. Maalouf, born in Beirut and now residing in Paris, is a virtuoso of the quarter-tone trumpet, which enables him to work with the maqam, or system of melodic modes, in traditional Arabic music. He inherited this set of adaptive strategies from his father, the revered classical trumpeter Nassim Maalouf. Both musicians play a custom horn with four valves instead of three, and both draw on a rigorous technique that extends beyond Western conservatory standards.
Mr. Maalouf with the drummer Clarence Penn on Monday at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. Credit Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times
The younger Mr. Maalouf, 34, has parlayed this flexibility into a celebrated career in France, trafficking broadly in jazz fusion, hip-hop, orchestral music and global pop. A few years ago, he created a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack to the 1927 René Clair film “La Proie du Vent” (“The Prey of the Wind”), inspired by Miles Davis’s work with Louis Malle. The resulting album, “Wind” (M’ister), featured his regular pianist, Frank Woeste, along with several marquee Americans: the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Clarence Penn.
He led the same quintet at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, in a tribute to Oum Kalthoum, one of the Arab world’s greatest singers. This was both an impressive feat of cultural translation and an absorbing display of devotion: the 75-minute set consisted entirely of Mr. Maalouf’s arrangement of “Alf Leila wa Leila,” or “One Thousand and One Nights,” perhaps Oum Kalthoum’s best-loved performance. Though the suite was sprawling in scope and embroidered with intricate details, Mr. Maalouf used no sheet music, often playing for long stretches with his eyes closed.
For much of the set he evoked the swooping charisma of Oum Kalthoum’s vocal lines, worrying and finessing his notes in service of the melody. His band, airtight but flexible, rumbled and shuddered behind him, sometimes pushing into the foreground with a cyclical groove. Often a theme was scored for trumpet and tenor in octaves, or in a chattering counterpoint. And the solos, brief but potent, nodded to the provenance of the music: Mr. Turner wove his way through a latticework of modal scales, and Mr. Grenadier favored a flinty attack, as if to emulate the sound of an Arabic oud.
There were a few jazz allusions in the suite — to John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, even John Zorn’s group Masada — but they were fleeting, and part of a larger picture, unique on its own merits. One bit of good news, then: Mr. Maalouf noted that the band would be recording this music the next day, for an album, “Kalthoum,” due out on Impulse! this fall.
Source: www.nytimes.com