Anouar Brahem
Le Voyage De Sahar

Life is a journey, those who travel live twice (Omar Khayyam)

Some sounds are lost in the night of time, taking on in the mind the soft, blurred contours of a mirage on the horizon. The sound of the oud, which has traversed millennia, lands, peoples, cultures, is one of these. Its history is a delicate trait of Arab culture that traveled from Iraq to Central Asia and Morocco, later navigating the Mediterranean and crossing first Spain, then France, and finally Italy, where it transformed into the lute and accompanied the birth of Renaissance songs. In its strings vibrates a history of journeys, encounters, and mergers of different knowledge, capable of generating new culture.

This splendid mirage fortunately does not belong only to the past, because even today there are many musicians capable of giving new life to this instrument. The Tunisian Anouar Brahem, together with the Lebanese Rabih Abou-Khalil, is without a doubt one of its most important interpreters, because he succeeded in blending the sweet rhythm of the Arabic lute with other Western-style sounds, starting from tradition to occasionally touch the field of improvisation, each time offering unique, refined, and fascinating sensations that migrate into the soul like a dream swaying from west to east, leaving in the mouth the bittersweet taste of a distant past and in the heart the mysterious dissolving of a desire.

True to this path, today Brahem releases for the prestigious ECM Records another testament to his talent, expressed within an original ensemble that, besides the Tunisian musician, includes the presence of François Couturier on piano and Jean-Luis Matinier on accordion. It’s the same formation as Brahem’s previous work “Le Pas Du Chat Noir” (ECM 2002), an apparently unusual musical encounter that today gives us a splendid album, perhaps one of the most beautiful, magical, and profound from the Tunisian musician, who manages to harmoniously blend different atmospheres and influences with coherence and apparent simplicity. Countless sensations are offered by the listening, oscillating between the perception of a delicacy sometimes hypnotic, dreamlike, or enchanting and the ethereal breath of a kind of sweet melancholy with isolated streaks of pain. And it all happens with extreme naturalness through slight and imperceptible shifts offered by the game of musical instruments: when the oud plays, one imagines the boundlessness of the desert; when it's the piano's turn, one thinks of Eric Satie or even Philip Glass, while the accordion has a suggestive European fragrance, often only hinted at, that sometimes remains in the background, now disperses into the whole. When the instruments merge, it seems they were born to play together. When they simply exchange the task of developing now the rhythm, now the melody, the transitions between them are most natural, even though the perception remains constant that the oud is the trait d'union of this splendid music.

But perhaps all these are just illusions, other subtle mirages, or mental itineraries because this music is in reality a non-place. Like a watercolor by Hugo Pratt, it's a fascinating imaginary journey that manages to gently hypnotize the listener throughout this musical journey, so soft, refined, and intimate that it can conquer anyone.