A Rare, Auspicious New York Appearance by an Icon of Middle Eastern Jazz

One of the most potentially transcendent shows of 2022 happens tomorrow night, July 22 at half past eleven at Drom when pyrotechnic clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski’s slinky and reliably combustible NY Gypsy All-Stars team up with special guest trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf. The Lebanese-born Maalouf has been arguably the hottest commodity in French jazz (ok, for what that’s worth) for the last several years, and he deserves to be vastly better known outside of that world, or the Middle East, where he’s iconic. You can get in for thirty bucks in advance.

If you’re thinking of checking out the show, a good place to start is his double album 40 Melodies – streaming at youtube – yet another of those releases from the dead of 2020 which hasn’t received the coverage it deserves. It’s basically a greatest-hits collection of stripped-down jukebox jazz versions of the songs that made him famous. Most of these new arrangements are duos with guitarist Francois Delporte, who makes an sparring partner whether playing spare, spiky rock rhythm, mimicking the voicings of an oud, or cutting loose with the occasional ferocious roar.

The result is more Middle Eastern music played on western instruments than it is jazz. The opening number, All Around the Wall has a neatly stylized yakuza-film video to match as Maalouf shifts from shadowy Middle Eastern chromatics to a catchy, circling western riff while the guitar rises in the mix. Several of the tunes that follow – a Lebanese sonata of sorts – remind very much of another brilliant trumpeter, Ben Holmes, whose fondness for edgy chromatics and use of space reflects a somewhat different adjacency, klezmer music.

This is a long album, 43 tracks that expand from stately, often somber levantine melodies, through classical High Romanticism, a couple of dips into reggae, dabke and occasional latin or flamenco flavors. Maalouf is at the top of his meticulous game with his quicksilver melismas and maqam microtones all the way through Beirut, a gorgeously vamping chromatic melody spiced with delicious microtonalities over a resonant, jangly guitar backdrop. Eventually Maalouf puts in his mute and then Delporte hits his distortion pedal, and the song explodes.

Some of the many other highlights include a gorgeous, syncopated ballad version of S3NS and Les Quais, with guests the Kronos Quartet drifting methodically along with the guitar and Maalouf’s uneasy bounces overhead. There’s also Radio Magellanes, which shifts from somber traditionalism to an airy lull and then a bittersweetly triumphant drive out; and remakes of a couple of absolutely gorgeous early tunes. In Improbable, Maalouf and Delporte revisit but also revise the original’s pervasive gloom, later making mellow Hendrix out of the otherwise uneasily shifting Shadows. The sense that this is a theme and variations, even more brooding than the earlier part of the album, enhances the intensity as the record winds up.

The most potentially loaded title here is Election Night, which dates back to 2018, so there’s at least one ferociously contested moment it doesn’t reflect. Jury’s out about the earlier one. The song itself is a hoot, the most boisterous – and maybe sarcastic – number here.

Ibrahim Maalouf Draws Inspiration from a Miles Davis Classic

[Editor’s note – when New York Music Daily spun off from this blog, they took the rock and reggae and most of the global sounds with them….and also just about everything that falls under the rubric of noir music. So they took this one too. Once in awhile we’ll throw them something jazzy – today they’re throwing this repost back to us.]

Does it make sense to try to listen to a jazz homage out of context, or – in the case of this particular album – is it inseparable from the its legendary predecessor? Would it be fair to call this homage the best album of the year? Lebanese/French trumpeter/composer Ibrahim Maalouf’s brilliant new new score to the 1927 Rene Clair silent film La Proie Du Vent (Prey to the Wind) takes it its inspiration from Miles Davis’ immortal noir soundtrack to the 1958 Louis Malle film Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (Elevator to the Gallows). Maalouf follows the architecture of the Miles record, but not sequentially. As Davis did, when Maalouf gets the chance, he focuses in hard on lighter moments, both to offset and accentuate the relentless darkness of the rest of the soundtrack.

Davis recorded his album haphazardly in a couple of days in a Paris studio with a pickup band, employing the same modal system used for the improvisations on Kind of Blue, with equally powerful results. Maalouf recorded this one in a couple of days in a New York studio, but carefully chose the players – pianist Frank Woeste, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Clarence Penn – since he felt they’d be comfortable with his use of Middle Eastern scales. The Miles record is drenched in reverb, added post-production; Maalouf’s production is as airy and sometimes arid as the film would seem to suggest. Overall, the effect of both albums is the same, an unrelenting unease foreshadowing imminent doom despite all distractions to the contrary. Together and separately, both are classics of the noir pantheon.

Woeste’s icy, Ran Blake-esque flourish introducing Maalouf’s resonant lines over Grenadier’s tersely staggeried syncopation immediately establishes the claustrophobic atmosphere that will resound crushingly throughout most of the score. Clear as this recording is, it feels as if the band is playing from behind a wall, Maalouf tentatively reaching upwards just as Davis did with his title theme. Davis offered temporary reprieves with bass solos, chase scenes and convivial, conspiratorial interludes; Maalouf employs the latter but none of the former, choosing to liven his own score with reggae and clave. But while the latin groove motors along comfortably and expansively, the reggae all too soon gives way to a crypto-waltz, ushering in the somber main theme.

To call the rest of this album Lynchian would be ironic, considering that David Lynch and his frequent soundtrack collaborator Angelo Badalamenti – and others – have drawn so heavily on Miles Davis. Maalouf matches Davis’ restraint, even though he often digresses into Middle Eastern modalites, which the supporting cast let resonate from a distance, leaving plenty of room for the trumpet’s eerie microtones. Yet Maalouf’s attack doesn’t mimic Davis, as the themes build with an expansive, sometimes breathy, sometimes ironic balminess. Turner often plays good cop to Maalouf’s brooding bad one, working the dichotomy for all it’s worth on the aptly titled Excitement, soaring over the band’s uneven pulse before Maalouf takes it down into shadowy noir cabaret. The final three tableaux – chillingly tense variations on a Gallic ballad, a morose wee-hours nocturne and the suspenseful closing theme, propelled by Penn’s judicious hitman tom-tom work – drive this masterpiece home through the mist with a quietly determined wallop. It’s out now from Harmonia Mundi; and here’s an enticing clip of Suspicions, one of the score’s most chilling interludes.