Emel Mathlouthi, Heroine of the Arab Spring, Brings Her Transcendent Voice and Revolutionary Songs to New York

Last night Tunisian-born, Paris-based singer and bandleader Emel Mathlouthi treated a sold-out crowd at Florence Gould Hall at the French Institute to a performance whose stripped-down, intimate format did nothing to diminish the volcanic intensity and raw power of her symphonic, revolutionary Middle Eastern art-rock anthems. Singing in Arabic with a couple of extremely successful ventures into English, Mathlouthi played both acoustic and electric guitars with an edgy efficiency, backed by guitarist Karim Attoumane, whose ethereal, majestically atmospheric lines gave the songs heft and bulk, and pianist Emmanuel Trouve, whose elegant chromatics enhanced both the songs’ neoromantic European and moodily levantine passages (in addition to a biting Doors quote, in a nod to the late Ray Manzarek).

Technically speaking, Mathlouthi is an astonishingly powerful, individualistic singer, maintaining an almost otherworldly clarity from the depths to the heights of what could be a four-octave range, whether with a ghostly whisper or a gale-force wail. Few other singers in the world have so much raw power at their disposal. With that kind of voice, Mathlouthi can afford to be straightforward, and she usually is, although the two most exhilarating moments of the concert were when she hit a rapidfire, serpentine Middle Eastern glissando, and when she went to the absolute top of her register during a riveting, angst-fueled rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that put to shame any other version including the original.

Emotionally, Mathlouthi vents a venomous contempt for and hostility to oppression, but more than anything else, she gives voice to longing. But the longing she evokes isn’t a solipsistic desire for attention or affection: it’s a longing for freedom – and a chance to transcend the hellish experience of the battle for it. She wasted no time in disdainfully explaining that the reason that the audience was seeing only a trio onstage was because that two of her Tunisian bandmates had been denied US visas. But at the end of the show, after a poignant, dynamically bristling version of her folk rock-flavored signature song, Kelmti Horra  (Freedom of Speech, one of the iconic anthems of the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring) she backed away from the mic, retreated toward the piano and then twirled, jaunty and triumphant, knowing that she was about to dance away victorious.

Ornate and intricately intertwining as her songs are, they’re not art for art’s sake. Mathlouthi knows that she and others like her are a dictator’s worst enemy, and she revels in that, if with an understandable bitteness. “The pen and paper are the strongest, most powerful things in the world,” she reaffirmed as the band launched into a broodingly swaying minor-key ballad. Although what she was doing with pen and paper endangered her life in Tunisia to the point of forcing her into exile, ultimately they saved her and others like her. She dedicated the shapeshifting anthem Ethnia Twila (The Long Road), with its middle period Pink Floyd sweep and majesty, to “the brave and courageous people who fight for freedom and dignity.”

As the show went on, Mathlouthi mimicked oud voicings on her guitar via a series of nimble pull-offs, used a series of loop effects to sing Bjork possibly better than Bjork does herself, brought to mind Randi Russo or early PJ Harvey with a hypnotic, insistent, slow-burning anthem and eventually took the intensity to a searing peak with Ma Ikit (Not Found). “I cannot find a melody strong enough to break human hatred,” she intoned before building the song to an imploring, exhausted crescendo. Whether or not the audience understood the lyrics -and many did, and spontaneously clapped along in several places – it was impossible not be drawn into the drama of a battle whose conclusion is ultimately ours to either concede, or to join in with Mathlouthi and reach for victory.

Thanks to the French Institute, here’s some great Youtube footage of the early part of the concert: that Manzarek quote is at 6:35.

Haunting, Transcendent Iraqi Sounds at Naseer Shamma’s Sold-Out Show at the Met

[repost from sister blog Lucid Culture, in case you're wondering where this came from]

There was a point during oudist Naseer Shamma’s sold-out show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last night where in the middle of an expansive, bucolic theme, he suddenly transformed it into a menacing raga, wailing and then sirening downward on the high strings against an ominously reverberating low note. It was one of many such moments for the Iraq-born, Cairo-based virtuoso, performing with a seven-piece version of his extraordinary Al-Oyoun Ensemble and earning a standing ovation from a crowd that throughout the show spontanteously broke out into clapping and singing along with Shamma’s instrumentals.

His music is as cutting-edge as anything in the Arabic-speaking world, yet remains rooted in ancient traditions and often in familiar themes. Shamma began the concert judiciously with a solo improvisation that rose and fell dramatically, using his fret hand to tap out rapidfire clusters with a precision that was both spectacular and uncanny. The show ended with the ensemble hamming up a bright pastoral theme, nay flute player Hany ElBadry firing off a wildly trilling, buffoonishly masterful display of chops that drew the most explosive applause of the night. In between, the group – which also included Saber AbdelSattar on qanun, Hussein ElGhandour and Said Zaki on violins, Salah Ragab on bass and Amro Mostafa on riq frame drum – made their way through an eclectic program rich with emotion and intensity. Shamma and AbdelSattar engaged in several wryly adrenalized duels and exchanges, while a long, droll call-and-response between the oud and drum grew more amusing as it went on. But as much fun as the band and audience were having, the majority of the themes were sober, even severe, marked by a shared terseness and restraint that often spilled over into unselfconscious plaintiveness as the group mined the microtones of the maqams (Arabic scales) with a sophistication that was stunning both for its technical skill and emotional attunement. This pensive, raw quality may well have had something to do with the fact that this was Shamma’s first American concert in over a decade since he’d boycotted this country throughout the Iraq war.

Opening act the Alwan Arab Music Ensemble (better known as the Alwan All-Stars) were just as cutting-edge and intense. Bandleader/santoor player Amir ElSaffar, who brought this bill together, also programs the music at Alwan for the Arts, the downtown hotspot which has become a home for paradigm-shifting Middle Eastern sounds much as CBGB was for punk rock in the 70s: if you’re somebody in that world, you want to play there. In a set that could have gone on for thee times as long as it did without losing any interest, the group – also including ElSaffar’s virtuoso sister Dena on violin and jowza fiddle, Lety AlNaggar on nay, George Ziadeh on oud, Shusmo bandleader Tareq Abboushi on buzuq, Apostolis Sideris on bass, Zafer Tawil on qanun and percussion, and Johnny Farraj on riq – played variations on an Iraqi repertoire that has all but disappeared since its heyday sixty or seventy years ago. Stately, steady themes were interspersed with solo passages that in the band’s epic second number had been devised to represent the individual styles of the various regions in Iraq. Amir ElSaffar also took care to mention that the mini-suite also memorialized the ten-year anniversary of the Bush regime’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq, which may have accounted for the understatedly brooding, lingering effect of a purposeful but mesmerizing santoor solo, ElSaffar’s sister raising the ante with an edgy intensity before Ziadeh took it back down with a shadowy unease. Let’s hope that it isn’t another ten years before another such a riveting, exhilarating doublebill as this one happens on American turf.

Edgy, Powerful Middle Eastern Guitar Sound from Michel Sajrawy

[cross-posted from NYMD's sister blog Lucid Culture]

Palestinian guitarist Michel Sajrawy ‘s latest album Arabop transcends category. What it most closely resembles is the current wave of electric gypsy music: fans of bands like the NY Gypsy All-Stars will love this stuff. Here he’s joined by a crew of Israeli musicians from his Nazareth hometown, teaming up for a vividly powerful mix of Middle Eastern and Balkan-tinged romps as well as a handful of haunting longer-scale numbers. Sajrawy plays with an envelope effect popular with guitarists east of the Danube that fills out his precise, staccato lines to the point where sometimes it sounds like he’s playing an electric piano or synth. What’s most impressive is that he often sounds like he’s playing a fretless guitar even though he’s simply bending strings on a standard-issue Strat. The result is a new hybrid musical language incorporating both traditional Egyptian modes and western tonalities, much in the same vein as David Fiuczynski here in the US and Salim Ghazi Saeedi in Iran.

The opening track kicks off with a slinky guitar vamp followed by a haunted, pleading soprano sax solo by Maali Klar, who shares a fondness for microtones and whose contributions to this album are some of its most riveting moments. Alto saxophonist Amiram Granot plays casually contrasting chromatics over the pulse of Stas Zilberman’s drums and Wisam Arram’s percussion. As he does on several tracks here, Sajrawy also plays electric bass on this one; Valeri Lipets holds down the low end on the others.

1 Count Before 40 begins with a pensive oud taqsim by Samir Makhoul, builds to a stately sway, Sajrawy navigating the space judiciously with a bit of a Greek folk feel: they work the dynamics up and down to a pinpoint guitar solo out. The title track, structured as sort of a musical palindrome,  blends biting Black Sea riffage, a long and rather chilling microtonal bop guitar solo and more of that delicious, ney-like microtonal soprano sax from Klar.

The cospiratorial, whispery Syncretic Beliefs is basically a microtonal tone poem, Sarajway playing casually but purposefully over a djeridoo-like drone. Batumi works a trickily rhythmic groove, Sajrawy expertly shifting it further from the Middle East into otherworldly microtones and then spiraling bop, Klar taking it deep into the shadows in the wake of Sajrawy’s long solo. The album’s best track is the brooding, dirgelike, practically ten-minute epic Hal Asmar Ellon, swaying with a haunting understatement, Granot’s alto summoning the spirits from the nether regions this time: it sounds like an electric version of a Trio Joubran piece.

Sajrawy mimics an oud line on the watery intro to Ya Lel, which eventually picks up with a funky edge before returning to the brooding initial theme. Likewise, Invention is a launching pad for Sajrawy’s nimble cross-genre exploration, moving once again from the desert to bop-land. At the end of the album, Sajrawy takes the popular Egyptian tune Longa Farah Faza and turns it into a sizzling organ shuffle – it’s the only place on the album where he shows off his supersonic speed and he makes the absolute most of it. Like the rest of the tracks here, it’s a feast of blissfully edgy chromatic guitar.

Cosmopolitan Surrealism from Rabih Abou-Khalil

Lebanese-French oudist and composer Rabih Abou-Khalil’s latest album Hungry People is jaunty, funny, unpredictably trippy and quintessentially cosmopolitan. It’s nebulously Middle Eastern, but it owes as much to American jazz and rock (especially Frank Zappa) as it does any traditional levantine style. The lead instrument here, for the most part, is not the oud but Sardinian singer Gavino Murgia’s terse, resonant soprano sax. Accordionist Luciano Biondini adds lickety-split Mediterranean flair alongside tuba virtuoso Michel Godard, who somehow gets his big horn to emulate an entire brass section’s worth of sounds. It’s ironic yet not particularly surprising that the most potentially comedic instrument on such a humor-driven album would be given a more serioso role than the rest of the band. Eclectic drummer Jarrod Cagwin propels this beast with beats that run the gamut from mighty to delicate.

For the most part, these songs don’t frequently employ the haunting, modal Middle Eastern grooves that a lot of fans of this music  gravitate toward. To set the stage, the blithe opening track, Shrilling Chicken adds some bouncy Moroccan flavor to a familiar American blues progression. While an oud, an accordion and growly electric bass all vamping the blues over a North African beat might not be what you might expect, that’s pretty much the point here. The second cut, When the Dog Bites has Zappa-esque surrealism, a latin-tinged groove, a funky tuba bassline and droll throat-singing from Murgia.

Unsurprisingly, the best songs here – and the ones that will appeal the most to fans of more traditional, uneasily slinky levantine sounds – are the serious ones. A Better Tomorrow is one of the rare places where the oud gets centerstage – and finally a long, suspenseful solo - lit up by Cagwin’s lush cymbal work. And Dreams of a Dying City has the feel of a cautionary tale, terse, elegaic and insistently, ominously crescendoing.

The rest of the album shifts from satirically bustling cinematics (Bankers’ Banquet and the offhandedly chilling Hats and Cravats) to shuffling Irish reel allusions (Fish & Chips & Mushy Peas), to madcap 50s Egyptian film music (When Frankie Shot Lara), to unexpectedly pensive and lyrical (If You Should Leave Me), to the busy Shaving Is Boring, Waxing Is Painful, the closest thing to straight-up jazz here with its tricky metrics. Those who like this album also ought to check out Abou-Khalil’s orchestral works, which his inimitable brand of surrealism to new levels with some lavish arrangements. This one’s out now from Harmonia Mundi.

Orient Noir: Klezmer Sounds from the Edges of the Diaspora

On the Orient Noir compilation, billed as a “WestEastern Divan,” the folks over at Piranha Records in Germany raid their own archives for an instant album…and a pretty killer playlist that goes on for well over an hour. It’s quite an inspiration for adventurous downloaders (most of this stuff is on youtube – follow the links below). It’s noir to the extent that the sexy and mysterious microtones of Middle Eastern and Jewish music are noir. This is first and foremost a klezmer playlist, one that ranges across more of the Jewish diaspora than most, with a handful of tasty levantine numbers thrown in for good measure.

The weakest tracks are from French band Watcha Clan: a brief klezmer intro and a woozy reggae cover of an Ofra Haza hit. The track most instantly identifiable as klezmer is from Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars, Susan Sandler out in front of the band, giving the song a barely restrained longing. London also appears in a low-key, moody collaboration with Serbian brass virtuoso Boban Markovic, while another project he’s been involved with for decades, the Klezmatics, are represented by the understatedly ferocious, gospel-fueled I’m Not Afraid.

A couple of instrumentals are stripped down to the basics of slinky percussion and a single melody line: a flute-and-accordion jam from Nubian artist Mahmoud Fadl, and Ali’s Nay, credited to veteran Lebanese composer Ihsan Al-Mounzer. The most eye-opening stuff here is the Jewish music that pushes the boundaries of klezmer with influences from Africa – Moroccan cantor Emil Zrihan’s amusingly titled, flamenco-flavored Maka Shelishit, and Moroccan Sephardic crooner Maurice El Medioni ‘s long diptych Ya Maalem/Kelbi Razahi, a noir cabaret tango with Balkan horns!

Ruth Yaakov’s Las Esuergas de Angora – from her album Sephardic Songs of the Balkans – offers a tricky blend of flamenco and gypsy music with what sounds like creepy, swirly West African riti fiddle. And a track by popular Zanzibar taraab chanteuse Bi Kikude blends Bollywood-flavored, surfy rock with lushly suspenseful levantine orchestration.

Interestingly, on this klezmer-oriented playlist, the most outright haunting tracks are by the Arabs. Salwa Abou Greisha sings a sweeping, haunting multi-part Egyptian bellydance epic, and iconic Egyptian trumpeter Samy El Bably provides his hit Ana Bamasi El Haba Doll, an elegant vamp with richly nuanced solos from trumpet and accordion. The playlist ends the way you might end your own playlist, with something completely random and weird: in this case, The Garden, a cantorially-tinged 1979 song by short-lived German hippie-rock band Efendi’s Garden. If Hotel California-style twin guitars playing vaguely Middle Eastern riffs are your thing, you’ll love this one. Happy hunting, wink wink!

The Buzuq Is Mightier Than the Sword

Ramzi Aburedwan was eight years old when he became iconic in his native Palestine. Photographed at the second when he was about to hurl a rock at an Israeli tank, his image would circulate on t-shirts and posters throughout the late 80s and early 90s. The photo inspired numerous literary works, notably poet Nizar Qabbani’s famous 1988 Trilogy of the Children of the Stones. But Aburedwan soon discovered that music was mightier than the sword, a point he drives home again and again on his album Reflections of Palestine. Trained in France as a violist, he returned home to become the leader of the Palestine National Ensemble of Arabic Music. He would also become a virtuoso of the buzuq (brother to the Greek bouzouki), which he plays on his latest album Reflections of Palestine alongside Mohammed Al Qutati on accordion, Ziad Benyoussef on oud, Mohamed Najem on clarinet, and Tareq Rantissi and Bachir Rouimi on percussion.

Aburedwan’s edgy chromatic melodies more frequently employ western minor scales than they do the microtones of the Arabic maqamat. The music on this album is not violent; it’s often haunting, sometimes bitter, wounded, reflective. It’s also very lively in places, most notably on Bordeaux, a long one-chord jam that the oud takes into shadowier terrain. Bahar, which opens with casually strummed chords in the style of a British folk ballad, eventually morphs into an upbeat Greek-flavored dance. And Sodfa (Arabic for “coincidence”) explores both rhythms and tonalities from the Balkans.

But the slower material is the most powerful. Rahil (“exile”) potently evokes both longing for home as well as the furtive nature of life under an occupation, Aburedwan gently tremolo-picking his buzuq almost in the style of a Russian balalaika, eventually building to a tense, apprehensive dance. Sans Addresse is essentially a cavatina, rising from a brooding, hesitant oud taqsim to a funeral march, Aburedwan’s mournful phrases capturing the grief, agitation and fear of living as an exile. The epic Tahrir (“liberation”) begins bubbly but tensely and becomes even more tense as it rises, with almost a tango beat, before a long, judicious accordion solo over a hypnotic percussion riff.

The two most traditionally Middle Eastern pieces are Samai Faah Faza, a rhythmically tricky number that spins clever variations on a series of Egyptian-tinged riffs, and Andalus, an anthem that sets accordion and gently tremolo-picked buzuq mingling with terse oud and echoey, ominous percussion. The most unselfconsciously beautiful song is Raja, beginning with somber solo clarinet, working its way up to a pensive, plaintive dirge that crescendos with a series of intense chromatic riffs. The album ends with Gitans En Orient, a bustling, shapeshifting romp, sometimes majestic, sometimes scampering, underscoring gypsy music’s roots in the Middle East. With the gypsy music explosion of recent years, the potential audience for this richly melodic, intense album extends far beyond the usual demimonde of Middle Eastern and Arabic music fans. It’s out now from World Music Network.

The Spy From Cairo Stars in a Memorable Sequel

One-man bands are common throughout the Arab diaspora: it’s not uncommon for a master Middle Eastern musician to play several instruments expertly. One such master is Brooklyn-based Moreno Visini, AKA Zeb, AKA the Spy from Cairo: he does everything himself. He’ll lay down a drum loop, then add layers of oud, then saz lute, then washes of strings through a pedal effect run from either the oud or the saz. What makes him different is that he’ll also add a fat reggae bassline, or just a catchy bass riff, which he’ll loop so it runs over and over again beneath all the Middle Eastern instruments. His new album Arabadub – his second on Wonder Wheel Recordings - is more Egyptian than reggae, although when it’s Egyptian reggae it’s sprinkled with light dub touches as well. There’s nobody who sounds quite like him.

He’s a fantastic player, too. He’ll typically open a piece with either a bass riff or an improvisational taqsim on one of the stringed instruments, then add an anthemic string arrangement, then take a long, serpentine solo on the oud, or the saz, or both. Sometimes he intertwines the two lutes; several of the other tracks also feature ney, one of them building very hauntingly from the flute’s lowest, most breathy registers to a biting, agitated dervish dance. Every time, he goes for slinky, suspenseful ambience rather than showing off his fast fingers, so in the few instances when he goes for the jugular with frenzies of tremolo-picking on the oud, the effect is breathtaking.

With the jangle and plink of the saz, the unmistakeably boomy bite of the oud and the hypnotic pulse of the drums and bass, the tunes are downright gorgeous and often haunting. The most potent, and most dubwise one is the next-to-final cut, Latif, which blends Middle Eastern tonalities with a poignant Western neoromantic motif in the style of legendary Lebanese songwriters the Rahbani Brothers. The aptly titled Marseilles Noir hints at a plaintive French musette theme. The most anthemic one, Road to Ryhad, winds its way from a fat bass riff to a pensively incisive oud solo where all the other instruments eventually drop out of the mix to make way for a slow, ruminative taqsim, then another long oud solo that builds almost imperceptibly to an understatedly powerful crescendo followed playfully by the one time on the entire album where the drums actually do a reggae one-drop. Visini doesn’t confine himself to reggae beats, either: a handful of cuts have a clip-clop, trip-hop-like rhythm, and there’s a brisk number that’s basically levantine ska. If you listen closely, you’ll notice that in several instances, Visini will begin with a bass loop but by the middle of the song, he’s playing a bass countermelody to complement the other instruments. There’s a lot more here that reveals itself cleverly with repeated listening: after all, dub is music to get lost in, and you can get absolutely, completely lost in this album. Beyond the Arab world, who is the audience for this? Reggae fans, stoners, devotees of the more hypnotic side of esoterica and anyone with a taste for the beautiful, often haunting maqam scales of Arabic music.

Emel Mathlouthi Captures the Horrors of Fascism and the Thrill of Revolution

Fifty years ago, it was Americans who were writing some of the most powerful and resonant protest anthems and songs of freedom; a generation later, it was the British. Today, it’s the people of the Arabic-speaking world. To fail to acknowledge these artists at this moment, as their message of transformation and genuine hope spreads around the globe, would be the same as dismissing Bob Dylan in 1964 or the Clash in 1979. A star in France where she moved after leaving her native Tunisia, singer/guitarist Emel Mathlouthi became to last year’s Tunisian revolution what Warda was for the Algerians a half-century ago: a lightning rod, and a particularly fearless one. Mathlouthi’s album Kelmti Horra (Arabic for “Freedom of Speech”) is out recently worldwide from World Village Music – while the obvious audience is an Arabic-speaking one, it’s a riveting listen whether or not you understand the lyrics.

By any standard, Mathlouthi is an extraordinary singer, highly nuanced, evoking an intense tenderness yet often direct to the point of being confrontational. She cites both Dylan and Cheikh Imam as influences, and draws as much from American soul music and new wave rock like Siouxsie & the Banshees as she does from Arabic pop and classical styles, often layering her vocals into a mighty, ornate wall of harmonies. Behind her, violin and piano stand out stark and plaintive against murky low-register keyboard drones and the ominous boom or thud of a drum machine or percussion loop. This is haunted, exhausted, angry, bitter, wounded wartime music, with the inescapable message that if we continue to let the world be run by dictators and speculators, that choice is suicidal.

The album begins on a soul-infused but wary note with Houdou On (Calm), rising and then falling down into a nebulous interlude that she comes out of with an insistent intensity. Ma Ikit (Not Found) alternates a growling Marilyn Manson-ish synth bassline with an anguished, sweepingly anthemic minor-key melody. Rhythms here tend to be straight-up and closer to rock than the Middle East, whether the slow, stalking, Peter Gabriel-ish Stranger, with its stern chromatic riffage and Mathlouthi’s perfect English lyric, or the bittersweet, surprisingly delicate title track, a cautionary tale familiar to anyone watching his or her back while the spycams roll and the troops roll out.

Ya Tounes Ya Meskina (Poor Tunisia), the anthem that started the ball rolling, sets vocals that offer comfort rather than fueling the fires of rage, against a backdrop of ominous motorik synth, echoey syndrums and a string arrangement that’s absolutely majestic – it’s no surprise that this was such a hit. By contrast, Dhalem (Tyrant) is crushingly sarcastic, a faux lullaby with a creepy music box interpolated into its pleading, longing melody. And the epic Ethnia Twila (The Road Is Long) slowly and wistfully unwinds through constant tempo changes into a final crescendo of crowd noise and children chanting resolutely.

The single most gripping track here might be Dfina (Burial), a bitter Tunisian-flavored art-rock anthem that shifts between distant disillusion and raw, unhinged rage. The most pop-oriented one is Hinama (When), with its ominous post-new wave production and watery guitars. The album ends with another multi-part epic, Yezzi (Enough), shifting from a pensive folk rock-tinged intro as it reaches for freedom once and for all, resolute and indomitable. The album is best enjoyed as a whole – it’s hard to turn away once Mathlouthi hits her stride. There aren’t many albums that pack this kind of impact: simply one of 2012′s best, and probably destined for iconic status as both historical artifact and artistic achievement.

Emel Mathlouthi and her band play the Alliance Francaise, 55 E 59th St. in Manhattan on May 22, 2013 at 8 PM. Tickets and information are available here.

Haunting, Hypnotic Middle Eastern Sounds from Niyaz

In the era of the Arab Spring, it’s become clear that the people of the Middle East have not suffered gladly. As the revolution that spread from Tunisia, to Egypt, to Syria and Greece and soon these shores gains momentum, we owe a debt to its freedom fighters for jumpstarting the movement as it spreads around the world. Canadian ensemble Niyaz celebrate those heroes’ resilience – “Sumud” in Arabic – which is the title of the band’s hypnotically intense, melodically rich new album. The band’s multicultural viewpoint reflects its members’ diversity. Frontwoman/santoor player Azam Ali came to the United States as a refugee from India in 1985; multi-instrumentalist/composer Loga Ramin Torkian originally hails from Iran; keyboardist/drummer/effects wizard Carmen Rizzo is US-based. The rest of the group here includes Habib Meftah Boushehri on percussion and flute, Ulas Ozdemir on saz, Naser Musa on oud and Omer Avci on percussion. Rizzo’s signature sonic manipulation layers the organic textures of Torkian’s jangling, clanking, plunking lutes – rebab, saz, kamaan, djumbush, lafta and also guitar and viol – within a dense, chilly, endlessly echoing wash of drones, percussion loops wafting through the mix with a distant, muffled pulse. The effect is hypnotic, to say the least. The rhythms often give the songs a trip-hop or downtempo electronic lounge feel, albeit with dynamics which leave no doubt that this was created by musicians rather than by a computer.

Whether singing in Persian, Arabic or Turkish, Ali’s nuanced vocals span from longing, to rapturous beauty, to raw anguish: for those who don’t speak those languages, the cd booklet provides English translations. Most of the songs are new arrangements of traditional melodies, often with additional music by the band, which makes sense: in the countries where these tunes come from, improvisation rules. Ironically, the catchiest, most pop-oriented one here, Musa’s Rayat al Sumud (Palestine) is also the most lyrically intense: “No matter how many borders you create, no matter how many soldiers you line up, we will always fly the flag of resistance,” Ali sings in Arabic with a steely resolve. They follow that with another brisk anthem contrasting spiky lute textures with echoey, twinkling keyboards.

Many of the cuts here employ the haunting chromatics of the Arabic hijaz scale: a majestic Afghani folk song sung in Dari (a Persian dialect spoken there), whose message of peace has particular resonance these days; an almost imperceptibly crescendoing Persian love song; a steady, tiptoeing Kurdish tune and a duet by Ali and Torkian over a slinky Ethiopian-flavored triplet groove. A strolling, pulsing song by Ozdemir has echoes of gypsy rock; other songs here sound like an Iranian version of Portishead. The album ends with a gorgeous, longing Turkish epic that slowly comes together after a long, apprehensively crescendoing introduction. Sometimes solemn, sometimes soaring within Rizzo’s signature swirl, it’s the kind of album that sounds best late at night with the lights out.

Dusky Grooves from the Toure-Raichel Collective

Desert blues albums are best enjoyed as a whole. Sure, you can break the individual tracks up and scatter them amongst different playlists, but a good desert blues album sets a mood. The Toure-Raichel Collective’s new album The Tel Aviv Session is a different kind of desert blues album, a collaboration between pyrotechnic Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure and Israeli keyboardist/bandleader Idan Raichel. Raichel is an insatiably omnivorous player who seemingly never met a style he didn’t want to master; Toure admits to thinking at first that Raichel was a “crazy hippie,” but on this generally low-key, daylong collaboration in an Israeli recording studio, the two make a good team. Although he plays acoustic guitar here, Toure still has the restless, uneasy edge that makes him such a compelling electric player. Raichel shows off a potent understanding of chromatically-fueled, Arabic-tinged motifs, often playing with a rippling staccato feel that, especially when he mutes the strings inside the piano, evokes the sound of a balafon or a qanun. In one passage, he brushes the strings for shimmery, harplike glissandos. Behind them, bassist Yossi Fine - who has toured with Toure, mentored Raichel in his early years and may ultimately have been responsible for jumpstarting this session – plays endlessly hypnotic loops in tandem with percussionist Souleymane Kane. French jazz harmonica player Frederic Yonnet guests on a rustic 1920s flavored blues jam that evokes Hazmat Modine in a particularly boisterous mood; Yankale Segal, from Raichel’s touring band, adds a third layer of richly glistening textures on Iranian tar lute on another. And the final cut, where the band finally cuts loose with an all-too-brief, soaring crescendo, features haunting, intense kamancheh (Iranian spiked fiddle) by Mark Eliyahu.

The rest of the album alternates between slinky two-chord desert blues vamps, and Middle Eastern piano music, sometimes in the same jam. Toure reveals a fondness for open chords and a biting facility for raga-like passages; Raichel often mimics Toure’s quicksilver hammer-on attack. Most of the songs here are long, slowly and casually coalescing out of themes typically introduced by the guitar. When Raichel supplies the central riff, Toure responds with fluttering, muted chromatics of his own, or simply steers the jam south toward Mali. The album liner notes mention “frequent breaks for coffee;” one suspects that there were other aromas wafting through the studio that day. The most hypnotic track, a lush, warmly major-key cut that brings to mind the Stones’ Moonlight Mile is followed by a brief, rather impatient, upbeat cut driven by Toure. Then they follow that with the single most hypnotic cut, featuring Raichel on Fender Rhodes, adding a vibraphone-like rhythmic bounce against Kane’s boomy calabash. It’s out now on Cumbancha; fans of desert blues, Middle Eastern music and intelligent jam bands ought to check it out. And it goes without saying: this collaboration between a Muslim African and an Israeli Jew underscores the argument that if we took the rabbis and mullahs (and American agitators) out of the picture and left everything to the musicians, there would be no war in the Middle East.