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Artist: Ibrahim Maalouf

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Ibrahim Maalouf:

Red & Black Light

"…a virtuoso of the quarter-tone trumpet…" - New York Times
"Ibrahim Maalouf coaxes his horn to emit a haunting sound few others can achieve…" – Departures Magazine

New Album from trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, Red & Black Light released on Impulse!/Verve Label Group digitally on September 9, 2016

US Tour dates kick off this fall in San Francisco and include dates in New York City, Monterey, and Columbus, OH

Ibrahim Maalouf's Red & Black Light will be released digitally on Impulse!/ Verve Label Group on September 9, 2016. This album follows Maalouf's album Kalthoum, an hour-long suite inspired by legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum's Thousand And One Nights.

Ibrahim Maalouf is known for bridging the gap between Arabic music and western jazz – a feat helped by his unusual four-valve trumpet, invented by his father, that digs into the in-between notes. The Atlantic said of his performance earlier this year at Winter Jazz Fest, "Attempts at translating world music into jazz are common, but successful translations are far rarer. Maalouf managed the trick. He took full advantage of Eastern scales, hammering them into superb modal jazz."

While Kalthoum paid homage to the Egyptian female singer Oum Kalthoum, Red & Black Light continues Maalouf's musical tribute to women. Maalouf says this album is "an ode to the woman of today and her founding, essential role in the hope of a better world. The women in my family have had (and still have today) immense influence on all my work in music. Despite having lives like labyrinths, complex and often dramatic, these women have inside them a strength and stability similar to a kind of unshakeable trance."

And so his compositions-on this album more contemporary, more electronic-- follow in that vein. Maalouf continues, "Although the writing in these pieces is particularly complex (with polyrhythms in 19, 17 or 27 for example), we arranged in such a way that you never hear the weight of this writing."

The album includes a moody, intricate arrangement of Beyoncé's 2011 hit Run The World (Girls) – reimagined in a video that tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world that succumbs to racism, but is saved by women. In Red & Black Light, Maalouf's trumpet wails over the rock-infused stomping groove. The whole album is a rich blend of Arabic melody, electro-filled instrumentation, rock-heavy grooves and complex polyrhythmic structures.

Ibrahim Maalouf:

Kalthoum

KALTHOUM is a celebration of women who overturned the course of history, women whose artistic influence has had an impact that reaches all the way down to our lives today. So I chose an emblematic figure, a genuine monument in the history of Arab people, and incidentally someone whose voice is the one I've listened to the most, ever since I was a child: Oum Kalthoum.

She was known as the Star of the Orient, and my father was a great fan. He was fond of many sublime voices - Feiruz, Abdel Wahab, Wadih El Safi, Souad Mohamed - but for him, Oum Kalthoum reached the heights of the art of the "Mawal", the tradition that consists of improvising at length for many minutes. It calls for all the technique and virtuosity that belong to the historical Arab styles. He taught me to sing her best-known songs, and always took care that I should sing them as correctly and precisely as possible. He made me pay so much attention to those songs that they have had a long-lasting effect on my vision of lyricism and vocal performance. And because I'm not a singer myself, I try to use my instrument to convey the love I have for an art that, in the end, is hardly practised at all: the "Tarab".

Obviously, trying to explain the "Tarab" in music is a very complex matter; it is not only an emotion and a sensation of ecstasy, but also an art of living one's life with happiness, and so I thought it would be wiser to attempt an experiment, and translate this into music as a stylistic exercise.

Pianist Frank Woeste and I have "transcribed" one of the Egyptian diva's greatest songs, "Alf Leila Wa Leila" ("The Thousand and One Nights"), translating it into jazz that respects the conventions but, hopefully, innovates in the way it mixes cultures.

This song dates from 1969 and was composed by Balighe Hamidi; it takes the form of a suite lasting around an hour (as was often the case in those days with works of this type), with a three-minute chorus and verses of between five and twenty-five minutes. A large part of the piece, both in the original version and in this one, is reserved for improvising, but this suite is above all a series of tableaux, and the way they are set up was very exciting to transcribe.

Because our version is exclusively instrumental, the poetry of the original song has not been reproduced, but this leaves room for a much freer performance in terms of style. With this piece, as far as it would allow, my aim was to intensify the contemporary aspirations of music that is anchored in a tradition from which it continuously seeks to free itself.