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London Jazz Festival

 

London Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall
Friday 14 November 2008

The Times
Jazzwise Magazine
Preview in New Statesman
Preview of the festival in The Financial Times

Photos can be seen at this blog http://editionontour.blogspot.com/2008/11/london-jazz-festival-first-night.html

The Times (five stars)
Britten Sinfonia/MacGregor at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
This exhilarating fusion - East meets West meets North meets South - shows us what the future of music will be like
by Richard Morrison
Monday 17 November 2008

A classical chamber orchestra on the opening night of the London Jazz Festival with a Tunisian oud player? Purists on every side must have been steaming from all orifices. But this is the future of music. And it works, as this exhilarating fusion showed.

Nothing demonstrated that better than Arvo Pärt's 1977 minimalist classic, Fratres. It opened the concert, played “straight” by the excellent strings of the Britten Sinfonia under Joanna MacGregor's direction, with its elegiac refrain rising and falling over a drone like a sombre ritual. Then, at the end, it was repeated as an encore - but with a difference. This time the great Dhafer Youssef and the virtuoso percussionist Satoshi Takeishi added a subtle, shadowy patina of Arabic cries and whispers. It was as if the ancestral Estonian modes summoned by Pärt in Northern Europe had stirred strange, kindred echoes in North Africa. Pure musical magic.

And it wasn't the only heartstoppingly beautiful moment in this “East meets West meets North meets South” programme. Youssef's own pieces - gentle-spirited, syncopated improvisations in sophisticated metres, showcasing his stunningly pure voice (electronically enhanced with overlapping echoes), his shofar-like falsetto, and dextrous fingerwork on his Arabic lute - gained a dimension, sonically and expressively, when accompanied by the strings. Meanwhile, Takeishi, squatting beside his exotic drums and cymbals, supplied deft and supple solos, as did the ubiquitous jazz bassist Peter Herbert. And the Britten Sinfonia brought to the party some cool culture-hopping of its own. With MacGregor at the piano and Jacqueline Shave supplying fleet-fingered fiddle solos, it played three of MacGregor's exuberant arrangements of songs by the renowned Romanian gypsy singer Gabi Lunca.

Then Shave led two evocative pieces by Bartók. The Burletta from the Sixth Quartet was properly savage. But Pe Loc from the Romanian Folk Dances was the real show- stopper, with Youssef's voice and Takeishi's brushed drums again adding a mysterious and mystical subtext. No, Bartók didn't write it like that. But yes, that dedicated follower of folk fashion would have loved the intrusion.

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Jazzwise Magazine
Britten Sinfonia/Dhafer Youssef/Joanna MacGregor - 14/11/08 QEH, LJF
by David Winks
Friday 21 November 2008

The diverse roster of this year's London Jazz Festival reflects the breadth of music being made as well as the vibrancy and vitality of the scene. It was therefore fitting to commence the week with an intriguing programme of works by the composers Avro Pärt and Béla Bartók interpreted by the versatile orchestral talents of Britten Sinfonia, percussionist Satoshi Takeishi and the Tunisian singer Dhafer Youssef.

Few would be able to combine such a disparate array of musicians, and it is testament to the experience and foresight of the Musical Director, Joanna MacGregor, that this amalgamation melds beautifully. While her conducting was initially tempered by a slight awkwardness she soon relaxed and, once settled at the Steinway, continued to encourage the ensemble and ensure that a fine balance was maintained between the artists.

During the first half of the evening, the music progressed from Pärt's reticent 'Fratres' to an energetic rendition of 'Hora de la Bolintin' by the Romanian folk singer Gabi Luncă. Clearly many of the audience had especially come to hear Youssef, and he received a warm reception as he took to the stage. Throughout the performance the irrepressible Sufi singer betrayed a host of emotions, and as he tilted his head back, unleashed a vocal range to match. At times kneading the side of his nose with the side of his palm, he effortlessly shifted to an almost sub aqua register.

Following the interval, the warm tones of his oud perfectly complimented Peter Herbert's bass, whilst Takeishi sketched a wonderfully textured solo, his brush strokes slipping across the hall. Having reintroduced the Sinfonia to the stage, the music swelled towards a climatic rendition of Youssef's own composition, 'Odd Poetry', which saw him joined by MacGreggor leaping into the air in celebration of an innovative and daring collaboration.

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The concert was previewed here in the New Statesman:
http://www.newstatesman.com/music/2008/11/dhafer-youssef-arabic-oud-jazz
The sound of love
By Hisham Matar
6 November 2008

The Tunisian vocalist Dhafer Youssef is one of the leaders of an exciting renaissance in Arabic music. A new generation of artists is engaging with both classical tradition and international audiences.

To the north stretches the Mediterranean, and to the south, where it looks as if the desert has blistered, a salt lake shimmers. The small fishing town of Tabulbah sits in between: a Tunisian port nearly 200km by winding road south of the capital Tunis. This is where, in 1967, the extraordinary vocalist and oud player Dhafer Youssef was born. Youssef will be performing at the London Jazz Festival on 14 November with Joanna MacGregor and the Britten Sinfonia. If you have not done so already, you might want to get your ticket soon. It promises to be a magical evening.

The landscape of Youssef's beginnings tells us something about his musical meditations. The close proximity of the sea and desert is there in his exploration of that old Sufi theme: the soul's longing to return to the divine. This is the Muslim love story that the poets Rumi and Hafez wrote about. It is a philosophy that proved to be fruitful ground for the Syrian poet Adonis, a pioneer of modern Arabic poetry who, it is rumoured, has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year since 2005.

In fact, one can draw a line from Adonis the poet to Youssef the musician: both are deeply rooted in the Arabic mystical tradition, yet remain artistically outward-looking and adventurous. Adonis's work is just as influenced, for instance, by the writings of the 12th-century Arab Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi as it is by T S Eliot, Ezra Pound and the European modernists. Similarly, Youssef's music would not be as existentially relevant without its Muslim heritage, interest in classical Indian music and deep involvement in the Scandinavian jazz avant-garde.

The continued usefulness of Sufi philosophy for artists of differing origins and from distinct epochs is due in large part to its extraordinary adaptability. It seems to matter even in an age when God is supposed to be dead. Youssef's debt to Sufism is there in his evocations of the self dissolving into wonderment and yearning. He is not so much documenting the desirer and the desired as he is the space that divides the two. He ranges across culture, across the secular and religious, which gives his work a relevant urgency in these unhappy times.

It was in Tabulbah that Dhafer Youssef began his training in devotional music at the age of five. One of eight children, he grew up in a family of modest means, but one that nurtured his talent and encouraged his aspirations. Soon he began singing at weddings, and saved enough money to buy his first oud. When he was 19 he moved to Vienna and there collaborated with a generation of musicians who see themselves not so much as heirs of one musical tradition, but of all the world's music; artists such as Peter Herbert, Iva Bittova, Christian Muthspiel and Renaud Garcia Fons. Youssef's first album, Malak, released in 1999, was written and recorded in Vienna and was very much the product of such exchanges. The work established him internationally.

From Vienna he went on to work and live in Barcelona, Berlin, Dakar and Paris. In 2001 he had attempted to settle in New York, where he recorded his second album, Electric Sufi, which featured Dieter Ilg, Markus Stockhausen and Doug Wimbish. But after the attacks of 11 September he felt the need to live in a less unfamiliar city. He moved to Barbès, the predominantly Arab and African district of Paris, where, when I lived in that city and felt a bout of homesickness coming on, I would go to one of the area's small cafes and eat couscous.

In many ways Europe has always been Youssef's musical home. His collaborations with European musicians, such as the lyrical Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu and guitarists Eivind Aarset of Norway and the Austrian Wolfgang Muthspiel, have been as formative and essential to Youssef's development as composer and instrumentalist as his early years in Tunisia. And although Dhafer Youssef's international wanderings are unusually far-reaching, they are also in some ways characteristically North African. In the early 1900s the Algerian coastal city of Oran, where Albert Camus lived and set his novel, The Plague, became the meeting place for Arab, African, Portuguese, Spanish and French traders and musicians. This produced the musical genre of "raï", which, like Youssef's music, is bundled rather untidily under the category, "world music".

Was Claude Debussy engaging in a bit of world music, I wonder, when on encountering gamelan Indonesian music at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle he went home and began composing the Estampes for piano? The problem seems to be with the word "world"; as an adjective it has come to mean a sort of anthropological, homogenised muddle, and so does little to reflect the careful, earnest engagement of artists such as Dhafer Youssef.

Some of the finest, most inventive jazz today is happening in Norway and Sweden. It is for this reason that Youssef has nurtured a persistent interest in the serene austerity of Scandinavian jazz, particularly that of Norway, as his third album, Digital Prophecy, testifies. And his fourth album, Divine Shadows, sees Youssef's collaboration with his team of Norwegian musicians - whom he describes as more African than Africans - go further. There is something particularly beautiful about how they have learned to carry his oud, how they understand its warmth and temperament, and know how to give it space. At times the oud is imploring, but then it consoles. It seems to be weaving something together with Eivind Aarset's guitar. When Youssef's voice arrives it mesmerises with its force as well as with its astonishing range and ability.

It is rare to encounter a human voice so powerful yet so refined, that moves you with its strength as well as with its vulnerability. It seems to at once recall the madness of the village crier and the serenity of a dawn muezzin. It has found a sibling in Arve Henriksen's trumpet. Few trumpeters can impart such depth of feeling as Henriksen. And beneath it all rides, like a gushing river after a strong rainstorm, Audun Erlien's bass, Marilyn Mazur's percussion and Rune Arnesen's drums.

They are so evenly matched that they seem to be powered by the same dreams. Then skating above that river are the electronics, programmed by Jan Bang and the other members of the band. The digital sounds evoke sometimes a distant metropolis, then an intimate scratch like a lover's fingers in your hair, as if what concerns them most is memory. At times the rhythm gives the impression of wanting to back-pedal, as if it is seeking reassurance, which works perfectly with the confidence of Youssef's sound. At other times, a short, funk-cut rhythm takes hold, pushing everything forward, and you feel not so much like dancing as whirling. This is when the experiment is working; when it is not, the music descends into ambient electronica.

In Divine Shadows, as well as in his most recent release, Glow, made with Youssef's old Austrian musical partner, the guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, Dhafer Youssef seems to chart with these north European musicians the point where Arabic and western music meet and separate. Western music, with its preoccupation with the linear journey, with movements that progress to resolution, is contrasted with classical Arabic's perambulatory nature: it is less concerned with getting there than with being. The combination is haunting, and evokes the Sufi longing for union in new ways that resonate with the predicament that the Muslim world and western Europe find themselves in today. Here the longing to return to the divine becomes the desire for harmony and brotherhood with the other. The intuitive sensitivity that Youssef shares with these jazz musicians, particularly with Aarset and Muthspiel, is a testament to what is possible when one engages with other artistic traditions.

At a time when the Arab world is enduring on the one hand the harsh gaze of Europe and America, and on the other political oppression at home, one can take heart in the fact that at least Arabic music is going through a kind of renaissance. Dhafer Youssef is part of a new generation of musicians that is as deeply rooted in its secular and mystic heritage, as it is keen to engage with international audiences. There is something both compelling and profoundly stirring, for example, in the classically engaged and intensely felt compositions of the Iraqi virtuoso oud player Naseer Shamma, or in the intellectual and emotional brilliance of the Tunisian Anouar Brahem and the experimental urgency and flamboyance of the Palestinian Kamilya Jubran (the latter's only album, Wameedd, is recorded with the Swiss jazz trumpeter Werner Hasler).

Unlike, for example, the Arabic novel, which apart from very few exceptions is struggling to gain the attention its literary heritage promises, Arabic music like Youssef's seems to have found ways to remain vital and ambitious, relevant, and engaged.

Hisham Matar is the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted "In the Country of Men". He will be writing regularly on the arts for the New Statesman. Dhafer Youssef performs at the London Jazz Festival on 14 November. www.londonjazzfestival.org.uk

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London Jazz Festival
By Mike Hobart
1 November 2008
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a99137ec-a6ed-11dd-95be-000077b07658.html

The umbrella of populist billings and new commissions that shelters the London Jazz Festival’s nightly clutch of top-notch gigs is a supersize one this year.

The 2008 event, which starts on Friday, November 14, is the biggest so far. For some idea of scale, the first day alone has 26 gigs, led off by a celebration of popular song at the Barbican. Competing events include Femi Kuti’s throbbing upgrade of Afrobeat at the Royal Festival Hall, orchestral world jazz from the gorgeous-toned vocalist Dhafer Youssef and the Britten Sinfonia at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, an exploration of contemporary composition and improvisation led by Keith Tippet in the Purcell Room and urgent modern jazz from saxophonist Vincent Herring at Ronnie Scott’s.

Each of the 10 nights has a similarly full and diverse programme, presented in London’s concert halls and clubs, and there is a first outreach into the capital’s suburbs. “Festival on the Move” sees Italian marching band Funk Off roam around the capital on the first weekend; the 10 baritone saxophones of Tokyo-Chutei-Iki and Neil Cowley’s award-winning piano trio wander afar for the second. And last year’s after-hours focus is now expanded to two late-night jam sessions – at Charlie Wright’s out east, and at Ronnie Scott’s up west.

This year’s big draw is a brace of concerts by the former Miles Davis pianist Herbie Hancock and his new touring band, featuring a subtly shaded trumpet and harmonica front line – Terence Blanchard and Gregoire Maret – and a knockout rhythm section including Benin guitarist Lionel Loueke.

Hancock won 2008’s album of the year Grammy for River – The Joni Letters, his stunning remoulding of Joni Mitchell songs. His accessible but no-holds-barred approach is normally a festival must-see but both his gigs at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday, November 15, and at the Barbican on Wednesday, November 19 are already sold out. If you want to go, check for returns only.

There are, however, other gigs equally rich in promise. On Saturday, November 15 guitarist Bill Frisell’s trio performs original compositions to a selection of silent movies and cartoons at the Barbican, his finely etched, slightly surreal Americana an ideal soundtrack. On Wednesday, November 19, US trumpeter Roy Hargrove and his sparkling quintet power the BBC Big Band on a brash programme of bop, mambo and funk.

Two more Miles Davis alumni remind us of the massive contribution the trumpeter made to 20th-century music. Pianist Chick Corea and guitarist John McLaughlin have not played in a band together since they were part of Davis’s inner circle some 40 years ago. Both went on to launch their own influential fusion bands, albeit with a rock slant. This joint project sees them team gritty funk of the next generation with a band that includes high-energy saxophonist Kenny Garrett and bass virtuoso Christian McBride. They headline at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, November 23.

With headliners like these, the bespoke element takes a back seat, but one-off themed concerts abound. The opening celebration of a century of popular song supports the likes of Carleen Anderson and Cleveland Watkiss with an orchestra led by trumpeter Guy Barker. The repertoire ranges from Gershwin to Quincy Jones.

On Monday, November 17, saxophonist Alan Barnes and his octet premiere new arrangements of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn classics at the Purcell Room, and on Thursday, November 20, Courtney Pine investigates the legacy of New Orleans saxophonist Sidney Bechet. UK band Empirical will provide support for a top double bill.

Africa, Latin America and the Middle East are, as ever, well represented. “African Flashback” combines music from French bassist Henri Texier’s trio and Guy Le Querrec’s photography at LSO St Luke’s on Tuesday, November 20.

Gonzalo Rubacalba and French accordionist Richard Galliano’s Latin chamber jazz at QEH on Sunday, November 16, is recommended – they are part of a strong European contingent. Norway’s special contribution to contemporary jazz is showcased with an eight-day event, Scene Norway, at Kings Place.

This year there seems to be more of the edgy, interactive stuff than usual. Two top-of-their-game saxophonists are dropping in for club sessions, and both have recently released flowing albums full of melody and bite. David Sanchez’s quartet brings his Latin-inflected version to Pizza Express, Dean Street, W1, for two nights starting on Saturday, November 15. Chris Potter turns up at Ronnie Scott’s with ultra-hip keyboardist Craig Taborn on Monday, November 17.

Cool-school titan Lee Konitz is at the 606 Club on Thursday, November 20. And there are loads of BBC jazz award-winning Brits with a punky attitude. Matthew Herbert’s big band are at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday, November 21 and Get The Blessing are at The Vortex, N1, the night before.

Lots to see, hard choices to be made.

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