The Other Mediterranean

We all know the seven notes. Add sharps and flats and you get twelve basic pitches, which shifted up or down an octave (the most intuitive and universal of intervals) fill out the whole stave. From each of these tones you can build a scale, major or minor, and by grouping several notes of the same scale you form chords – some of which sound full and bright, others dark or unsettled, others downright dissonant, and others still uncertain and suspended, as if waiting to give way to some more conclusive combination of sounds. That, in a nutshell, is tonality: pair it with a selection of instruments drawn from the vast palette of classical and rock music, plus one of the two fundamental rhythmic schemes – a strong beat every 4, or every 3 – and you can bring to life an endless array of possible musical forms. Styles and sounds capable of covering the entire spectrum of human emotion, forming languages that, listen after listen, become ever more cohesive and immediately communicative.
Jazz can be seen as just one of the many branches on this tree of possibilities. It's defined by the importance it places on the dialogue between composition and improvisation, and by its tendency to rely on a subtle but highly effective rhythmic trick, a slight asymmetry of accents and durations between notes that, on paper, should have the same time value: swing. Simple, right?

Too simple. Not only because the picture just sketched is excessively formalist and deliberately ignores the whole tangle of social, cultural, historical, geographical and ethnic issues that give any musical genre its body and soul. No, the picture drawn is too reductive because it fails to account for a crucial feature of music in general and of jazz in particular: its irrepressible tendency to break out of the mould, to shrug off the "musts," the "dos" and, ultimately, even the "cans" that prevail within its own field, in order to go looking for (or invent) others.
There are a thousand ways in which jazz has widened its horizons, revisiting this or that boundary condition to bring new expressive possibilities to life. There's jazz without improvisation and jazz without swing; jazz that's dissonant or nearly indistinguishable from classical and pop; jazz that climbs its scales starting from different degrees than the first just to see what happens, or flees any preset structure in search of the fullest possible expressive freedom.
And then there's Dave Brubeck, who in 1959 embarked on a path both elementary and daring: drawing on the rhythmic and harmonic richness of different musical cultures to open up territories as accessible to the ear as the usual ones, yet curiously disorienting and still entirely unexplored. The album is called "Time Out", and it contains the two tracks that stand as the most famous example of jazz's "Middle-Easternization": "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and "Take Five". With their unforgettable melodies and heavy use of odd time signatures, these pieces, now standards in their own right (and in some cases even jingles for TV commercials), showed – and still show – the Western world that there's a whole universe beyond 4/4 and the oom-pah-pah of the ballroom.

An ocean of music

Much water has flowed under the bridge since then, but the geographical focus of Brubeck's attention remains – perhaps now more than ever – a crucial hub for countless creative paths. Times really have changed: Brubeck's gesture, then read within cool jazz circles as revolutionary and progressive, would today be seen as a blatant case of cultural appropriation. Even discussing it here as a forerunner of Mediterranean jazz, or Medi-jazz, risks branding this article as Eurocentric (or Americentric, or whatever you want to call it).
Meanwhile, jazz has for decades moved beyond the African American (and later Euro-American) milieu that shaped its initial development, becoming the international genre par excellence. Not just because, like many others, it's produced and listened to all over the world, but also because part of the essence of contemporary jazz is that its lineups bring together musicians of every background, from the most far-flung corners of the globe.
In a context that, at least intellectually, pays ever-closer attention to cultural identities, it's only natural that a growing number of artists feel drawn to what they perceive as their own musical roots, and want to interpret or champion them. These roots, moreover, tend – in both the New World and the Old – to be complex tangles of ethnicity and genealogy, anything but simple to untangle, yet undoubtedly rich, varied and fascinating to explore.

The Mediterranean, always as much a boundary as a channel for exchange and cross-pollination, has witnessed over the centuries the rise and fall of empires and civilizations, has been a theatre of conflict and a conduit for innovation. Even though today it has lost, even in our own eyes, its role as humanity's absolute point of reference, it remains an essential crossroads of tensions and opportunities, a meeting and clashing ground for worlds that are at once very close and very far apart.
Accustomed as we are to the privileged spot we occupy on the map — Europe and Italy jut out with peninsulas and islands right into the middle of the sea, dominating it — we tend to view the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean as fascinating, exotic, threatening or insignificant elsewheres. Yet we forget how inextricably our present and our future are bound up with those places, and how much of what we consider part of our own identity is in fact the fruit of encounters with those coasts and the lands stretching out behind them.

"Mediterranean jazz" can mean many things. It can be synonymous with a rather stale Third-Worldism, or the product of cheap cocktail-bar exoticism; or it can be the creative outcome of in-depth ethnographic research, as well as the unexpected landing point of careers born and raised entirely within traditional music. Medi-jazz isn't a scene, nor even a genre; it isn't even a label particularly used by critics or promoters. It's a convenient catch-all, useful for grouping together music and artists who, for one reason or another, have made the Mediterranean and its traditions a crucial part of their vision. In putting together this article, we chose to focus on paths that aren't strictly regionalist, but that are able – sometimes even at the expense of fidelity to their own culture of origin – to bridge multiple shores, whether opposite or adjacent, of the sea reflecting Western Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa.
The decision to focus this survey on artists whose careers have mainly unfolded over the last decade, besides making the task more manageable, is meant to foreground the vitality and contemporary relevance of the musical horizons under discussion. The message we'd like to send is: we're letting a ton of interesting stuff slip by, but there's still plenty of time to catch up!

The route so far

The fact that the music presented here doesn't form a cohesive landscape doesn't mean it's impossible to sketch at least a rough history or identify recurring elements, both on a biographical level and a more strictly musical one. Well aware that, starting from a limited sample, it's difficult to separate general characteristics from one's own selection bias, here nonetheless is an attempt at contextualization.

Western jazz musicians' infatuation with the Middle East didn't fade away with Brubeck, only to resurface in 2010 like some underground river. It was 1967 when trumpeter Don Ellis released "Electric Bath", a third stream record on which the entire big band led by Ellis threw itself headlong into scales of Anatolian origin, impossible in any orthodox or unorthodox version of harmony as understood on either side of the Atlantic. In the decades that followed, numerous celebrated musicians of international standing have "washed their clothes" close to the shores that once belonged to the Abbasids, generally for one-off projects: in many cases these are broad fascinations that resulted in occasional instrumental borrowings (on Ornette Coleman's "Broken Shadows" and "Science Fiction", released in 1971 and 1972, reedman Dewey Redman plays a Middle Eastern oboe credited as a musette) or harmonic and atmospheric ones (Herbie Mann, "Impressions Of The Middle East", 1967). Rarer, but documented, are collaborations with local musicians: also from 1967 is George Gruntz's "Noon In Tunisia" (with Eberhard Weber, a twenty-five-year-old Jean-Luc Ponty and five North African musicians); then in 1978 came "Live In Ankara", a meeting between trumpeter Don Cherry and a Turkish ensemble. In fusion and jazz-rock circles, multi-ethnic "currys" are far more common, often featuring Middle Eastern elements: alongside (almost) entirely European outfits like Embryo (Germany), Area (Italy) and Archimedes Badkar (Sweden), noteworthy are the Franco-Persian-Algerian Rahmann and the many projects led on Swedish soil by Turkish percussionist Okay Temiz, among them Oriental Wind.

At the same time, in the countries of the southeastern Mediterranean, if not fully-fledged jazz scenes, at least phenomena heavily influenced by Western jazz styles began to develop. Fairly early on, instruments typical of jazz (above all the saxophone) were absorbed into the large orchestras accompanying popular singers across the Arab world. In the 1950s, jazz influences were blatant in the lush pop of Lebanese brothers Assi and Mansour Rahbani, composers for one of the most prominent voices in the entire Arab world, the iconic singer Fairouz (Assi's wife from 1955).
In Egypt, in 1968 drummer and composer Salah Ragab received a specific mandate from Nasser to assemble a group that could make jazz the new post-revolutionary musical idiom: thus debuted the Cairo Jazz Band, which, despite state funding, never achieved the popular acclaim initially hoped for over its many years of activity (Ragab would however develop a close friendship with Sun Ra, with whom he performed repeatedly until the Cairo Jazz Band disbanded in 1974: nearly all of these recordings are collected on "The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab In Egypt", from 1983). Again it was through Fairouz that, from the late 1970s, jazz influences gained further ground in the Arab world thanks to the contribution of her son Ziad Rahbani, who took over from his father and uncle as principal songwriter. With Rahbani Jr.'s music, the label "oriental jazz" gained some currency, and his figure has more recently played a decisive role in presenting singers like Salma Mousfi and Latifa as refined vocal jazz interpreters. Outside the Arab world, Turkey, Israel and the Soviet republics of the Caucasus developed more extensive national jazz scenes, influenced by Western ones and at times in contact with them.
A case apart, however, is that of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, an American double bassist of purported (though disputed) Sudanese roots who, as early as the late 1950s, took up the Middle Eastern lute known as the oud and devoted himself to a musical syncretism between big band jazz and Arabic musical forms. A bassist for Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and Herbie Mann, Ahmed Abdul-Malik has been the subject of biographical research that seems to have established his actual Caribbean origins and his birth name, Jonathan Tim Jr.: his new identity would have been created to lend more credibility to his distinctive musical explorations (appreciable, for instance, on "Jazz Sahara", from 1959).

From the late 1980s, musicians from the Levant and North Africa began making their way onto Western labels and stages, often through significant collaborations and with a style that was at once personal and immediately recognizable as an expression of its geographic context. Leading the way was oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil, a Lebanese musician who moved to Germany during the 1978 war. Albums such as "Between Dusk And Dawn" (1987), "Al-Jadida" (1991) and, above all, "Blue Camel" (1992, with Kenny Wheeler and Steve Swallow) established him as something more than the usual "exotic guest" seen many times before, but rather as a leading artist capable of expressing his own original vision of jazz without being overshadowed by the international stature of his collaborators. 1991 also saw the solo debut (on ECM) of another oud player, Tunisian musician Anouar Brahem, whose suspended, rarefied style would in later years lead him to record as co-leader with Jan Garbarek ("Madar", 1994), Richard Galliano ("Khomsa", 1995), and John Surman and Dave Holland ("Thimar", 1998).

What followed, slowly between the late 1990s and the 2000s, and then at an accelerated pace over the last decade, now looks like a full-blown medi-jazz explosion: dozens upon dozens of artists and groups, young and not so young, in Europe and beyond, who with widely differing ambitions ground their expression in a complete fusion of jazz sensibility and southeastern Mediterranean musical structures. Their paths may be motivated by curiosity — paired with careful study — toward idioms outside their own direct cultural roots, but more often they're tied to the rediscovery and expression of their own heritage: for a large part of the music discussed here, the contribution of first-, second- or third-generation immigrant musicians from North Africa or the Middle East is essential.
There's no point now in attempting a summary of today's rich landscape: that's what the rest of the article is for. It may be worthwhile, however, to recap rather briskly a few intermediate steps between the pioneering phase of Abu-Khalil and Brahem and the present day. The downtempo-tinged nu/acid jazz of Franco-Lebanese musician Toufic Farroukh (almost a Levantine St Germain, at least judging by the fascinating "Drab Zeen", from 2002); the Hadouk Trio of ex-Gong member Didier Malherbe, authors of an effective synthesis between exotic instrumentation and melodic forms entirely familiar to European audiences. The rich and surprising path of French double bassist Renaud Garcia-Fons, who from 1997's "Oriental Bass" onward has pursued a thoroughly personal and intriguing ethno-jazz vein, at times not far from the melodic immediacy of our own Gianluigi Trovesi. The fusion/nu jazz encounter of Turkish-Swedish saxophonist İlhan Erşahin, which peaked in 2002 with the shape-shifting "Harikalar Diyarı (Wonderland)" and was renewed in 2010 with "Istanbul Sessions", in league with Swiss trumpeter Erik Truffaz. Truffaz himself, across a career of constant stylistic experimentation, has also pursued deliberately medi-jazz trajectories: a clear example is "Saloua", from 2005. To close this thoroughly partial overview, a mention too of Jon Hassell, who appears in 2009 on ECM as a supporting player on the ambitious project "Thulâthiyat" by Norwegian pianist and composer Jon Balke: a jazz and orchestral reinterpretation of the cultural legacy of Muslim Iberia, featuring Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui.

A Small Musical Glossary

Given the need to navigate a multiplicity of different offerings, it's worth establishing some recurring linguistic reference points, corresponding to instruments or musical concepts that matter for the descriptions that follow. Partly due to the influence of Greek thought, over the centuries music theory here was strongly codified, forming a body of notions and classifications largely independent of those used in the West. Instrumentation and theoretical elaboration co-evolved, giving rise to chordophones, aerophones and percussion instruments with technical possibilities different from those more familiar to us. The most practical way to navigate the key terms is a brief glossary, which, resorting to some brutal simplification, attempts a partial conceptual and lexical translation.

Iqa' (pl. iqa'at): the rhythmic cell that makes up the basic cycle of classical Arabic music. Unlike much Western music, which treats the tempo of a performance as a global feature and conceptualizes changes of rhythm as exceptions, composition based on iqa' treats tempo and rhythmic pattern as a local property, lasting the length of a cycle: as in the aksak structures of Balkan music, it can be entirely natural for a single piece to combine several different iqa', differing both in tempo (there are ones in 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, but also 8/4, 10/4, 11/8, 13/8, 17/8...) and in rhythmic pattern. The latter is indicated by the sequence of deep, sustained beats (dum) and dry, sharp ones (tak) that identifies the iqa'. In contemporary musical forms, the theoretical apparatus of the iqa' has taken a back seat, and for the narrower catalogue of rhythmic patterns still in use, the term wazn (literally "weight", but figuratively also poetic meter) is often used instead.

Maqam or maqām (pl. maqāmāt): an Arabic term meaning "place", "position", indicating the melodic mode of a composition, comparable to the modality of Western music theory (which, however, centers the notion more on harmonic than melodic aspects). A maqam doesn't merely identify a usable set of notes, i.e. a scale (which is heptatonic, like most Western ones), but also assigns specific melodic roles to the notes, as well as defining simple "model phrases" (jins) associated with recognizable melodic functions and moods — somewhat as chords function in the Western classical tradition. Also encompassing an inventory of possible strategies for transitioning or modulating between one melodic node and another, each of the seventy-two classically catalogued maqamat represents a compositional and improvisational scheme covering most of the non-rhythmic aspects of a performance. Beyond the Arab world, the maqam system is also found (with adaptations) in Turkey and Persia, where it forms a key element of the musical traditions.

Oud: a stringed instrument of Persian origin, belonging to the family of short-necked lutes. Traditionally widespread, with local variations, across a vast area stretching from the Maghreb to Persia, and taking in Turkey, the Caucasus and even Greece, the oud is characterized by ten or twelve paired strings, plus an additional bass string used as a drone. Another distinctive feature, which makes it particularly adaptable to different musical contexts, is the absence of frets: as with relatives of the violin or the fretless bass, this allows the musician to produce virtually any pitch within the instrument's range, without being limited to the discrete possibilities set by a single scale.

Quarter tones: the introduction, from the second half of the eighteenth century, of equal temperament standardized the way instruments used in European classical music (and, by extension, regional ones) were built and tuned, equating notes of very close pitch to one another (e.g. C♯ and D♭, C and D♭♭) and dividing an octave into twelve equivalent intervals called semitones. This innovation allows keyboard instruments to perform melodies and harmonies in any scale from the classical catalogue, regardless of the one the instrument was built for (on which fingering is easier). No such process occurs in musical cultures based on the maqam, which is a microtonal system, since it calls for interval divisions smaller than a semitone. As a result, each traditional keyboard instrument is suited to one or more specific maqamat, but not to others, while instruments like the oud, more flexible because they lack a keyboard, enjoy a significant competitive advantage that has helped their spread. To allow music based on the maqam to be performed on Western-derived instruments as well, technical modifications have at times been introduced to allow the production of notes a quarter tone (half a semitone) apart from one another: this is a practical approximation, developed from the early twentieth century onward, which in effect reproduces an equating of nearby pitches similar to that of equal temperament, dividing the octave into twenty-four intervals instead of twelve.

Psaltery: a stringed instrument of the zither family, found in Europe, North Africa and Asia in many local variants (kantele, cimbalom, qanun, santur). Its many metal strings, each corresponding to a note, are strung across a wooden soundboard and generally plucked or struck with small hammers. Although, like the harp or piano, it's an instrument that's quite laborious to tune, it originally offered an advantage in musical cultures that don't use equal temperament: since the pitch of each string can be adjusted via an appropriate tuning key, the strings can be retuned one by one to perform pieces requiring different intonations. This yields a significant advantage in terms of portability: in principle, a traveling musician need only carry a single psaltery, rather than a multitude of instruments, as a wind player might have to.

Taqsīm (Arabic) or taksim (Turkish): literally "division", this is a genre of improvisatory instrumental performance found throughout the southeastern Mediterranean. Performances, generally lasting between ten and fifteen minutes, are firmly grounded in the maqam and involve laying out a principal melodic mode, followed by numerous passages and modulations toward other, secondary maqamat, before concluding with a return to the foundational maqam. Among the many instruments used in these performances, the most frequent tend to be the oud, the buzuq and the saz (other lutes, but long-necked ones), the psaltery and, in areas under Turkish influence, the ney flute.

Disclaimer: on criteria and biases

What you are reading is a touristic article. It is so knowingly, and without shame: the aim is not to immerse the reader in the life and musical culture of other lands, letting them read it as though it were their own, but rather to point out a few destinations capable of striking and moving even entirely unprepared ears.

The approach adopted here mirrors the one that led to the writing of this piece: the spark that ignited the desire to dig deeper was the music of a handful of artists with an immediate emotional impact, and it's their names that occupy the first part of the list, the more analytical section. These are musicians whose work requires no mediation or questioning of certainties from the Western listener, save perhaps a certain fondness for unusual structures and compositional intricacy. If you like "Take Five", in other words, you're already sorted – well, we're back to Dave Brubeck!
Moving on through the list of recommended records, you'll come across names with a thornier style, as well as less dazzling works, side projects whose expressive qualities are easier to appreciate once you've gained some familiarity with the dominant instruments and sounds. But the ordering, of course, should be taken cum grano salis: depending on personal taste, some will certainly find Gordon Grdina's free improvisation far more immediately digestible than the constant prog reversals of Tigran Hamasyan.
Then there are artists who – entirely relevant to the topic at hand – are not included in the selection offered here. Beyond the obvious filter of what the writer happens to know, plain old aesthetic criteria, deeply personal and debatable, have also played their part. So don't be surprised if an overview that necessarily starts from Dave Brubeck doesn't make room for the free-form experimentalism of Egyptians Nadah El Shazly and Maurice Louca (but hey, there they are, name-checked, so easy on the complaints).

There's at least one more limitation to flag. Almost all the names making up this selection work in Western countries and are signed to labels based in Europe, Australia, North America. This is undoubtedly where the effect of selection bias comes into play, shaping the research behind this piece: it's not that a "homegrown" medi-jazz doesn't exist (quite the opposite – a few names included or mentioned in passing prove otherwise), but it's clear that – even in the internet age – its visibility to the average Western listener will be far more limited than what can be achieved through promoters, press campaigns, concerts specifically aimed at Western audiences. The familiarity factor matters too: with language (searching for titles and materials written in the Latin alphabet is one thing, trying to navigate pages and platforms in Arabic script quite another), and above all with musical language itself.
Which brings us back to the theme of tourism: the content of the big list that follows is, in itself, tourist stuff. These are records made for and consumed by Western ears, by artists whose sensibility was shaped by listening to Western jazz even more than to the traditional styles that inspire them. It's very likely easier for us – fans of music as listening – to recognise ourselves in it than for someone who, on the other side of the sea, grew up immersed in similar-sounding music that served completely different social functions.
Does this perhaps diminish the value of this music, understood as its capacity to amaze, entertain, give sonic form to feelings that would otherwise be impossible to express? Let the music decide: here is a selection of records, arranged chronologically within the three sections that make up the list. Alongside it, you'll also find an introductory playlist and a videography of live performances.
Happy listening and happy reading!

Six to start with…

Dhafer Youssef – Abu Nawas Rhapsody (Jazzland Recordings, 2010)
Dhafer Youssef's name sits at the crossroads of the many trajectories of Mediterranean jazz over the last twenty years. Tunisian, born in 1967, he trained at Quranic school but soon gravitated towards jazz, "clandestinely", via the strings of the oud, the fretless lute that would become his instrument of choice. Having moved to Europe, he crossed paths with the folklore research of Paolo Fresu and the future jazz of the Norwegian scene led by Nils Petter Molvær, Bugge Wesseltoft, Eivind Aarset. With these and other musicians, he had already, in the 2000s, crafted works of great evocative power ("Electric Sufi", "Digital Prophecy", "Omaggio alla world music"), inaugurating a marriage of tradition and modernity that reaches its fullest realisation in 2010 with "Abu Nawas Rhapsody".
Recorded with a quartet featuring Mark Guiliana on drums and a then still little-known Tigran Hamasyan on piano, the album is a musical rendering of poems by Abū Nuwās al-Salamī, a Persian poet who lived in Baghdad during the Abbasid era (756-814 AD) and is remembered for ushering in a new era in Arabic poetry, as well as for the delicacy and irony with which his verses celebrated intoxication, betrayal, and homosexual love. Truth be told, hedonistic inspiration isn't the most obvious feature of the "rhapsody", which stands out instead for its original blend of melancholy, dynamism and spirituality. Alongside the warm sound of the oud, the record is dominated by Hamasyan's pianistic flair – capable of alternating elegy and executional fury while always keeping a firm harmonic tie to his Armenian roots – and by Dhafer Youssef's chant-like singing. The son of a muezzin, the musician has cultivated his voice alongside his stringed instrument, and wields it with great mastery, now weaving slow litanies of striking atmospheric power, now occupying the upper octaves with a timbre eerily close to that of a trumpet. Colourful, poignant and underpinned by uncommon technical skill, "Abu Nawas Rhapsody" is fusion in the most literal sense of the word: a meeting of worlds that talk to one another and combine to create a universe of sensations that didn't exist before.

Avishai Cohen – Seven Seas (Emi/Blue Note, 2011)
Over more than twenty years of releases as a double bassist and bandleader, Israeli musician Avishai Cohen has developed a palette that ranges from post-bop to easy listening to Latin-inflected fusion, all in a personal, immediately recognisable way thanks to the surprising melodic inventiveness with which he handles his instrument. It's with 2006's "Continuo", though, that the Middle Eastern influences always present in his music take over, defining the most iconic version of his style: a refined, cosmopolitan idiom that reworks in jazz form the musical patterns of a vast geographical area stretching from the Mediterranean up to the shores of the Baltic.
The Levant and North Africa provide the harmonic and percussive roots of the compositions, which nonetheless also incorporate, within a sumptuous chamber-music setting, very conspicuous klezmer, Sephardic and Eastern European elements, inherited by Cohen through a family of musicians of Spanish, Polish and Greek descent.
"Seven Seas" further develops the musician's intriguing pan-Mediterranean synthesis, bringing to the fore the intricate pianistic architecture of longtime collaborator Shai Maestro and recasting the exoticism of "Continuo" in a more urban key. The title track is, like other pieces on the record, a bouquet of compound meters, polyrhythmic interlocking and minor-key harmonies: fans of Area will be utterly captivated. Other tracks make use of the horn section (trombone, sax, flugelhorn, English horn) to ease the tension and create more expansive atmospheres, softened – yet at the same time enriched with tension – by vocal additions and clever rhythmic thinning and thickening. Crucial to the effectiveness of these structures is the contribution of another regular Cohen collaborator, percussionist Itamar Doari, whose flair animates most of the tracks with a rhythmic fabric that's never too showy but always in constant flux. Cohen's recombinant exploration of his many traditional influences continues in 2019 with "Arvoles", another fully realised work, this time recorded with a mostly Northern European lineup.

Tigran Hamasyan – Shadow Theater (Verve, 2013)
This site has covered Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan many times, and in sufficiently glowing terms to make plenty of readers familiar with his highly eclectic, personal style. A cornerstone of the pianist's multifaceted expressive palette is the musical heritage of his home country. Perched in the Caucasus – one of the most ethnographically rich regions on the planet – Armenia is, for Tigran Hamasyan, both creative wellspring and ultimate destination of every stylistic journey he undertakes: an inexhaustible reservoir of melodies, rhythms, historical and liturgical references that fuel the musician's inspiration even when he ventures into apparently far-flung musical territories.
The album featured here is the third released under the artist's own name and predates his growing forays into ambient/chamber and djent territory: thanks partly to the contribution of Norwegian Jan Bang, though, electronic elements are already clearly present, dotting several tracks and forming the backbone of pieces like "Drip". Elsewhere, it's Nate Wood's drum'n'bass-inflected drumming (Kneebody) that pushes the balance towards nu jazz coordinates. The undisputed protagonist of the album's chameleonic jazz-rock, however, remains Hamasyan's reworking of Armenian musical tradition, in which overflowing metric and harmonic complexity intersects with the spiritual echoes of the intricate landscape of Eastern Christianity. The album's signature track is the torrential "The Court Jester", which, amid ethereal voices and piano-bass-drums salvoes in wildly odd meters, ends up brushing shores genuinely close to the celestial zeuhl of bands like Eskaton and Dün. Even more than in his later records, "Shadow Theater" showcases the young pianist's shape-shifting personality, revealing both a strong emotional attachment to his own cultural roots and a desire to explore musical realms alien to both Caucasian tradition and jazz orthodoxy. The result is an extremely varied and original album, one that already contains, in nuce, all the future expressive directions the artist's career would go on to take in the years that followed.

Amir ElSaffar – Crisis (Pi Recordings, 2015)
The output of Amir ElSaffar, a Chicago-born trumpeter with an Iraqi father, is also highly diverse both in style and in expressive immediacy. His interest in Near Eastern music took off around the turn of the millennium, when he came across the performance techniques of Egyptian trumpeter Samy El-Bably, capable of producing quarter tones. After meeting the musician in 1999, ElSaffar developed his own approach to microtones, first with the aid of a slide trumpet, then on his regular instrument. Through embouchure variations, ElSaffar is able to avoid the "flattening" effect caused by approximating quarter tones within the new equal temperament, and instead access the full range of melodic and harmonic possibilities offered by the classical maqam. Feeling the need to hone his theoretical knowledge in the field, he travelled first to Baghdad and then to London, where he studied the principles of the maqam, absorbing its vocal aspects and the performance techniques of the santur (the story of how he ended up moving from one city to the other is curious: having arrived in Iraq just months before the outbreak of the Second Gulf War, local musicians reportedly told him, astonished: "What are you doing here? The only person who still knows the whole repertoire lives in London!").
The years around 2010 mark ElSaffar's most intense period of linguistic experimentation, during which, in league with saxophonist and musicologist of Persian origin Hafez Modirzadeh, he carried out in-depth research into "chromodality" – a term coined by Modirzadeh to describe the reworking of microtonality, the maqam and its Persian counterpart dastagh within a jazz context. The results are gathered on the fairly forbidding "Radif Suite" (2010) and "Post-Chromodal Out!" (2012). Considerably more accessible, yet equally stimulating and representative of ElSaffar's rich expressive range, are the three albums released under the Two Rivers Ensemble name, culminating in "Crisis".
In the years immediately preceding the making of the record, ElSaffar lived in Cairo and Lebanon, where he witnessed the brutal crackdown on the Arab Spring uprisings and collaborated with musicians fleeing the ever more chaotic conflict in Syria. Born of shock, anger and disillusionment at the state of the Middle East as he experienced it, the album moves beyond the relative abstraction of his two previous works, arriving at a vigorously dynamic, communicative style. Backing the trumpeter are five Western and Middle Eastern musicians of the highest calibre, themselves experts in the microtonal use of their respective instruments. More composed, but fully successful and surprisingly melodic, is "Alchemy" (2013), which features a quintet led by ElSaffar engaged in a formal exploration of "alternative harmonies" built on microtonal scales of Babylonian origin and/or on the deliberate layering of multiple interval systems.

Ibrahim Maalouf – Kalthoum (Mi'ster Productions, 2015)
Lebanese-French trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf is a prominent figure on the French cultural scene: composer of film scores, of a symphony and of concerts broadcast on national TV, he received the Ordre du Mérite in 2015 from the hands of President François Hollande. Following in his father's footsteps, he has perfected the use of the quarter-tone trumpet devised by his father Nassim Maalouf to allow the performance of musical themes built on the Arabic maqam system. The highly melodic use of microtonal inflections – reminiscent of Don Ellis's Turkish-tinged excursions, Ellis having been among the first to adopt the elder Maalouf's innovation – gives Maalouf's music an immediately recognisable chromatic fluidity, one appreciated too by the many international stars who have sought him out (from Sting to Natacha Atlas, by way of Trilok Gurtu and Vanessa Paradis).
Versatile and by no means averse to pop crossovers (see his contribution to the 2017 multi-artist world masterpiece "Lamomali"), the trumpeter pursues, with real personality, a project of reworking the musical culture of the south-eastern Mediterranean, one of whose most representative episodes is "Kalthoum". The album is dedicated to one of the most celebrated musical figures of the Arab world, Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, and reinterprets, as a kind of standard, the long composition "Alf leila wa leila" ("A Thousand and One Nights"), written for the singer by Baligh Hamdi, a leading figure of Egyptian music in the 1960s and 70s. Backing Maalouf in this endeavour is a top-tier lineup featuring double bassist Larry Grenadier (Brad Mehldau Trio) and, as co-arranger of the pieces, German pianist Frank Woeste. The alchemy generated by Maalouf and his cohorts is elegant, dynamic and enthralling, brilliantly combining the excellent melodic quality of the themes with rich, layered instrumental arrangements. From the same year as "Kalthoum", the eminently catchy "Red And Black Light" effectively explores the more fusion-oriented side of Maalouf's musicality; "Levantine Symphony no. 1", from 2018, instead inaugurates a union of jazz, rock, classical and traditional music that the musician – one can only expect – will return to again in years to come.

Daniel Herskedal – The Roc (Edition Records, 2017)
It's rare, in jazz, to come across small ensembles that feature a bass tuba; rarer still to find it placed at the very centre of the sonic alchemy, as the lead instrument. And yet that's exactly what happens with Norwegian musician Daniel Herskedal, born in 1982 and, for the past decade, particularly active in the territory between chamber jazz and traditional music. His musical research has led him to work as an arranger in the folk field (highly recommended: "Mojhtestasse – Cultural Heirlooms", with sami singer Marja Mortensson), but also to delve into music from lands far removed from Scandinavia.
Since the late 2000s, in particular, the musician's interest has focused on the Middle East, where he has undertaken numerous trips that led him to form bonds with local artists. It's especially through his collaboration with oud player Maher Mahmoud, Syrian but resident in Denmark since 2013, that Herskedal has acquired new theoretical and compositional tools: scales, modes and rhythms typical of the Mesopotamian region become a fundamental part of the horn player's vocabulary, one he has increasingly incorporated into his own music since 2015's "Slow Eastbound Train". "The Roc" is, alongside the later "Voyage" (2019), the album that best represents Herskedal's sound world: backed by viola, cello, piano and percussion, his bass tuba reveals itself as an instrument of unsuspected expressive range, capable of conjuring now murky, agitated atmospheres, now landscapes of extreme calm and luminosity. Whether a track's inspiration reflects his Nordic heritage ("The Krøderen Line") or explicitly evokes Middle Eastern cultures, the quintet's style remains cohesive in blending its different geographical influences. Herskedal's approach isn't philological – the musician doesn't try to present himself as a custodian of traditions that aren't his own – but fully conveys the emotional dimension of the journey and his fascination with the richness of the cultures he encountered. As the titles themselves suggest, "Kurd Bayat Nahawand To Kurd", "Hijaz Train Station", "There Are Three Things You Cannot Hide: Love, Smoke And A Man Riding On A Camel" are magic lamps capable of conjuring up entire scenarios – mountains, deserts, wanderers, caravans – complete with subtle plays of mood and sensation. What a simple reading of the tracklist can't convey, however, is the refinement of Herskedal and co.'s third stream alchemy, nor, above all, the irresistible melodic power of the musician's compositions.

… six more to dig deeper…

Hijaz – Chemsi (Zephyrus Records, 2011)
You can debate which of the records mentioned in this piece is the most surprising, the best played, the one with the most expressive sound, which artist or ensemble comes across as most distinctive, and which instead most faithfully reflects the culture it draws on. But when it comes to who has the most electrifying interplay, there's no room for doubt: Belgium's Hijaz. The acoustic groove of this Antwerp quartet is simply phenomenal. At its heart lies the interaction between the Arabic scales brought to the table by Tunisian oud player Moufadhel Adhoum and the lopsided meters of rebetiko, part of the cultural inheritance of Greek-descended pianist Niko Deman. Alongside the steady additions of bass and drums, their second album "Chemsi" ("my Sun") also features percussion, violin, the duduk oboe and the ney flute, played by Armenian, Tunisian, Moroccan and Indian guests. The result is a panoply of different timbral, rhythmic and stylistic elements that give a decidedly fired-up outlet to the cool jazz idioms underpinning the sound. It might be reinventing the wheel a bit – Dave Brubeck got there sixty-odd years ago – but the effectiveness of the synthesis is genuinely dazzling.


Naïssam Jalal & Rhythms Of Resistance – Almot Wala Almazala (Les Couleurs du Son, 2016)
Naïssam Jalal is a French flautist of Syrian descent, trained at the Paris Conservatoire and further refined in Damascus (to learn the technique of the ney flute) and Cairo. Much sought after for international tours on both sides of the Mediterranean, she founded the quintet Rhythms Of Resistance in 2008 with French musicians of North African descent. With the ensemble, she explores the many possible creative intersections between jazz, traditional music and avant-garde languages developed within the classical world. An expert in "extended techniques" on the transverse flute, Naïssam Jalal has the enviable ability to combine experimental daring with evocative and expressive power, lightness and immediacy. "Almot Wala Almazala" ("Death rather than humiliation" – a reference to the spirit of the failed Arab Spring uprisings) is the product of a tightly-knit ensemble in which every piece slots perfectly into place, shaping a work that surprises with its own particular combination of freedom and forethought.
The band is always at the service of the flute, the undisputed star of the music: Jalal's instrument is hypnotic and charismatic in every situation, whether following in the footsteps of Roland Kirk and Ian Anderson through sing/play technique, or, as on "Alep", used to create enveloping microtonal stasis. On "Où est le bouton pause de mon cerveau?", she launches into wildly oblique unisons with the sax against a maddeningly polyrhythmic pulse: it could have been a completely gratuitous, uncommunicative exercise, but instead it manages to engage and enrapture through a perfect illusion of catchiness. Closing this labyrinthine, wide-ranging work are the eight searing minutes of avant-chamber jazz that make up the title track, in memory of the martyrs of the Syrian revolution – an impeccable sonic synthesis of the record's many souls.

Tarek Yamani – Peninsular (Edict Records, 2017)
Lebanese keyboardist Tarek Yamani, based in New York since 2011, is an interesting case of a self-taught musician who has managed to make a name for himself in as technical a field as jazz piano. He has a few film scores and three albums to his name, the latest of which, commissioned by the Abu Dhabi festival, shows his inventive arabic jazz synthesis in its most advanced form. His is a highly dynamic, melodic and engaging style, whose defining features are the exploration of the polyrhythmic traits of the khaliji music of the Arabian peninsula and the adaptation of the maqam to jazz performance. To pursue this latter goal, the musician plays a specially reprogrammed electronic keyboard tuned to multiples of the quarter tone. The melodic effect, distinctly peculiar and in some ways disorienting, is at the heart of many of the most effective moments on "Peninsular", a highly varied record capable of moving from elegant, detached cool jazz to whirling (arabic)/samba/jazz constructions within the span of a single track ("Gate Of Tears"), or of launching into lopsidedly frivolous Arab-Caribbean divertissements ("Rastprints"). To describe his sound, Yamani coins the term "afro tarab": tarab is an Arabic word denoting both a state of ecstasy induced by music and the music that produces it. Besides being effective at highlighting roots that are at once Black and Middle Eastern, the phrase fits particularly well with the sense of rapture that invariably accompanies the rhythmic and microtonal whirlwind of his compositions.

Yazz Ahmed – La Saboteuse (Naim, 2017)
Often associated with the London nu jazz scene, with which she does indeed share stages and collaborations, trumpeter Yazz Ahmed's music actually sits at the meeting point between cinematic jazz and Middle Eastern traditions, shaped both by the artist's own origins (her father is from Bahrain) and by her time spent in art-rock circles. "La saboteuse" is the album that first fully conveys her striking musical vision, and stands out precisely for its blend of Middle Eastern rhythms and harmonies with dynamically punchy, deliciously retro-toned big band sounds.
Backed by the bass clarinet of Shabaka Hutchings (The Comet Is Coming, Sons of Kemet, Melt Yourself Down) and Swedish guitarist Samuel Hällkvist (Isildurs Bane), the musician alternates between trumpet and flugelhorn (of which she owns a quarter-tone version), offering up a well-balanced run of original compositions, pieces born of collective improvisation, and two highly successful covers: "Bloom" by Radiohead and "Organ Eternal" by These New Puritans – both bands she has collaborated with, in fact for the recording of the very albums that contain these pieces. The record shines for its melodic effectiveness and the ever-present "desert" rhythmic patterns, heavily accented and exotically flavoured; the true distinguishing feature of the blend, though, is the sound itself, multicoloured and evocative. Contributing especially to this are the use of vibraphone and the prominence of electric bass, which widen the band's timbral palette, shifting it from a purely horn-based setup towards elegantly easy listening shores. The following LP, "Polyhymnia" (2019), recorded with an even larger lineup, is also excellent.

Out Of Nations – Quest (World Music Network, 2018)
The award for the most flamboyant and spectacular ensemble in the medi-jazz neighbourhood goes, without a shadow of a doubt, to the international sextet Out of Nations. With a band whose members hail from anywhere between the Baltic and North Africa, and a style with all the rubbery funky-fusion bounce of Snarky Puppy, horn player and composer Lety ElNaggar puts on full display the kaleidoscopic nature of her complex geographical identity. Born to Egyptian and Mexican parents, the young musician grew up and trained between Philadelphia, Cairo, Beirut and Berlin, pursuing classical and jazz studies alongside a Bachelor of Arts in Middle Eastern and South Asian studies. When such cultural richness takes the form of musical creativity, it takes on a taste for flashiness and grandeur that could easily make Return to Forever's "Romantic Warrior" sound like the work of restraint-obsessed office clerks. Embracing without a shred of hesitation the most garish tones of Middle Eastern folk-pop, it drags traditional memories and hyper-vitaminised disco grooves into a kitsch whirlwind that spins round so many times it leaves you utterly bewitched. You've surely never wondered what a resurrected Weather Report might sound like, booked for a stellar fee to headline Egyptian national TV's New Year's Eve show – not because the need for such a thing to exist in some alternate dimension wasn't obvious, but simply because, for reasons we'll never fully grasp, its realisation arrived in our plane of reality before we'd had the time to even put the thought into words.

Majid Bekkas, Goran Kajfeš, Jesper Nordenström, Stefan Pasborg – Magic Spirit Quartet (ACT, 2020)
Moroccan multi-instrumentalist Majid Bekkas is a significant figure in the local musical culture. Co-director of the Rabat jazz festival, over the years he has developed a strong interest in the traditions of the gnawa – a Black ethnic group originally from the Sahel, present for centuries in Morocco, where they were enslaved by local Berber populations. Gnawa music combines features common to sufi spirituality, such as the fluid, cyclical nature of the compositions, with a recognisably sub-Saharan matrix built on call-and-response dynamics and interlocking short, incisive rhythmic-melodic phrases (which, to a Western ear, immediately recall the riff-based structure of the blues – not surprisingly, since they are likely one of its very origins). On "Magic Spirit Quartet", recorded with a Swedish lineup, Bekkas's musicality unfolds through his chosen instruments (guitar, voice, oud and guembri, or sentir: a three-stringed, elongated bass lute) alongside the instrumental support of piano, drums and trumpet. The latter is played, in a markedly Davis-esque style, by Goran Kajfeš of Angles/Fire! Orchestra, lending the overall sound a murky, abstract, psychedelic edge; a perfect fit within the flow, at once open-ended and structured, that Bekkas sets in motion.

… and a few more surprises:

Gordon Grdina’s Haram – Her Eyes Illuminate (Songlines, 2012)
Guitarist and oud player Gordon Grdina is unquestionably the most challenging artist on this list. A Canadian improviser of Slovenian descent working in the free jazz field, he has over the years gravitated toward Middle Eastern instruments and sonorities, weaving them into an integral part of his musical palette. His output spans an extremely wide stylistic range, from the most uncompromising abstraction to work with a strong world component, though it never loses a certain intrinsic difficulty. It must be said that, even at his most experimental, Grdina's phrasing always remains communicative: whether he's wading through Tim Berne territory (see "Nomad", from 2020), surrounding himself with disreputable characters from Mats Gustafsson's circle, or immersing himself in unsettling free/prog-folk explorations (the recent projects under the name The Marrow), the expressive effectiveness of his sketches remains guaranteed. If we had to single out his most representative release for this piece, the choice can only fall on the sole Haram album, the ensemble Grdina formed in 2007 with the aim of creating incendiary, even "heretical" (haram denotes, in Islamic theology, conditions and behaviours forbidden to believers) interpretations of celebrated Egyptian and Iraqi songs from the twentieth century. Despite the stated intent, the reworkings are actually rather disciplined and, even allowing for the inevitable avant-leaning solo detours, fully retain the melodic immediacy of the originals.

L’Hijâz’Car – L’Hijâz’Car (Buda Musique, 2014)
A borderline inclusion, the French group L’Hijâz’Car, a quintet from Strasbourg devoted to musical crossbreeding on the frontier between chamber music and ethno-jazz, with an evident avant-prog streak. The lineup features oud, bass clarinet, double bass and no fewer than two percussionists, and began its activity in the early 2000s before arriving, in 2008, at a well-received collaboration with Algerian singer Houria Aïchi. The self-titled album, entirely acoustic and instrumental, dates from 2014 and finds the band showing off its full, astonishing range of timbre, rhythm and dynamics. Time flies across the record's seven lengthy compositions, which skip elegantly and with a persistent unease between Univers Zero and the streets of Istanbul, between delicacy and aggression, zigzagging in Fred Frith-style fashion and offering brilliant rereadings of standards ("1973 – Mulatu And The Duke" is a meeting between a tribute to legendary Ethiopian jazzman Mulatu Astatke and a cover of "Caravan", Duke Ellington's iconic composition which, thanks to its moon-like harmony and countless reinterpretations, is often — and rightly — regarded as the forerunner of any medi-jazz excursion). Fans of Paolo Angeli will certainly be spellbound by the galaxy of rough, unusual sounds double bassist and composer Vincent Posty manages to draw from his instrument; equally captivating is the ability of the band's other main author, Jean Louis-Marchand, to adapt the bass clarinet to an extraordinary variety of rhythmic and melodic contexts.

Joseph Tawadros – Permission To Evaporate (ABC, 2014)
"I try to record one album a year, and to make it completely different from the previous ones." Getting a handle on the output of Joseph Tawadros, an Egyptian multi-instrumentalist of Coptic descent naturalised Australian, is no simple task. A virtuoso of the oud, he has not only forged a thoroughly hybrid style straddling traditional music, classical and jazz, but also has a habit of ranging (often within a single record) across wildly varied geographic references and levels of seriousness. So, in 2010, we find him alongside none other than the trio of Abercrombie-Patitucci-DeJohnette for a splendid fusion experiment; just a year later, he turns up instead with his percussionist brother James and Armenian-Australian guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan in a thoroughly progressive flamenco-Middle Eastern tour de force in odd meters (complete with a cover of "Blackbird"). What follows: a concert with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, an anatol-bluegrass record with legendary banjo player Béla Fleck… And the work that best serves as an illustrative — though by no means exhaustive — introduction to his tightrope-walking sonic universe: "Permission To Evaporate", as elusive stylistically as ever, if not more so, and this time round particularly electric and fiery, thanks in part to the unusual presence of electric guitar.

Masaa – Afkar (Traumton, 2014)
From Germany, a vocal jazz project built around the musical poetry of Lebanese singer Rabih Lahoud, who in 2012, at the initiative of trumpeter Markus Stockhausen (son of the celebrated composer Karlheinz), joined forces with an already established trumpet-piano-percussion trio. Masaa (an Arabic word meaning "evening") make intimate, nuanced music, refined in approach, in which the jazz element often surfaces only as an undertone, careful never to override Lahoud's chansonnier sensibility. The tracks on their second album, "Afkar" ("reflections", "thoughts"), are built on minimal arrangements that elegantly exploit silence, acoustic timbres and occasional avant-jazz angularity to build contrasts between fullness and emptiness, tension and release, moments of agitation thick with Middle Eastern sonorities, and more detached chamber-music atmospheres. After pianist Clemens Pötzsch's departure, guitarist Reentko Dirks joined the lineup in 2019: their most recent album, "Irade", represents a successful evolution of the band's formula in a direction that is at least as evocative and personal.

Quintet Silsila – Désert du Thar (La Compagnie des Sons Nomades, 2015)
"Silsila", Arabic for "chain", is the spiritual genealogy that in Sufism links the disciple to the master and, link after link, all the way back to the Prophet. One wonders whether the choice of name for this French chamber ensemble is meant to underline how the essence of tradition lies not in slavish stasis but in the chain itself: in the web of translations and betrayals (terms that, not coincidentally, share the same root as "tradition") which over time lead from one reference point to its opposite. Certainly the music on "Désert du Thar" fits this conception well: without stylistically adhering to any single geographic canon, it seems to stand in continuity with a plurality of regional idioms, discreetly filtered through the timbral lens of its double bass-violin-sax-piano-percussion lineup. The Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa are the places most clearly evoked by their reflective yet lively sound, which mirrors the band's multi-ethnic makeup (Tunisia, India, France, Greece). Also recommended is another project by violinist Zied Zouari, "Maqâm Roads", more explicitly focused on exploring the links between the Near East and the Indian subcontinent.

Haz’art Trio – Infinite Chase (The Muse Alliance, 2017)
This young international outfit is based in Switzerland and offers an intriguing alchemy: the oud of the Tunisian tradition, of which lutenist Fadhel Boubaker is a master, combined with nu jazz rhythmic architectures courtesy of German double bassist Jonathan Sell and Swiss drummer Dominik Fürstberger. Nimble and full of invention, the trio's music steers clear of world jazz orthodoxy to experiment with crackling acoustic drum'n'bass sequences paired with the stringed instrument's limpid melodic arabesques. This, at least, holds true for the record's most successful moments, corresponding roughly to its first half. The remainder of the album is less focused, leaning on more atmospheric, sparser compositions that, alongside an undeniable sense of mystery, also elicit the odd yawn.

Zela Margossian Quintet – Transition (Art as Catharsis, 2018)
Among the more "disciplined" releases from Art as Catharsis (one of the most incendiary labels on today's progressive scene) is the debut album by Australian pianist of Armenian descent Zela Margossian and her quintet. Winner in 2018 of the Australian Recording Industry Association award for best album in the world music category, the record is a jazz exploration of Armenian musical tradition and may well remind many listeners of a milder take on Tigran Hamasyan's output. The quintet's music does share undeniable similarities, yet has traits of its own: it is lighter, livelier and more composed, but also less centred on a single leader's expressive vision. Thanks to a lineup that includes winds (sax, clarinet and the Anatolian flute known as the kaval), double bass, drums and percussion (courtesy of Kurdish musician Adem Yilmaz, also a member of the Persian-leaning Eishan Ensemble), "Transition" boasts a timbral and structural richness that extends well beyond the Caucasus alone, and stands as a thoroughly intriguing, promising and successful experiment in world jazz.

Sarāb – Sarāb (Matrisse Productions, 2019)
Young Parisians bearing a name that means "mirage" in Arabic, who made their debut album possible through a €4,500 crowdfunding campaign on Ulule. Their music fuses a jazz-rock foundation, often edged with metallic bite, with the Middle Eastern melodicism embodied by singer Climène Zarkan — of Persian origin but musically trained in Damascus — and trombonist Robinson Khoury, of Middle Eastern roots, already admired for his work on Ibrahim Maalouf's "Kalthoum" and Natacha Atlas's "Myriad Road" (again with Maalouf). Amid languid passages and moments of near-frenetic agitation, it's the dialogues between the trombone and the group's other soloists that prove especially thrilling, turning sharply metallic in the driving "Limb Of Purity", helped along by a brilliant use of electronic effects. Overall the formula is certainly still a work in progress, but it already brims with grit, emotional drive and potential.

RomAraBeat – RomAraBeat (Finisterre, 2019)
"Jazz" is a reductive label for this Italian outfit, which brings together Maghrebi, Balkan and homegrown musicians to set to music the dense web of ties linking the opposite shores of the Mediterranean — a sea that has always been a place of exchange between peoples and cultures. Stylistically straddling several territories, RomAraBeat's music combines Roma and North African traditions with the jazz idiom, generating a "lingua franca" that makes up, with lightness and imagination, for its deliberate lack of philological rigour in reinterpreting its many roots. Clarinets, piano, oud, accordion, percussion, voice and psaltery are the main ingredients of this sparkling musical pot pourri, which shares with Moni Ovadia's band and the multi-ethnic ensemble L'Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio not only some members but also a calm, constructive "mixed-blood" approach to cultural encounter — a vision that, at least on the musical level, should leave little doubt as to its effectiveness and timeliness.

Milad Khawam – To The West (XJAZZ Music, 2020)
Born and raised in Damascus but now living in Berlin, trumpeter Milad Khawam is one of the few jazz musicians, alongside Amir ElSaffar, able to control microtonal variations on his instrument without resorting to a "fourth valve". After numerous engagements with Western and Middle Eastern orchestras and some forays into electronic performance, the musician's solo debut arrived in 2020. The tracks on "To The West" began taking shape in 2015, the year the musician, fleeing the war, reached Europe via the infamous "Balkan route" (some melodies, he recounts, were born as an attempt at distraction and self-consolation during the harrowing hours of illegal transit through Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia). The rhythmic influences of Balkan music are indeed a key component of the album's kaleidoscopic sound, which pairs a rich lineup (piano, electric bass, drums and the qanun psaltery, played by German, Palestinian and Syrian musicians) with tremendous stylistic variety.

Terez Sliman – When The Waves (KKV, 2020)
Released on Norway's Kirkelig Kulturverksted, "When The Waves" finds singer Terez Sliman, a Palestinian born and raised in Haifa, teaming up with renowned future/avant-jazz guitarist Eivind Aarset for a refined, enveloping jazz-pop project full of atmospheric tension. The tracks feature sparse arrangements, largely built on improvisations with clear ambient and electronic overtones — a choice fully in keeping with Aarset's musical aesthetic, but also perfectly suited to the singer's interpretive gifts, which combine passion and otherness in her vocal performances. Yet where Sliman's voice grows more urgent (e.g. "When Tables Will Turn"), the sound can turn rougher too, to powerfully emotional effect. Much of the songwriting is the work of her fellow countryman Raymond Haddad, who co-produces the record and also handles electric bass and modular synthesizers; the lyrics, meanwhile, are by Terez Sliman herself, with Syrian-Palestinian poet Yasser Khanjar collaborating on two tracks.

Harrycane Orchestra – Dark Makam (Galileo Music, 2020)
A large ensemble founded in Germany in 2015, Harrycane Orchestra brings together young musicians alongside seasoned figures such as singer and percussionist Tarkan Yesil and multi-instrumentalist Joe T. Aykut, both of Turkish descent (the latter, incidentally, has composed well-known jingles for Italian advertising products). Their 2017 debut, "Phosphorous", stood out for its fusion of electric jazz with Anatolian and broader Middle Eastern stylistic elements, drawing somewhat glib comparisons in the German press to Embryo's ethno-prog. For their second album, "Dark Makam", the band led by drummer and composer Harry Alt considerably refines its formula, enlisting the strings of Augsburg's Leopold Mozart String Quartet. The pairing greatly widens the group's timbral range and significantly boosts its dynamic reach: once merely exotic and intriguing, Harrycane Orchestra's music is now enveloping and hypnotic. Recorded mostly live in the studio, the album leaves one deeply curious about the band's live rendition, which promises to be exceptional.

Motus Laevus – Y (Felmay, 2020)
Wind player Edmondo Romano has been active on the Italian progressive/world scene for a good three decades. With Eris Pluvia, Finisterre and Höstsonaten, he has helped write important pages in the story of Italy's prog revival. With Avarta, Orchestra Bailam and numerous solo projects, he has also, since the late Nineties, pursued genuinely valuable and personal paths along the borderlands between progressive folk, jazz and Mediterranean traditions. Among the many releases worth flagging, the choice here falls on the most recent: the album credited to Motus Laevus, which places Romano's instruments within an Italian-Slovenian trio of reeds, guitars and keyboards, with guest percussion and drums, and production duties handled by the duo of Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi (a guarantee of quality when it comes to pan-Mediterranean fusion). Airy, crystalline yet always driving and full of tension, the album's music unites the Mediterranean's opposite shores, combining Balkan themes and North African rhythms, Anatolian meters and Celtic flourishes. All of it delivered with an evident progressive spirit, able at every turn to combine lightness, expressiveness, invention and elegance. Also highly worthwhile, and entirely relevant to this piece, is 2012's "Sonno Eliso", featuring guests (among others) Ares Tavolazzi of Area and oud player Elias Nardi (himself the author of significant albums).

Jakop Janssønn – Bricoleur (Finito Bacalao Records, 2020)
Among Daniel Herskedal's many collaborations as instrumentalist and arranger, percussionist Jakop Janssønn's solo debut proves particularly successful and pertinent to the theme of this piece. As suggested by the title — which also lends its name to the drums-violin-bass tuba trio driving the record — the album's music is born as a passionate patchwork of wildly heterogeneous styles, instruments and influences. Sonically, one could call it an unprecedented experiment in "folktronic jazz": a rather misleading label, given that the tracks don't contain a single gram of electronics, yet an effective one nonetheless in suggesting, on one hand, the brightness and acoustic warmth radiating from the sound, and on the other, the subtle scattering of jingles, rustlings and little sonic flickers that dot the compositions and give the sound its body. Even the matter of geographic references proves rather unusual here: the project draws on Norwegian, Icelandic, Russian and Sámi musical traditions, echoed both in the titles and in the harmonic构造s and instrumentation (which includes the kantele, a kind of zither or psaltery common in the Baltic region); in most of the tracks, however, Middle Eastern influences are conspicuous, even taking over entirely in several of the longer pieces.
It's Anatolian harmonies — together with the strings of the Tromsø Orchestra — that drive the dizzying dynamics of "Petsjenga", and "Valvedh" wouldn't gallop along quite the same way without its desert rhythms and percussion, not to mention its irrepressible drum'n'bass about-faces (which repeatedly drag the record to within a hair's breadth of nu jazz). Welcoming and vital, intimate and cosmopolitan, "Bricoleur" is an album thoroughly sui generis, one that nonetheless shows just how promising and varied the paths still are to be explored in rediscovering and reinventing the traditions of parts of the world that seem worlds apart.

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05/03/2026