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CD Review
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Mondo Mix, CD Review >>
-by Daniel Brown
Marcel Khalifé: Born in the northern seaside village of Amchit, Lebanon, in 1950, the oud player and composer Marcel Khalife has been likened to an early-days Bob Dylan of the Middle East. His engagement at the sides of Lebanon’s downtrodden and the Palestinian cause, as well as his courage have won him respect throughout the Arab world. But it is his total mastery of the Arab lute and his ability to push back its classical frontiers that have gained him the plaudits of critics worldwide. In late 2006 he released his 15th album, Taqasim, which is arguably his most audacious to date.
Khalife’s love affair with the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish has been well-documented in the past. For the last three decades, he has willingly dipped into the fertile work of the Palestinian to pepper his compositions with Darwish’s choice metaphors and prose. So this all-instrumental homage to the master poet knocks the listeners slightly off-balance. “I want to manifest the subtle, the unspoken,” he explains in the moving liner notes. These wordless improvisations (which is the literal translation of the word “taqasim”) are destined to “recreate what the poetry of Darwish has created in me.”
The result is three deeply moving parts where prose and written cadence become riveting conversations between Khalife’s oud, his son’s percussions and the upright bass of Peter Herbert. It is sparse but never empty, restrained yet overflowing with emotion, challenging if always within the grasp of the neophyte. “Nowhere have his poetry and my voice been as intensely present as in this work,” he hammers. “As mischievously as the two boys that still inhabit the two of us, the singing voice and the poetic words run and skip with juvenile abandon on the five lines of the musical staff.” And the listener can picture the gay abandon of two running adults at the end of Part One as the oud embarks on one its controlled flights away from the tragedies haunting the Middle East.
This is never a solitary exploration. Khalife has the rare ability to build up a quiet tension before inviting the bass or percussions to join his merry dance. Witness the superb exchange with his son Bashar after eight minutes of Part 3. His presence is enhanced by a daring move to only use the lower registers of the oud and double bass. In this way, he says, he “shall entrust to the broad range of the lower registers...the task of communicating those tremendous but obscure dimensions that are often ignored by the listeners’ ears – the task of expressing the profound consonance between the poet and the musician.”
At the same time, Khalife further opens his world to jazz, with improvised exchanges with Herbert’s pulsating bass lines. The fact that it was superbly recorded in the Big Apple might have inadvertently contributed to this bridge into what is occasionally referred to as American classical music. The result has already impressed Khalife’s compatriots. Beirut’s Daily Star wrote of the album: “A sound field of floating overtones and oscillating reverberations results...Listening to Khalife’s latest (album) feels like sinking into waves of murky water. It is an uncannily physical lexperience.” Yes, but an experience that can only further awaken the world to the poetic abilities of this uniquely talented Lebanese artist. 12/01/06
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