Ibrahim Maalouf Set for Make Music New York Festival, June 21
By: James T Harding Apr. 30, 2012
Ibrahim Maalouf will be performing on June 21, 2012 at Drom and as part of Make Music New York at the French Consulate.
Composer and trumpet player Ibrahim Maalouf was in the mountains of Lebanon, in his backyard. “I was taking sticks and hitting these big metal things that were in the garden, left there for ages,” Maalouf explains. “And suddenly, it appeared to me that I needEd Strong drums. Stronger than samples, or a regular drum set.” In Paris he recruited Zalindê, a 17-member all-female Brazilian-style batucada ensemble to blast out potent rhythm tracks.
“Since it’s my music, I choose what I think is beautiful. For example, I love Balkan trumpets, and I really love Brazilian batucadas, and when you put a Brazilian rhythm under trumpets playing an Arab melody with a Balkan feel, I think it sounds really good. So I did it.”
“For Diagnostic, I wanted to take the minimum of things, only things that were the most important for me,” Maalouf notes, explaining how he constructed his pieces, composing and playing most of the parts in studio. “Even each track is dedicated and inspired by somebody very close to me: My sisters, daughter, mother, and father. And of course Beirut, my hometown.”
Photo Credit: Denis Rouvre.
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