Faraj Suleiman - Solo – Live (At) Montreux Jazz Festival

Two Gentlemen

£13.18

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: TWOGTL0902
Barcode: 7640186551410
Release Date: 01 Oct 2021
Genre: Jazz

TRACKLISTING:
1. Arabic Improv
2. As a First Step
3. A Boy on a Bicycle 7pm
4. First Night
5. Dawn
6. Oriental Melody
7. Naughty Boy

Listen to the seven tracks that make up “Solo - Live @ Montreux Jazz Festival 2018”: they perfectly illustrate the poetics of their composer, Faraj Suleiman, born in Palestine in 1984, i.e. to bring about a new form of Arab music, which would be both the result of Suleiman’s very personal vision and a magnetic pole attracting to him other more or less distant traditions – both in space and time. Look at Faraj Suleiman play: here is a pianist who likes to keep his arms close to his body. Such body language is that of a musician who wants to keep the desires that cross his mind close to his heart.

The genesis of this desire is perhaps to be found in the founding myths. Faraj Suleiman’s personal legend can be read as a departure from and then a return to his instrument, the piano. There was his uncle, the music teacher, who put him in front of the keyboard as a child. Three years of teaching, three years of pain, as he admits. As a result, Suleiman turned away from the ivories for more than a decade. But it seems that the uncle’s touch had left a mark: after his teenage years, Suleiman enrolled in musicology, became a music teacher, and above all sat down in front of the piano again.
He worked on the instrument – a lot, for a long time, and alone. Above all, he invented his own music: an oriental matrix (scales, modes, melodies, intervals, rhythmic patterns) that attracts a whole host of elements from elsewhere or from the past – classical, jazz, rock or tango. This magnetism is enchanting, and anything but a constraint: the genres Suleiman conjures blend with incredible naturalness with his welcoming vision.

The performance at the MJF which is the subject of this record shows this enough right from the start: listening to Arabic Improv, listeners may think they are picking up what could be a Mediterranean cousin of Erik Satie for a few seconds, then things get out of hand – the tune starts hopping, trilling, whirling like a dervish that is knocked off kilter without ever falling over. In short, it swings. As A First Step, which follows and opens with an almost Gainsbourg-like layer of chords (there is something of Un Poison violent, c’est ça l’amour in the track), brings out an underlying danger, before smashing it wide open and breaking it down into smaller units. A whole bestiary of melodic animalcules pass under the harrowing hands of Faraj Suleiman…

A Boy On A Bicycle slows down the tempo, more open to a form of agile melancholy, like that of rain on the roofs, then to the simple and direct joy of children. For everything here is still alive, spurred on by the pointillist interweaving of rhythmic structures, by the perpetual syncopations that dictate the pianist’s movements as in the case of First Night, which follows in the same line with the same type of grey atmosphere, and of Dawn, a superb quest for well-placed dissonances, always in the extreme proximity of chaos, but without ever giving in to it.

Oriental Melody is also listened to like a shower of banderillas, but with a glimpse of Dave Brubeck’s ghost between the falling notes. Then at the end, comes the real tour de force that is Naughty Boy: a continuous flow, a river of sounds that resonate with each other (one thinks sometimes of Lubomyr Melnyk’s uninterrupted playing technique) and then strike to transform the piano into a form of santur (in Switzerland, we speak of hackbrett, i.e. a hammered dulcimer). At this precise moment, listeners lose themselves with delight in a geographical spell that blends together in one place and for a few minutes Western Europe, the Balkans and the southern rim of the Mediterranean.

Look at Faraj Suleiman play: here is a pianist who likes to keep his arms close to his body. Such body language is that of a musician who wants to keep the desires that cross his mind close to his heart.

OTHER ACTIVITY: https://www.farajsuleiman.com/