The talented Ibrahim Maalouf struck again at the opening of the Jazz in Marciac festival, giving the audience a raging duo with jazz legend Wynton Marsalis: a “big challenge” for the protagonist trumpet player, who saw “green and not ripe “during his career.
In the center, about fifteen trumpeters. On the court side, Ibrahim Maalouf has come together, with his musicians playing modern instruments. On the garden side, jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, accompanied by his pianist and double bassist. On stage, the mix is explosive. Electric.
“To meet Wynton Marsalis, to compose for him, it’s just giant,” confided the French-Lebanese trumpet player to AFP, three hours before his concert on Friday.
“It’s a big challenge, to show that Wynton’s traditional jazz and the African-American legacy he defends are not incompatible with what I propose musically, which has nothing to do,” explained the trumpet player. winner of four Victoires de la Musique and a Cesar Award for Best Film Music.
In the freshness of his box, the one who is nevertheless a regular at the Jazz in Marciac festival showed himself anxious to “do things well”.
Because, he said, suddenly serious, “if we muster, we have many bad intentions that could jump on the occasion to show that the compatibility between our visions does not exist, that it is a fad”.
But what “bad intentions”? We ask, we insist. Ibrahim Maalouf caresses his shaven head, embarrassed, and admits with a surprising lucidity: “You know, the jazz world, it’s not a world of bisounours”.
“There is always a debate about whether what I’m doing is jazz or not,” explains Ibrahim Maalouf, an unclassifiable person who mixes pop, rap, electro, classical, jazz and world music. “Yet, he stresses, it’s music that conveys notions of freedom, openness”.
“I have known green and not ripe for 15 years,” he says finally. “Many times I have been insulted by jazz musicians, especially from the French milieu”.
He says: “One year, I won the Victoires de la Musique and another trumpet player, and it did not please him that we both win in jazz, me as an artist of the year, him for the album of the year. ”
“Arrived at his place, he published (on the internet) a photo of me with a spit on my face” on the image, he explains. “It was extremely violent.”
“I do not care if I’m jazz,” he finally concluded, assuring that “jazz is no more terrible” than other music circles.
Violence, the musician has experienced others, he who arrived in France as a result of the civil war in Lebanon. “I saw bombs, I saw bodies, that’s why there is a lot of cynicism in the booklets of my albums”.
Still, Friday evening, the complicity between Ibrahim Maalouf, UFO music, and his counterpart in New Orleans 56-year-old Pulitzer Prize for music, sparked under the skies of Marciac. And the public has asked for more.
What reassure the Franco-Lebanese, who at 37, is now focused on the release of his next album, “Levantine Symphony No.1”, scheduled for September 2018.
“Humbly, I try to make our realities a little softer, a little softer, and our dreams a little more real,” he slips into a smile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGqNwZ950M
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