Anouar Brahem Quartet

Anouar Brahem, oud; Klaus Gesing, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone; Björn Meyer, bass; Khaled Yassine, percussions

We are excited to announce one of the highlights of this year's Jazz Festival Ljubljana. One of the greatest masters of the Arab lute and an accomplished jazz composer, Anouar Brahem, will play his first concert in Slovenia.

For almost forty years and with a rich discography now covering no less than eleven albums on the ECM label, Anouar Brahem has been constantly placing the age-old tradition of Arab music, and the superb finesse of its emblem, the oud, into different contexts, where he not only contrasts it with modern jazz but also with the sophisticated harmonies of the erudite compositional tradition of the West and the refined forms of the rich cultural heritage of the Orient.

Today, he can draw on the experience he has gathered over the years in his concerts with other musicians. With the Quartet formed in 2009 for the album The Astounding Eyes of Rita he is now committing to a new project, thereby returning to his former terrain for the first time ever through a repertoire combining several of the group’s usual themes, together with some taken from older albums (Madar, Thimar, Astrakan Café, Le Voyage de Sahar…)  or more recent ones such as Blue Maqams. 

As leader of this group, livelier and more creative than ever after ten years of close understanding between himself and his musicians, Anouar Brahem is now casting a fresh look at his musical universe and opening up some original horizons for it.