Friday May 20, 2022 is the launch of the 41st edition of Jazz under the apple trees in Coutances. The opening concert is that of Ibrahim Maalouf with Haïdouti Orkestarthe Balkano-Turkish fanfare.
For the occasion, Ibrahim Maalouf is the guest of France Bleu Cotentin in Côté culture, he answers questions from Lionel Robin.
Ibrahim Maalouf “All countries can identify with this music”
Lionel Robin: You are international artist. We can consider you like that because I have the impression that the planet is a bit like your playground. Was it the trumpet that was your passport to the world in the end?
Ibrahim Maalouf: As I play instrumental music, the advantage is that I am not blocked by a specific language. And so, all countries can identify with this musicall people who live all over the world can possibly like or dislike. There is no language barrierso that also helps a lot with this development throughout the world.
Lionel Robin: So in your music, your thing is improvisation. You even wrote a book: “Little philosophy of improvisation”. In the end, you insist on improvisation, why is it important for you in today’s music, then in jazz, improvisation?
Ibrahim Maalouf: In fact, that’s the parallel I’ve seen year after year because I’ve been improvising for a long time. I started doing improv when I was very young at home, with the piano, the trumpet and everything. I realized as I progressed in my life as a musician that there were a lot of parallels between life and life in society and improvisation. And it became a kind of philosophy of life. In fact, ultimately, there is a real philosophy of life, a real philosophy that is defended by the art of improvisation.
I could talk to you about it for hours because it’s really what excites me. I summarize, I make a summary, but I assure you that I could talk about it for 3 hours non-stop.
Lionel Robin: To improvise, you still have to master your instrumentt. On this subject, it seems that you have mastered what is considered to be the most difficult work, I have inquired about, to play in the classical trumpet repertoire. This is Bach’s famous second Brandenburg Concerto. When you know how to play Bach, can you play everything?
Ibrahim Maalouf: I don’t know, but it’s true that Bach wrote extremely difficult things and in fact both physically difficult for a trumpeter, but also difficult in their simplicity. You know, sometimes the hardest things are the simplest things. I say it as much in Bach as in the song. In variety, you know how to make a hit, make a hit that everyone is dancing to, it seems like it’s something easy, but it’s extremely difficult. And in fact, sometimes, in music, the difficulty is not where you imagine it. When I was young, I worked a lot, a lot on the technique of my instrumentbecause I said to myself I really have to master the trumpet as well as possible to really free myself from it and free myself from technique, because it’s an instrument that is still not very easy to play physically and to be able to really have fun and create things that interest me. And so I worked a lot, a lot on the technical aspect.
Maurice André brought me so much!
Lionel Robin: In your career, you had the chance to meet a great man of the trumpet in France, it’s Maurice Andre. What did this gentleman bring you?
Ibrahim Maalouf: Houlala, so much! First, he was my father’s teacher. When my father arrived in France in the 1960s, he was his teacher at the Paris Conservatory. And then he helped him a lot to settle in France during the war. He helped him create this instrument that my father had been fantasizing about for a long time, which was a somewhat hybrid trumpet which allows you to play classical music but also Arabic music. Anyway, he’s someone who had a very, very important role in my father’s life. And then, me, I got to know him. I spent the international competition that bears his name and which is one of the greatest classical trumpet competitions in the world. And by arriving at the top of this competition, he spotted me and he also helped me a lot afterwards. And he is a man who had a rather impressive humility. He was the equivalent of Rostropovitch, but for the trumpet and throughout the world, he is someone who represented the French school classical music for years around the world and he had a huge influence on many musicians around the world and also on me..
Lionel Robin: I would just like us to take an interest in your trumpet. A word about this quite particular trumpet with four valves. What’s the point of actually having one more piston than the others? Just explain to us.
Ibrahim Maalouf: It’s not just one piston more than the others. But it’s mostly this invention of my father allows you to be able play all the music in the world on the trumpet. You know, a trumpet allows you to play chromatic scales, as they say. That is, if you look at a piano, you have white keys and black keys. Yes, it allows you to play all those notes. Except that in all the music in the world, but really in all the music in the world, except in classical music, because it disappeared about 300 or 400 years ago, quarter tones, ie intervals smaller than those of the piano. And these intervals which therefore also existed in classical music, until about 400 years ago, until we tempered the keyboard, that is to say until Johann Sebastian Bach creates the tempered keyboard. Before, there were quarter tones, as in the Arabic scalesin classical music, and that is something that very few people can finally imagine today. And these quarter tones exist, in Arabic music too and in oriental music. And so, this trumpet allows me to play absolutely all the music I would like to play. That’s also why I can do a duet with François in Coutances which is ultimately very inspired by baroque music where I play a bit of all the music I’ve been able to compose in my film scores or in my albums, etc And as much in the second part to play music from the Balkans with a lot of quarter tones. The balkan musicit’s a mixture, it’s nomadic musicthere is at the same time European music, Yiddish music, Arabic music, Turkish music, music from the countries of the former Yugoslavia, etc. So it’s very much influenced by all these cultures of the world and this instrument allows you to play that too. So it’s quite magical.
– Paul Bourdrel
Ibrahim Maalouf with the Haïdouti Orkestar and François Delporte in Coutances
Lionel Robin: You will play with theHaïdouti Orkestar. A word about this brass band, this orchestra?
Ibrahim Maalouf: Haïdouti Orkestar is a balkan brass band. So it’s very inspired by, as I was saying, all these cultures from the Orient, from Eastern Europe, nomadic cultures in fact. That is to say, it is a real mix between Arabic, Jewish, Turkish and East European music. It’s an amazing mix, actually. very festive. We party, we dance, we sing, so it’s going to be pretty cool actually. Haïdouti is an orchestra that I have known for a while. It’s a marching band I’ve been playing with for a very, very long time, almost fifteen years now. They are friends, all of them, and we really party like crazy. And what’s really great like that, I’m saying it once and for all, with this program we’re doing in Coutances, it’s the first time I’ve done that, it’s really a program at the same time. intimacy with this duo with François Delporte who is a musician with whom I have been playing for a very very long time now and really my partner, and at the same time this incredible fanfare which will set things on fire to say things.
Lionel Robin: Chances are..
Ibrahim Maalouf: So this is the first time that I’ve made this mix between these two programs and I am very, very happy that it is happening in Coutances. Jazz under the apple trees, it’s really a festival that I really like and I’ve had the chance to play several times and each time I’m really given the opportunity to do great things.
Lionel Robin: Precisely, you are all the more expected since your concert has been postponed to 2020, 2021. There, you still have two full concerts in the same evening. Does it put pressure or does it ultimately reassure?
Ibrahim Maalouf: It gives wings. It’s too good. I arrive saying to myself that’s it, we’re going to party, that’s for sure. There is no problem with gauges, there is no problem with masks and PCRs and je-don’t-know-what. There is not this problem there and there is a problem that we do not have either, that is, is it well filled out or not? I must admit that I arrive thinking OK, it’s really going to be a party..
Lionel Robin: Thank you very much. Many thanks to Ibrahim Maalouf
Ibrahim Maalouf: Can’t wait to see you again. Thank you so much.