So why is a Tunisian oud player from the small seaside village of Teboulba pushing the discourse between roots and digital musical forward with some Scandinavian electronic nu-jazz cats in tow?
‘It is about the possibility, for me, to go forward with my musical fantasy,” says Dhafer Youssef. ‘I come from a tradition of feeling and electronic music is another platform for me to get closer to that fantasy. To explore the emotion of music, the reaction to sound and its colours,” he continues.
‘There are, for me, no barriers between cultures, people or music. When I listen to digital music, it was not as a digital sound but as a feeling. I listen to it like I listen to acoustic sounds,” says Youssef, who first hooked into electronica after moving to Vienna, Austria, to study music as a 19-year-old.
Youssef’s musical outpourings are about emotions. And the shattering of classification: his broad vocal range draws from qawali laments — making inevitable comparisons with Pakistani qawali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. On stage electronic distortion, sampling and slicing combine with jazz improvisation, providing the ‘carpet” for the remarkable soar of his voice — whether melancholic or spiritually celebratory. Texturally, the music segues from ambient to swooning to sparse. Anthropologically, it affirms the nomadism of music around the Mediterranean sea and further, into Pakistan and India. It is music that is disdainful of a passport; for either identity, or the journey.
Born in 1969, Youssef is self-taught in the eight-string oud (a Middle-Eastern lute with a bulbous, gourd-like body), his first being home made, comprising discards from the sea.
His first album, the jazz-roots-oriental Malak, was born out of a series of collaborations at Vienna’s Porgy and Bess jazz club and features the likes of Markus Stockhausen (trumpet and flugelhorn) and Deepak Ram on bansuri (a bamboo alto flute). The follow-up, Electric Sufi, further explored qwaali and jazzy backbeats while Digital Prophecy provided an evocative amalgamation of acoustic funk, electronic splicing and looping with Arabian and jazz improvisation.
Youssef says his latest album, Divine Shadows, is a continuation of the journey started with Electric Sufi, a ‘merging of electronic, acoustic and analogue, but with the addition of [Western] string instruments”.
Though Youssef has been critically acclaimed by Western media, what have been Eastern-oriental-Islamic responses to experimentation with classical forms? He says there are ‘conservative traditional” criticisms of his work, but he is finding more positive than negative reactions.
‘The most important thing is the sincerity in the music, and I think a lot of people recognise that in my work,” he says. Speaking over the telephone from Paris, Youssef becomes palpably excited as he talks about a trip to Syria: ‘Globalisation is affecting arts and music in the Middle East in a good way. There are a lot of young people accessing information on the internet, they know a lot of music, they are choosing to be creative, and for me that is like a big revolution,” he says, enthusing about a young jazz band he caught in Damascus.
Currently living in Paris, Youssef was close to settling in New York City, but then 9/11 happened: ‘I love New York. It’s more home than anywhere else in the world. But I hate the political arrogance of a lot of the world’s political leaders and their ignorance of basic things,” he says of his decision not to relocate.
Youssef is strident in his belief that both religion and politics have become ‘the opium of the masses”, manipulated to the agenda of a few, so he prefers a personal spirituality derived from the Sufi philosophy that human existence and the divine are inherently connected, that he appreciates people ‘who find god in their souls”.
His music is an articulation of that basic principle: at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival in 2005 his performance with Eivend Aarset (guitar and electronics), Rune Arnesen (drums) and Audun Erlien (bass guitar) was one such mystical journey. His aching vocals wailed across a soundscape of ambient-industrial sounds infused with jazz which was truly transcendental.
Youssef is accompanied by the same line-up on this tour, and he puts his constant work with the Norwegians down to their ‘deep emotion for music”.
That word ’emotion” again. Youssef admits to his live performances being based on emotion, on ‘the moment”: ‘I’m not a jazz musician, but I appreciate the improvisation. Getting on stage I feel the adrenaline as I start playing the oud and open my mouth and then the musicians start reacting to that … I don’t think about it, I love it. You obviously do a lot of composed stuff, but when you start flying, when you don’t know where you’re going — I love it.”
Dhafer Youssef performs at the Alliance Français in Durban on November 23 at 7.30pm, at Kippies in Newtown Johannesburg on November 24 at 8pm and at the Warehouse in Windhoek on November 27.