As I sit pondering the piece of Palestrina polyphony, a technique used both by Stanley Jordan - handyman of Jazz – and most bootleg DJs, there’s me thinking I’m already familiar with most complex of global music genres. But as I call up thirty-three [+]As I sit pondering the piece of Palestrina polyphony, a technique used both by Stanley Jordan - handyman of Jazz – and most bootleg DJs, there’s me thinking I’m already familiar with most complex of global music genres. But as I call up thirty-three year old Jordanian guitarist Kamal Musallam I realize I’m to discover another. Arabic Jazz? It may not sound that multifarious but I had never heard the two musical categories played together before.
‘I like to express my Middle Eastern influence as well as my western knowledge into the music I play,’ says the full time musician who began learning the accordion at the tender age of three, the guitar at eight, and as a teenager taught himself the Arabic classics on the oud. ‘I spent six years in the west in Switzerland and France (where I learnt about Jazz) although my roots are, well, primarily Jordanian but I lived in Kuwait for nine years, Lebanon for some time and now in the UAE.’
With such travel comes much extensive musical authority and it’s no wonder that Musallam’s debut, ‘On A Jordan River’s Side’, produced under his own label K&G, has taken him some years to compose and perfect. He doesn’t like to classify his album of genre flute and Spanish guitar melodies as Arabic Jazz, but there are undeniable swing beats played under riffs of the mysterious oud which you can’t fail to notice. ‘I’m searching to reach a cross between middle Eastern and Mediterranean with a jazzy touch,’ says the Rahabani, Pat Metheny and Farid El Atrash-influenced artist. And he has quite possibly found it. It’s an album with an unusual mix of styles that sometimes lapses into cheese, but the album has an overall sense of patent talent and mixed bag that he has been looking for.
The UAE got a taste of Musallam’s work when he opened for the Abu Dhabi Jazz Festival last year. He’ll be playing The Big One at the end of this month and is keen to blow his musical gusto on stage at the new Jazz series that began last December at Dubai Media City.
-Extract from: TIME-OUT Dubai, January 2004, ‘Local Lyrical’ by Charlotte McDonald.
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