CD, стоящие на полке рядом : Pseudo Ethnic (Arabica)      

Odd Times is Rabih Abou-Khalil's first live album. Since it would be impractical to assemble all of the guests he has had on his albums over the years, Abou-Khalil has gone in the other direction and pared his ensemble down to what is for him the bare bones: himself on oud, Howard Levy on harmonica, Michel Godard on tuba and serpent (an antique form of the tuba), Mark Nauseef on drums, and Nabil Khaiat on frame drums. Most live albums contain well-known pieces from the artist's studio repertoire; in contrast, Odd Times is mostly new material. In general, the album is a mix of shapeless, overlong attempts at atmosphere ("Elephant Hips") and fairly bouncy and fun items ("Q-Tips"). The pared-down lineup is engaging because Abou-Khalil's oud and Godard's tuba are more prominent; unfortunately, Levy's harmonica is also pronounced, and simply clashes with the entire project of fusing Arabic music and jazz. Though in all fairness, on "The Happy Sheik" Levy sets aside his usual cadences in favor of something more bluesy that melds better with its surroundings. The album closes with a vibrant performance of "Rabou-Abou-Kabou," one of Abou-Khalil's best songs.

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There is the world that we know - or think we know. There is music, that vast, bottomless realm beneath human consciousness. And, off to the side, there is world music, this entity and phenomenon whose very name eludes logic. At root, the term implies a kind of disturbing, what-else-is-new ethnocentricity at work: world music, in some way, can be described as music from outside of the First World, a western perspective on culture existing beyond its prescribed boundaries.

If there's a lesson to be gleaned from the post-McLuhan era global body politic, it is that we are wary villagers, connected by the tentacles of technology and concerns of a world grown increasingly accessible, but unsure of how to deal with the knowledge. With accessibility comes the potential translational confusion. And so, world music takes on an unstoppable life within the musical marketplace. It's a world of great potential liberation, venerable tradition, and semantic befuddlement.

What, then, to do with - and what to make of - the music of Rabih Abou-Khalil, the Lebanese oud player who settled in Munich in 1978, and who, over the course of now twelve albums of his music, has created a place to call his own?

Within his music, in a parallel universe to the thing we call jazz and the more nebulous thing we call world music, Abou-Khalil takes the oud to new heights - or should we say breadths? To coin a phrase, he wails on it. Guitar lore celebrates those players who combine gymnastic plectrum work and that certain gut-level intensity and lightness; this guy has that quality. Just as difficult to ignore are Abou-Khalil's roots, which reveal themselves all along the way in his music.

Abou-Khalil calls his new album Odd Times, but the "odd" is a doppelganger qualifier, a social statement, and an in-joke, all rolled up into one. There's nothing odd about the odd time signatures which casually dot the landscape of this music, anymore than the term "world music" aptly describes the alchemical process by which the elements of the music come together, naturally and without need for apology.

He has found willing and handy allies in the mission. Odd Times opens with Howard Levy's chugging harmonica riff, the locomotive breath of Americana, evoking hopeful trains and unrepentant locusts. An old hand at rhythmic mediation, Mark Nauseef navigates his way through the music on drums, abetted by Nabil Khaiat's frame drum parts, creating a kind of sleek rhythmic chassis that never strains under the weight of multi-cultural. Michel Godard's low range urgings and honkings supply a bass presence that links the music to American marching band aesthetics (Sousa, et al), and also the elephantine brass instrument's rightful place in the earliest jazz ensembles as well as more adventurous new ones. Reduce this band to its essential elements, and you have a globalized ensemble, touching on many traditions while carving out its own, invented as it goes.

Abou-Khalil is, in the end, less concerned with applying to world music attitude than with constructing his own world of music, with its own inner logic. In any art form, that's the ultimate aim: to draw on the tools and language around the artist, but to manipulate norms and expectations in such a way that we, the audience, are happily thrust into a new dimension. We pay visits to these dimensions, returning to our own "world," refreshed and slightly shaken.

- Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara 1997

We live in a world where musical tradition is increasingly hard to find undiluted. Increasingly; musical tradition is perceived and used as mere base metal for today's high-tech alchemists: An Indian webcast of thaat ragas is beamed through thousands of miles of submarine fiber-optic cable and downloaded by a Japanese DJ for a future mix, mbiras are cloned from fiberglass by the score in Zimbabwe, and Edgar Varese's name is invoked daily as the latest electronica act's elevator shoes to nobility.

It is a rare tonic and a delight, then, to hear a traditional, non-Western music played straight and bracingly contemporary in subject matter, without the veneer of say, a Bill Laswell jungle treatment. The music of Lebanese-born oud virtuoso Rabih Abou-Khalil mines this vein flawlessly. A poet of the oud, Rabih Abou-Khalil does with the Arabian instrument what Piazzolla did with the accordion - liberates it from its traditional roots, pushes its compass, galvanizes it with the dynamism of the 20th century, and makes it talk, coaxing desolate ballads of extraordinary beauty, and gutsy, headlong blues from its pear-shaped body and eleven strings. His mesmerizing modal explorations are like a cross-section of musical history, stratified layers of influences from ancient Arabic scales through the canon of Western classical composition and the fire and brimstone of avant garde jazz.

Rabih Abou-Khalil taps the djinn of the jazz improvisor, and keeps him under tight rein, bringing things to a boil but never quite letting the lid off the pot. like the perverse casting of wild man Screamin' Jay Hawkins as an uptight hotel clerk in Jim Jarmusch's film Mystery Train, this gives the resulting music a flint-hard, incandescent edge. Add to this a strikingly eclectic palette of instruments - oud, tuba, harmonica, drums - and what results is a haunting and alien music, located in an interzone between east and west, steeped in the past but churning with the anxieties and thrill of the present.

Rabih Abou-Khalil urged me not to write about the past, or to dissect the music on Odd Times track by track. I agree; this is not the place for dusty history. This is the present. These indeed are Odd Times. The music here has that sense of urgency. Lennon once sang of "Norwegian Wood;" the music that pours from Abou-Khalil's oud is closer to Macassar ebony: solid yet porous, a finely-grained, beautiful wood with a lustrous finish, shot through with wild streaks. Its rarity, lightness and strength make it the most prized of exotics.

- Andrew Jones, Montreal 1997