With his super-short hair, week-old beard and sullen gaze, Ibrahim Maalouf is something of an intriguing character. His “tough” look is not what we expect from a jazzman. But the musician seems to be trying to wrong-foot us, since there is no doubt that this Franco-Lebanese trumpeter really knows how to blow right across borders.

After a classical training, including first prize at the Conservatoire de Paris, he first got himself noticed by accompanying some of the heavyweights of French chanson, like Mathieu Chedid, Vincent Delerm and Arthur H. Although he was at ease working with others, the musician felt drawn to a change of scene and decided to set out solo and explore his own style, labelled far-eastern electro jazz fusion.

It is this multi-faceted musical identity that he preaches on his first album, Diasporas, released a few months ago. The self-produced disk took Maalouf four years of writing before he could reach his own alchemy of sound. “I’m convinced that first records are often autobiographical. In my case, this CD testifies a number of things that I have lived through or felt during my life.” He adds, “Producers from the major labels who approached me wanted me to do an Arab version of the Gotan Project (Ed. note: famous electro-tango group). But I wanted to record something more personal and authentic, with more of my own identity in it.”  Today the multinational record companies must be regretting that they never signed up this 27-year-old prodigy who has been so praised by the critics and so fought over by festival organisers.

Two-fold approach to music

The key to his success is his trumpeting style, which is a subtle mix of formal technique and improvisation, East and West. This two-fold approach to music stems from his life experience and his heritage. He was born during the Beirut bombings in 1980 and was less than a month old when his parents sought exile in France from the war in the Lebanon. “I come from a generation that has been lucky enough to travel and to be born in one place and grow up somewhere else. For me, it has been totally enriching to live this double culture, even if at times I feel torn or nostalgic.” The young Maalouf discovered the trumpet at the age of seven thanks to his father, Nassim Maalouf, who studied under Maurice André at the Paris Conservatoire, and, at the end of the 1960s, invented a four-piston trumpet that makes it possible to play quarter tones – a revolution for a brass instrument!

Despite his youth, he gave his first solo concert at nine years old, where he played Vivaldi. Eight years later, he interpreted the 2nd Brandebourgeois concerto by John-Sebastian Bach, which has a particularly difficult reputation among trumpeters. The prodigy son did not stop there. He became a serial competition-winner, collecting no less than 15 international prizes. “I did all my music exams with a trumpet armed with a fourth piston that I never used to interpret Western scores”, reminisces Ibrahim Maalouf. Today, with his school days behind him, he recognises that he has succeeded in being himself with his instrument. A trumpet that he promenades wherever his dreams take him, as the different worlds in Diasporas seem to tell us.

Shadows and voices

Out of the eleven tracks on the album, Shadows provides a good example of this quest for an identity. “I’ve worked a bit like a psychotherapist. I’ve tried to understand what I was feeling within myself. In Shadows, I can see the shadows and hear the voices from the war in the Lebanon.” But even so, he leaves a lot of room for the listener’s imagination. “I don’t like to draw in all the lines. It’s a sketch for people to put their own colours in”.  And so, this colourist of sound leaves his jazz mark on a daring cover of Dizzy Gillespie called Night in Tunisia, renamed Missin’Ya for the occasion. For him, the trumpeter, who died in 1993, is one of the rare American jazz musicians to have dedicated a title to an Arabic country. “In this very personal reinterpretation, I’ve tried to immerse myself into the possible origins of this standard.”

An instinctive musician, he also likes to shake up cultures by linking the past with the present, as he does in the title, 1925. In this voyage that seems to come out of a science fiction series, the child of Beirut imagines his grandfather, a peasant in the Lebanese mountains in 1925, suddenly finding himself in Paris today. The trumpeter has in fact produced his album like a film score and admits that he is partial to the screen and would like to compose for the cinema. One thing is for sure, Ibrahim Maalouf holds still more surprises up his sleeve.