‘Improvisation’ way of life, says trumpeter Maalouf

Sgt Pepper revisited

BEIRUT, May 27, (Agencies): For star trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, famed for his award-winning film soundtracks and jazz-inspired mixing of eastern and western sounds, improvisation is “a way of life”.

“Improvisation is a discipline that people don’t understand well,” the Franco-Lebanese musician, who has played with Sting and Elvis Costello among others, told AFP.

“For me it symbolises and sums up perfectly the best way to live, alongside each other,” he said during a trip to Lebanon to prepare for a July concert at a festival in Baalbek.

“To succeed in communicating with each other we must listen to each other and have empathy with others, despite the differences.”

The 36-year-old, born in Lebanon, fled with his parents — both musicians — during the country’s 15-year-civil war and settled in France.

He plays a four-pistoned instrument invented by his trumpeter father in the 1960s, as well playing the piano, composing and teaching.

He won French cinema’s highest award, a Cesar, in February for the music to “In the Forests of Siberia”. He also wrote the score for Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s “Radiance” which was nominated for a Palme d’Or at this month’s Cannes film festival.

Composition aside, Maalouf has a passion for the spontaneous.

He is the artistic director of m’IMPROvise, a June festival in Etampes near Paris, with Quincy Jones’ protege, pianist Alfredo Rodriguez, topping the lineup.

Maalouf

Gathered

He has gathered hundreds of people for joint improvisations, including at the 2015 Fete de la Musique in Paris.

“To improvise with others is to share a unique moment that will never happen twice,” he said.

Nephew of leading Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, a member of the Academie Francaise, the trumpeter says he does not try to make his music popular.

“I write music that awakens a feeling in me that makes me happy. I have the impression that people appreciate that,” he said.

“From the moment I’m on stage my priority is not to party with my musicians, the most important thing for me is that the public understands my musical language.”

“Before playing my music I address the audience and explain it to them. I want to be understood by people.”

Despite his film music success, he doubts he could work in Hollywood.

“In my way of working, there is a permanent search for creation and authenticity,” he said.

“Hollywood is an industry that operates according to codes. It is very rare that a film goes outside the usual framework of the Hollywood film industry.”

“If Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino for example asked me to compose music for their films and told me what they want... I would be obliged to refuse,” he said.

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“Listen, I think suspicion is completely warranted, to be honest,” says Giles Martin, talking about the contingent of Beatles fans who are skeptically waiting, arms folded, to hear his new remix of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” “You’re talking about an album that everyone feels as though they own spiritually, if not physically.”

The reaction among those who’ve actually heard his sonically evolved take on the 1967 classic — in advance of the remixed album’s release Friday in stand-along and boxed-set forms — has been almost universally rapturous, actually. The irony is that, as original producer George Martin’s son, the younger Martin spends a lot of his time in conversation de-emphasizing the idea that “Sgt. Pepper” is a producer’s album and playing up the fab-ness of the core four as lads doing a slightly more advanced version of what they’d always done.

“There’s no trickery,” Giles emphasizes. “You get that from the extras. It’s amazingly organic, the process. You know, for an album that’s claimed to be the epiphany of music production, if you compare it to a modern-day record, there’s really not a huge amount of production on there, apart from great arrangements of instruments.” Emphasizing their humanness by “taking off layers so you’re in the room with the band” helps achieve the goal, Giles says, of destroying “the mysticism of this having been created on a cloud.”

The goal was also to reconcile the differences between the original ’67 stereo and mono mixes, both of which have always had their warring adherents — not just for those fans of a certain “now we’re 64” age but “even more that when you tell your kids or grandkids about this album, they put it on and go, ‘Oh yeah, this is cool,’ and not ‘Why does it come out of one speaker?’ — where, with the stereo, you suddenly had the band all on one side and the bass and vocals on other — or, if it was the mono, ‘Why does it sound old?’ Because it’s not as if it’s an old-sounding record.”

All that having been said, this is not such a radical remix that most of the people who’ve played it casually over the years would even notice many of the differences. In other words, it’s not “Love,” the more radical rethink of selections from the Beatles’ catalog he did with his father nine years ago. “‘Love’ was different because the drive was to try to create this new world,” Martin says. “This is an embellishment of the world of ‘Sgt. Pepper.’” On the eve of the 50th anniversary release, Variety took a deep dive into that world with Martin.

Question: You have to love the passion of the hardcore fans on the message boards as they speculate about the choices you’ve made before they hear the finished product. I just read several pages of people talking about the clucking sound effect at the end of “Good Morning Good Morning”... because apparently the chicken sound is different on the stereo from the mono, and people wonder, which one he is going to use? And then there are a different number of beats on the two version going from that into the “Sgt Pepper’s Reprise.” It’s stuff most of us have never thought about.

Answer: Oh, you see, I do actually have to think about this stuff. And I don’t take it lightly, because it’s important to some people. There’s an edit between “Sgt. Pepper’s Reprise” and “Good Morning” on the album, the segue where the guitar cluck merges with the sound of the chicken.