THE ARTS: A decade ago, a trio of musicians created a work of novelty, infused with varied musical backgrounds. They're back touring, but the sound is still fresh, writes Arminta Wallace
Think of a tree: big, lush, laden with ripe fruit. Instead of one kind of fruit, however, it has three different kinds, all growing happily together among the branches. It's kind of an out-there image - which is okay, because it's taken from an eighth-century poem by a female Sufi mystic. It's also the perfect way to describe the 1998 album Thimar. Each of the three musicians featured on the album - named, naturally, after the Arabic word for fruit - is a star in his own right. Two, John Surman and Dave Holland, come from a primarily jazz background; one, Anouar Brahem, is a Tunisian oud player. Put them together and you get something strange and wonderful: not fusion, so much as a gentle, organic exploration of totally new musical territory.
A decade after the album's initial release, the trio has embarked on a tour of just 10 cities, landing in Dublin's Vicar Street tomorrow. Apart from the sheer joy of finding a musical event in the December calendar which has nothing whatsoever to do with the C word, it promises to be a pretty unusual gig.
"This is not something that people will get to hear live every day of the week," says saxophonist John Surman. "So to anyone out there who might be wondering whether they should come, I think they jolly well should. Because they may never get another chance."
As it happens, I agree. But it sounds much better coming from Surman, partly because his brisk West Country burr gives him a sort of Inspector Wexford-ish tone of authority - and partly because his musical credentials are as long as an orang-utan's arm. They stretch from stints with such jazz luminaries as Ronnie Scott and John McLaughlin through an iconic solo sax album, The Road To Saint Ives, to recent acclaim as a composer of contemporary dance scores and large-scale choral works.
THE SECOND MEMBER of the Thimar trio, double bass player extraordinaire Dave Holland, began in a classical orchestra and ended up being headhunted by Miles Davis, no less. And last, but certainly not least, is the man who composed most of the tracks on Thimar, Anouar Brahem. If you're wondering why the name of a Tunisian oud player is vaguely familiar, shift your mind into the world of film. Over the years, Brahem has produced a fistful of evocative scores, including Les Silences du Palais - and he has just finished making a documentary film of his own.
It's called Mots d'Après la Guerre (Words in the Wake of War), the war in question being the Israeli onslaught on Beirut in the spring of 2006. Why, I ask Brahem, did he want to make a documentary?
"Ah yes," he says. "Why. It's difficult to answer, because it happened very suddenly, you know?"He sounds the polar opposite of Surman, his intonation very French and very soft.
"I felt bad, to be honest," he continues. "I felt bad and I know Beirut, you know? I have some good friends there. My first reaction was that I wanted to go to see how things were and try to speak with the people."
As soon as Beirut airport reopened after the bombing, Brahem took a support crew to Lebanon and filmed the testimony of eight people from diverse religious backgrounds. "I wanted to have women, young people and . . . less young people," he says. "Also, it was important for me to speak with artists and intellectuals."
The film was shown at this year's Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and will, with any luck, make its way on to next year's international festival circuit. Its subject is unquestionably political, but Brahem's insistence that it is, above all, an artistic statement reflects his approach to collaborations of the Thimar variety. Thus, when I suggest that such collaborations may be even more important now - given the current climate of east-west tension - than they were a decade ago, when the album was recorded, he laughs quietly.
"You know, I never had that feeling," he says. "I know that there are political problems, but in my mind this kind of collaboration is very natural, and something I really wanted to do for a long time. I say sometimes that I like borders, because you can cross borders, you know? Because it's also the territory of exchange. Of course sometimes borders become blocked. But I always believe a border to be something that you can cross - and fortunately, I'm not alone."
Why, though, has he decided to tour the album now, 10 years on? "A good question. We did two tours, and then we had other projects and we stopped playing together. But I kept in my mind a very good memory of playing with Dave and John - and I missed it."
So when he met up with Holland at a festival, one thing led to another. And here they are. "We played a concert in France last year," says Brahem, "and I felt that we hadn't stopped playing together. The energy was there, the concentration, everything."
It was particularly important to recapture the initial energy because of the nature of Thimar: neither jazz nor world music, neither composed nor improvised. Even for musicians of this calibre, it posed a considerable challenge - as Holland recalls in an online sleeve note.
"Anouar gave us a pile of music the day before the session," he writes. "There were no bar lines - and of course there were no chords, because that's not a reference point in this music. But there were these complex melodies, and one phrase might have seven beats in it, and another phrase nine. And when John and I started to play this, at first we were stumbling all over ourselves . . ."
SURMAN RECALLS THE experience with fondness. "There were themes," he says. "The themes of Thimar, as it were? Oops - sorry about that! When we got the music, they were just numbered 'one', 'two', 'three' and so on - there were no titles. It was purely musical - which was quite enough, to be perfectly honest, to get inside the music."
Having studied north Indian classical music at London University, Surman was well up to speed with the mood and structure of Eastern music. He also composed his own track on Thimar, called Kernow. Another Arabic word? "No, it's Cornish," he says. "Cornish for Cornwall. I was born in Plymouth, and one of my cousins is a Cornish bard, and I've spent quite a lot of time in Brittany, so you know there's this special Celtic thing that runs across, and the musical influences which bat back and forth."
Listen to Thimar, and you certainly don't hear any stumbling around from Surman or Holland. Ultimately, however, what makes the album truly special is Brahem's masterful oud sound. Like the best guitarists, he is aware of the instrument's full range of capabilities, both melodic and rhythmic - as well he might be, having begun his studies at the age of 10 at the Tunis National Conervatoire of Music with one of the world's most renowned players, Ali Sriti. And like all the best performers, he makes it sound effortless.
"Well," he says, "sometimes you feel close to your instrument and feel you can get good sound from it. Sometimes it's difficult to find the right sound. It depends on the weather, the humidity, and on your - your état d'âme. It's a kind of alchemy which you have to find every day. It's the same for the violin, the cello, the double bass," he adds.
"For sure you have to work on that. But you are also never happy, you know? You are never really happy. You always want to be better. With music you always have the feeling that you have a lot to learn."
It's extraordinary to hear a musician of Brahem's stature say such a thing. It's even more extraordinary to reflect that he means every word of it.
He insists, however, that collaborations such as this one are nothing new. "Many forms of music have been talking together for a very long time," he says. Thank goodness we've been given the opportunity to listen.
Anouar Brahem, John Surman and Dave Holland play at Vicar Street tomorrow night. The album Thimar is on the ECM label
