Le Voyage De Sahar

Recreating the ambience that made his 2002 outing, Pas de Chat Noir, so evanescent yet indelibly memorable, Tunisian oud master Brahem continues his by-now-well-established collaboration with François Couturier (piano) and Jean-Louis Matinier (accordion.) The trio's improvisations are miracles of weightless precision; while sounding like nobody else, they also evoke chanting medieval monks, Keith Jarrett's florid keyboard sagas, Parisian bal musette, the long-vanished Moorish kingdom of Granada via 20th-century Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, languid recollections of French impressionist Eric Satie plus dissonant gleanings from Astor Piazzolla's sardonic Argentinean neo-tangos. Despite this complex array of intellectual influences, which permeate the trio's constructions like smoke rings, their works come across as disarmingly simple and unpretentious, a tidily diffuse combination of Arabic modes, European classical disciplines and jazzy intuition. Liberated by sheer inventiveness, the trio's technical skill is so extreme that it has long since ceased to draw attention to itself. Instrumentalists of this caliber are long past needing to impress anyone but themselves. --Christina Roden