Le Pas du Chat Noir — Anouar Brahem (2002)
An oud, a piano, and the instrument nobody takes seriously.
By Rafi Mercer
The accordion has a reputation problem. It belongs to pavements and weddings, to the man outside the Métro at Abbesses working through his repertoire for people who have already decided not to stop. It is the sound of a France that mostly exists on postcards. Put it on a record and you have made a decision about that record before anyone has heard a note of it.
So the surprise of Le Pas du Chat Noir is not the oud. It is Jean-Louis Matinier, sitting between an Arab lute and a concert grand, playing the least fashionable instrument in Europe as though it were a lung.
The trio is Anouar Brahem on oud, François Couturier on piano, Matinier on accordion. Recorded in July 2001 at Radio DRS in Zürich, engineered by Martin Pearson, produced by Manfred Eicher. Released on ECM in September 2002. Twelve pieces, seventy minutes, no percussion, no bass, nothing to hold onto but the three of them agreeing on where the next note goes.
The composition tells you why it sounds the way it does. Brahem wrote the material at the piano, in Tunis, across a long stretch of listening and composing — an instrument that is not his, in a language he had to translate himself into. Only later did he return to the oud and assemble the final trio around what he had already made. The oud arrives last. You can hear that. It moves through the piano's spaces the way you move through a house you used to live in, knowing where the furniture is without needing to look.
Nothing on the record develops. That is the point, and it is the thing that trips people who come to it expecting jazz. There is no theme-and-departure, no soloist stepping forward while the others hold the room. Instead: small cells, turned over. Harmony that sits still. A figure repeating until you stop hearing it as a figure and start hearing it as weather. ECM placed it nearer to the French minimalism of Satie, and even more to his Catalan successor Mompou, than to anything anyone would call world music — and that is right, though it undersells how physical the thing is. The oud has grain. The piano has a wet, unhurried decay. Brahem said it himself in the liner notes: half the magic is in what isn't played, in the overtones rising off the piano to mix with the warm tones of the oud and the breath of the accordion's bellows.
Breath. Not tone. Breath.
Now the part that makes it a document rather than a mood.
He recorded it in July 2001. It came out in September 2002. Fourteen months, and everything in between. In that gap: the towers, the axis-of-evil speech, the Iraq buildup. On 11 April 2002 an al-Qaeda operative drove a truck of liquid propane into the wall of the El Ghriba synagogue on Djerba, one of the oldest synagogues in Africa, killing fourteen Germans, three Tunisians and two Frenchmen. The following month, Ben Ali held the referendum that removed his term limits, and Tunisia was turning foreign journalists back at the border for having "ill will" toward the country. In France that same spring, Le Pen reached the presidential runoff. Every relationship this record is built on — Arab and European, Maghreb and Paris, the oud and the accordion — was being publicly poisoned while the tapes sat in Munich waiting for a release date.
There is a coincidence in the credits worth stating plainly, without making more of it than it is. Two of the themes, "Toi qui sais" and "Déjà la nuit," were written originally for Moufida Tlatli's film La saison des hommes. Tlatli's film is set on Djerba — the island where the men leave for eleven months a year and the women stay. Brahem composed that music in 2000. The bombing came later. Nobody arranged this. But it means the record carries, unknowingly, two pieces written for the island that would give Tunisia its worst year.
And then the sleeve. The cover photograph is by André Kertész — a Paris park in winter, bare trees, scattered iron chairs, shadows running the whole length of the frame. Kertész left Budapest for Paris in 1925 and Paris for New York in 1936. A displaced man's picture of a European park, wrapped around a Tunisian's compositions, played with two Frenchmen, on a German label, in a Swiss studio. Not one element of it is at home. The record never mentions this once.
Which is why it works in a room built for listening rather than talking. It does not ask for the front of your attention and it does not survive the back of it. Play it at conversational volume in a bar and it becomes wallpaper — pleasant, Mediterranean, forgettable. Play it properly, on a system that can hold the low end of the oud and let the piano's overtones actually decay, and it changes the temperature of the room within about ninety seconds. People stop finishing their sentences. Not because it is dramatic. Because it is patient, and patience is contagious in a way that intensity never is.
It became one of the label's quiet successes, the kind of record that outsells its category by being handed from one person to another rather than reviewed into prominence. Brahem returned to the same territory four years later with Le voyage de Sahar, and the trio held.
2002 was the year the argument got loud. Us and them, the whole apparatus, running at full volume across every front page. Brahem's answer was to make the quietest record of his life and put no argument in it at all — three instruments from three traditions, breathing at the same rate for seventy minutes, agreeing about nothing except tempo.
Look at the cover again. A dozen people in a park in winter, sitting apart, none of them speaking to any of the others. All of them in the same light.
Quick Questions
What instruments are on Le Pas du Chat Noir?
Just three: Anouar Brahem on oud, François Couturier on piano, Jean-Louis Matinier on accordion. No percussion, no bass, no electronics anywhere on the record.
Is Anouar Brahem a jazz musician?
He is filed under jazz, largely because ECM is, but the record behaves nothing like jazz. There is no improvised departure from a stated theme. It runs on repeating cells and static harmony, which puts it closer to Satie and Mompou than to anything in the American tradition.
Why do listening bars play records like this?
Because they reward a system and punish inattention. Music built from small repeated figures and long decays needs a room that can actually hold the tail of a note. On a good setup the record slows the room down; on a laptop it disappears.
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