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41f A Moorish Dance


Al Andaluz are reviving mediæval musics from southern Spain and North Africa and giving them a push into the future. Jan Fairley catches up with them in Germany.


I


n an upstairs room in the Harmonie bar in Bonn I find the Spanish, Ger- man and Arabic musicians of Al Andaluz just finishing a late after- noon meal as their sound check is about to begin across the courtyard. “Tea, wine, cheese, salami, fruit?” The genial Michael Popp, key mover behind Al Andaluz, gives me a warm welcome and straight away I feel a relaxed friendly vibe from everyone. It’s a sunny Sunday and while Al Andaluz have arrived after a Saturday night gig in Ghent, I’ve just flown in from Edinburgh. As they usually play large concert halls they tell me they’re looking forward to what will be for them an intimate gig.


I grab a cup of tea and a bagel and cheese as Michael and the rest of the male members of the band – Ernst, Aziz Sam- saoui, Jota Martínez and Sascha Gotowtschikow – disappear to attend to assorted hurdy-gurdies, qanun, ud, and various other strings as well as a host of percussion and begin the sound check. Unfortunately the veteran engineer turns out to be the type who is sure he knows better than the group how they should sound, a situation treated with the san- guine patience of musicians who’ve survived many a similar situation.


Harmonie is my kind of ideal venue: several small linked café- bars, a bistro and then a door to a modern long bar with a per- formance space at the end seating a couple of hundred complete with small upstairs balcony. As I arrived I bumped straight into Span- ish singer Mara Aranda: we last met some five years ago in Istanbul when she and her then partner Efrén López, both founders of Valencian group L’Ham De Foc, were spending time there learning music (see fR271/2).


Pretty soon after Istan- bul, Mara and Efrén began working on the Al Andaluz project with Popp, Sigrid Hausen and Ernst Schwindl. Over 20 years earlier, the three had founded the group Estampie, renowned for their radical reworking of medieval ‘early’ music. Since 1991, Popp and Hausen have had a second life in the band Qntal which


successfully fuses medieval, rock and elec- tronic sounds for a substantial audience of German Goth and industrial music fans. Still, the present abiding passion for all concerned is Al Andaluz, essentially because they are having a ball exchanging music and performing together. The Al Andaluz project’s alternative name, Las Tres Culturas (The Three Cultures), comes from the ways it brings together the Canti- gas De Santa María, troubadour Moorish- Andalus music with Latin and Byzantine influences; Sephardic songs from southern Spain and Arabic song from North Africa. Their first record, Deus Et Diabolus (God And The Devil), was released on Galileo in 2007 to great acclaim. Now they’ve just produced the second, Al-Maraya (The Mir- ror; Galileo GMC 039), much of which they will be featuring tonight.


After a quick catch-up with Mara – about her daughter (her parents are look- ing after her), about her work in the groups Solatge and Ensemble Pelegri (in which Jota Martínez also plays), but not about Efrén (they’ve broken up and he is no longer


playing with Al Andaluz) – I sit down by Iman Kandoussi who’s stretched out on a sofa. The youngest member of Al Andaluz’s triumvirate of female singers, with long black hair down to her waist, Iman tells me she comes from Tetuan in Morocco where, from the age of ten, she studied Arab- Andalus song and Arabic ud (lute) at the conservatoire. She came to Spain at the end of 2003 when only 19 and first met the oth- ers in Munich in July 2006, joining them as the ‘missing’ Arabic voice at the suggestion of qanun player Aziz Samsaoui.


Sigrid joins us and explains how the Estampie-Al Andaluz initiative came soon after Estampie members had created the Marco Polo project, which saw them col- laborate with Mongolian, Persian and Central Asian musicians to play music of the Silk Road. Popp, Hausen and Schwindl founded Estampie after study- ing early music at the Munich Conserva- toire. Taught by the German pioneers who put early music on the European and world map, they decided to renovate medieval music for the next generation, letting go of scholarly, over-respectful attitudes, shifting from the more ‘pre- cious’, chamber approaches which they feel inhibit emotion, often leaving the music, as Sigrid says, “like a dead person on a niche”.


Popp, who had started out playing recorder, moving on to baroque oboe then various guitars, fiddle, later taking up ud, then saz, tar and viola da gamba, did not see an orchestral life as his future. Hausen, a singer and virtuoso recorder and piccolo player, felt the same and so Estampie was born. They contrast their approach with that of say Spanish group Atrium Musicæ De Madrid led by Gregorio Paniagua, and others who ply the classical circuit and who take a more ‘antique’ cerebral approach, as if polishing the music up for display. This contrasts with the Estampie con- cept that underscores Al Andaluz, “Music-making is an open process, it’s about the energy you give and receive back and a bit of anarchic spir- it can be good!”


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