Terrae incognitae" by Kamilya Jubran

Interviews 25.02.2022

Kamilya Jubran grew up in Palestine in a very musical family. Her father was a violin maker and music teacher. Her relationship with music blossomed within the walls of this home-studio, full of students and musical instruments (kanouns and ouds). A long-time soloist with the Palestinian ensemble Sabreen, she took a big leap of faith when she moved to Europe in 2002. Since then, she has been exploring the possible encounters between her musical culture - based on the oral tradition - and European creative music, both improvised and written. Her path is that of an adventurer, a pioneer. What she likes most is the "Terrae Incognitae".

In Reims on February 4th as part of the Faraway Festival you played in a trio you formed with Youmna Saba (voice, oud) and Floy Krouchi (transformed bass). This is the first part of a series called "Terrae Incognitae", which I believe is destined to develop?
That's it! The idea came to me in the midst of the pandemic crisis; how inspiring that crisis was!
As soon as the doors of the theatres and concert halls were able to open again, Banlieues Bleues offered me carte blanche. I wanted to offer them something special in relation to my writing. This time, I wanted to be in the moment, in the spirit of improvisation, in the emotions, and not in thinking or writing, which I do with great pleasure with Sarah Murcia and Werner Hasler.
I had this idea of inventing a platform, of inviting musicians from different sound worlds and of living this moment that I dreamed of. That's how it came about!
Hence the title of the series: "Terrae Incognitae" ...
Yes, the desire for a blank page, for a leap into the unknown, because in the end I don't really know where I'm going musically! I always want to pursue my research further, to put myself in a dangerous situation, to rub shoulders with other cultures, but in a different way.
Making such moments possible: that's what drives me with this platform.
Moving forward, projecting myself into the unknown. Because there is always a lot to learn, to understand such situations.

How did you choose these two musicians?
I had already invited the Lebanese singer and oud player Youmna (Saba), on the project " Sodassi, Shared Memories"in 2018 with my association Zamkana: I had gathered an ensemble of young musicians from Arab cities in the Levant (Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine)
I found her path original; her oud playing, her minimalist compositions ... After "SodassiAfter", she got a grant at the Cité des Arts, so we stayed in touch and I thought of her for the first Terra Incognita trio. She was impressed by my proposal. Maybe she felt too young? She is from my children's generation (which I don't have). And that interests me: what does this generation think, what is its vision?
I met Floy (Krouchi) in Paris in 2002. We had done a trio experiment with the Israeli vocalist Meira Asher, an artist who had to leave Israel because of her anti-regime stance. After this trio meeting, we kept in touch, and afterwards, I saw that she had invented her magnificent bass! I contacted her for this first part of Terrae Incognitae.

In this first opus of "Terrae incognitae", you say some words in French. It's quite rare to hear you in this language?
I don't sing them, I say them. I always sing in Arabic, because I think there is a lot to do in that language. I am unable to sing in any other language. It's a question of artistic consistency. It's true that arriving in Europe in the early 2000s and singing in Arabic was complicated! But why not? You just have to find other ways of communicating through the lyrics.
So why here words in French?
It so happens that during the pandemic, the bassist Floy decided to learn Arabic. I became her distance learning teacher. In her exercises, she writes short sentences of two/three words, forms of haiku if you like. I took these words to improvise around them, at the beginning of the trio's creation.
The words I say in French in this Terra Incognita are the translation of the words she wrote in Arabic in her notebooks: it's a backwards translation!
These are very simple words but they were important in the post-confinement context. When you say: "a raven", it resonates with images. We saw a lot of birds dancing in the streets at that time in the empty, clean city.

You see "Terrae Incognitae" as a series of encounters with women musicians. Can we talk about your commitment to the presence of women in music?
"Terrae Incognitaeis the desire for a platform or an evolving, non-rigid, non-institutional space. The first idea is to provide an opportunity for encounters that do not happen naturally.
When you look at the programming done by cultural venues or presenters, you understand that there are agendas, themes, seasons .... Everything is very structured and more or less fixed, whereas the nature of music is not like that, I think.
It made me think... How do you make music? Who plays? With whom? How do we play music, in what conditions, and how do we get rid of these conditions? How can we make things evolve? That was the first idea.
I also started from another observation: in music, you don't invent anything. When we create, we often recycle ideas that have nourished us. And often, this heritage is male... in all societies! Of course there are great male creators in music, I don't deny that, but why not make room for another way of looking at things?
I love singing Abdel Wahab's music, traditional classical Arabic music, but it's very masculine. I don't want to separate men's music from women's music either, I just want to give more space to female expression, without conditioning.
To give this freedom, to go and see what is going on in a sound world that we know less about...

Your collaboration with Sarah Murcia spans more than 20 years, with several albums: it is a work of co-writing. The most recent collaboration is "Malek", with the Orchestre régional de Normandie and Jean Deroyer. I understand that the experience was not so smooth ...
I hesitated a lot to respond to this commission from the orchestra and its director Pierre-François Roussillon. He liked our duo, he liked the album Habka (Sarah and I, with three musicians from Quatuor IXI in 2016). I had big doubts from the start. It's an orchestra initiated to reading, to classical music; it's not my world. Sarah encouraged me to accept and I took the plunge!
I started by writing texts. It was a form of continuity with the spirit of WA , the third album with Werner Hasler, for which I also wrote my own lyrics. I had the impression that I hadn't exhausted this soil.
Because of the pandemic, the musical work was done at a distance between Sarah and me; a game of ping-pong. We sent ideas back and forth to each other. That's how ideas are built up with Sarah. Our worlds intersect. I write the melodic lines (the horizontal); she writes the harmony (the vertical). In addition, I process the texts, so that they are compatible with contemporary thinking, inspired by classical Arab music.

In "Malek", you play the oud, you sing your texts, with the orchestra around you?
That's it. The meeting with the orchestra was not easy I must say! It was the first time I worked with a conductor, but fortunately I was in very good hands... Jean Deroyer understands my background, and how I work with music. He liked our writing with Sarah. If the collaboration finally succeeded, it is also thanks to him; it was not easy at the very beginning. There are such differences between the way an orchestra speaks and mine.
They have a very beautiful overall sound, but I have the feeling that they are first and foremost devoted to the score, and that this comes before the music or the person; the opposite of me! We had to find the right balance and allay our concerns.
When we premiered at the Francophonies festival in Limoges last September, I was as nervous as ever, but we succeeded. And in the end, I think the orchestra was happy! That was when the real collaboration took place.

What is the nature of the lyrics in "Malek"?
In " Malek"I write in Palestinian dialect. I draw a lot of inspiration from songs, games we played as children, riddles we hummed. I am close to traditional poetry written in dialect, and I weave in my own sentences, my own words.

You said earlier that you had already started working on the text with Werner Hasler?
Yes, it was at the time of our third album, under pressure from some friends who thought that I had sung enough of other people's poems and that I should sing my own words.
We had a small residency at the home of some Norwegian friends, a small village two hours from Oslo, at the home of Jon Balke, a contemporary jazz pianist, and his wife Tone Myskja, a video artist. That's where I started to say my words. These texts are special: it's a bit of a digital expression if you like - like keywords, like those words on the iPhone, or hashtags at the end of an article; they're just images.
After this record with Werner, I had a lot of things left in my stomach, linked to my history and my family; the death of Dad and a family crisis. I needed this therapy with words, I needed to heal myself. That's what comes up in " Malek".

How do you see this duo with Werner Hasler developing?
We have been through a lot. I believe in long-term musical exchanges. I've had my partnerships; the one with Sarah since 1998, the one with Werner since 2002. It's a relationship of exchange and trust that develops over time.
I grew up with Werner, and our language grew with us. The more trust we gained, the less we were concerned about the fragility of the other. And I have the feeling that, as in a couple, there are always things to discover in him; I think that's beautiful!

Was Werner Hasler initially curious about your world?
Yes, and this curiosity was the reason for our meeting. Shortly afterwards, he became interested in classical music from the Levant, and went on a learning trip to Cairo to familiarise himself with the spirit of modal music.
Werner is a trumpet player and comes from a jazz background. He went to jazz school and very quickly became a rebel, rejecting jazz codes and labels, especially since, like many Swiss musicians, he was in contact with electronic music and had a rich European background at his fingertips. Little by little, he opened up his own path, and that's what attracted me to him; we were both searching. I thought: "He has everything, so what is he looking for"?
On the other hand, for him I was a point of contact with a culture he did not know about, because he had missed it. All of a sudden, he had a living witness to this music in front of him!
He didn't want to do what European musicians do, who just play the hits of oriental music. That was not his style... So there was this mutual curiosity.

And the duet with Sarah? How did it come about?
It was at the time of the band Sabreen. We were in the process of producing the group's 4th album, and Saïd Mourad, the founder of the group, wanted to integrate a double bass and strings into the ensemble, in addition to the usual instruments.
There aren't many double bass players in Palestine... I went to Paris to find her! Also, we were going to make this album with a small Parisian production company and I was the producer of the album. During this stay, I also met the great Lebanese poet Talal Haidar, because it was inconceivable for a Palestinian woman to meet a Lebanese man in Palestine (I wanted us to sing his texts, as well as those of the Egyptian poet Sayed Hegab).
So I'm in Paris and I'm looking for a double bass player. The production company knew Sarah Murcia, then a young musician of 20 years old. I called her, and she accepted immediately! We started working... Finally, for economic reasons, the production did not take place in Paris, so I had Sarah come to Jerusalem, we recorded with Sabreen, we produced the album at home and we still did a small tour abroad (France, Canada, Arab countries...).
During these trips, we exchanged a lot with Sarah, and we said to ourselves that we would like to write our own music one day. That's how the idea of the duo came about!

What do you consider to be Sarah Murcia's greatest qualities?
Her open mind and her curiosity. We also share a common trait: we are both "cash". We only do what we think is relevant.
She didn't want to do Arabic music, that was clear. And I didn't want to either.
I like her frankness, her honesty, her intelligence, her artistic quality; this capacity to understand other cultures, while keeping her artistic line.
We don't want to become the other, we try to be in front of the other. It is a face to face, a dialogue.

Another bassist with whom you have recently collaborated is Florentin Ginot. How did you meet him?
It was two years ago at Banlieues Bleues, at the time of Terra Incognita 1. He was present at the creation and liked the project.
He told me about his cycle "Les Instantanés". There had been a first part: "Folia". He wanted to continue this cycle and proposed that I be part of the second part, based on the Sibyl. He wanted to take as a starting point the liturgical song of the 12th century, the Sibyl, not so much out of interest in the liturgical aspect of the song, but rather because of its very simple, refined musical character. We worked in this direction. But our real encounter had taken place in 2018 on stage in Germany, during a premiere by Elliott Sharp with Musikfabrik and myself, at the Ruhr-Triennale festival (Florentin is the double bass player of the Cologne ensemble). There were brief exchanges backstage, then nothing more, until he came to listen to me at Banlieues Bleues, two years later... 

"Filiseti Mekidesi" an opera by Elliott Sharp (excerpts) from Janene Higgins on Vimeo.

Can you tell us more about the nature of this project around the Sibyl?
It's a long process. Florentin came to my house; we played together, without any definite idea. We started to find notes on which we could meet, very simple things. We immediately delved into a form of minimalism, sound purity, vibration: this was our common ground, and it's not easy to do...
Moreover, Florentin wanted to mix contemporary writing with texts from the Arab world. He made me some suggestions. I read his choice of texts, but I didn't find anything that touched me, except for texts by the Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan and Fadwa Souleimane, a Syrian poet and activist opposed to the Bashar el-Assad regime. There I found a meaning!
I made a selection of poems and a montage, in line with the purity of the music. And since it was about the Sibyl, I drew on the Byzantine music that I listened to a lot as a child in the Orthodox church: melodies based on the eight main scales of this music. I revisited these scales. I found things in them that seemed to me to be in keeping with the simplicity of the subject. Those who know this music will perhaps perceive some echoes of it.

Was this music still engraved in you, or did you have to listen to it again?
It was too far away. As my brother Khaled wrote about this music, he helped me; I revisited these modes with him. It was complicated. There have been so many changes over time... What changed after the schism? Who was singing what? Where is the microtonality? It did me a lot of good to revisit that culture.

Before this collaboration with Florentin Ginot, had you had other opportunities to meet musicians from the contemporary or experimental scene?
There was this meeting with Elliott Sharp in 2018. I was surprised to be invited by him. "What does he want from me? I was fascinated by his guitar playing and I immediately loved his world.
Otherwise, in 2002 when I arrived in Switzerland, I met quite a few musicians in Bern: in addition to Werner (Hasler), the improvising saxophonist Hans Koch, and Don Lee, a saxophonist who was very attracted to the modern New York jazz scene. We improvised together! That's when I entered the world of improvised music; it coincided with my arrival in Europe.

You don't come from this type of improvisation. What is the nature of improvisation in your culture?
In traditional classical Arab music, improvisation is very present. It's a test to pass: it's the criterion for recognising a professional musician, a virtuoso, but it's not a type of music. It's another philosophy, another way of seeing freedom of expression. And it takes place within a piece, a writing, a song or an instrumental piece. Whether you're an instrumentalist or a singer - because improvisation is also vocal - you improvise by preluding, by developing a theme, by ornamenting.

When you arrived in France, you developed your playing on the oud, you changed instruments. But your first instrument is the kanoun (the one you play in Sabreen) ...
It's true, and I played it even as a child! But after a while, I felt tired of this instrument, its maintenance, its tuning, its fragility. Playing in the open air with it is complex, and finally, one day, I said to myself that I had devoted a third of my life to tuning these 74 strings! (laughs)
Moreover, I was the frontwoman of the band Sabreen: singer and kanoun player at the same time, which was not at all practical. Addressing the public while playing this instrument is not easy.
Moreover, the oud was also present in my childhood at home, as my father was an oud and kanoun maker. When you are a child, it is easier to play the kanoun. It is flat, you put it on a table; I could play it easily. Playing the oud when you are a child is more difficult ... and dad had not yet made the small sizes of the oud at that time. The kanoun was fine for me. Until, when I was about to take my baccalaureate, I felt the urge to play the oud to relax between classes. That's when I found a link with the oud. But I still spent 20 years with the kanoun in Sabreen.
And then when I went to Europe, I took an oud, I thought that the kanoun could rest. I turned a page, it was a new beginning. I was entering a new search, and today I continue to search with the oud, but I still have a kanoun at home!
Who knows, one day?

Interview by Anne Montaron

Next concert on 12 April at the Théâtre de Vanves: Nhaoul with Kamilya Jubran and Sarah Murcia

Photo © Randa Shaat

Related

buy twitter accounts
betoffice