Anouar Brahem, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Django Bates

CD version. Blue Maqams brings the Tunisian oud player and composer Anouar Brahem together with three jazz musicians: bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and pianist Django Bates. The title joins the maqam, the modal system of Arabic music, to the blue of jazz. Released by ECM in October 2017, for Brahem's sixtieth birthday, it sets nine of his compositions against a bass and drums partnership that goes back half a century.

Brahem and Holland had first worked together on Thimar, the trio album with John Surman released in 1998. Holland and DeJohnette first played together with Miles Davis, but Brahem met the drummer for the first time on this project. Bates was Manfred Eicher's idea: after months of listening to pianists, Brahem heard a recording Eicher played him and was struck by its mix of virtuosity and lyricism. In his liner note Brahem says he wanted to blend oud and piano once more, then set them against a real jazz rhythm section. The quartet recorded at Avatar Studios in New York in May 2017, with James Farber as engineer and Eicher producing.

Brahem wrote all nine pieces, most between 2011 and 2017, while Bahia and Bom Dia Rio date from 1990 and were revived for this session. In Opening Day and La nuit the jazz players take on the hushed, breathing tone of the oud. The title track starts from a soft drum pattern and moves closer to jazz harmony, a kind of Tunisian blues. Several pieces include duo passages for oud and piano and short stretches of solo piano, and Holland's bass vamps often open the way for the improvisations.

John Fordham wrote in The Guardian that the record balances Mediterranean song forms with "the one-touch rhythmic elasticity and melodic ingenuity of the best jazz". He called it "a real meeting of hearts and minds". In AllMusic, Thom Jurek described it as "a nearly perfect illustration of balance between cultural and musical inquiry". It was a DownBeat Editor's Pick and appeared in the Jazzwise list of the top 20 jazz albums of 2017.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2580, first released on 13 October 2017.