Anouar Brahem

CD version. Le pas du chat noir is the album on which Anouar Brahem stepped forward most clearly as a composer. The Tunisian oud player wrote its twelve pieces at the piano and recorded them with pianist François Couturier and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier, an instrumentation ECM called unique. The result is a sparse chamber music, fully written yet played with the freshness of improvisation, in which silence and overtones count as much as the notes themselves.

After recording Thimar with John Surman and Dave Holland in 1997, Brahem put the oud aside for a long period and went on composing at a piano in his studio in Tunis. Manfred Eicher encouraged him to develop the pieces, and the oud came back gradually. The accordion was added later, as what Brahem called "this music's inner song". Couturier had worked with him since 1985. The trio recorded in July 2001 at the Radio DRS studio in Zürich, with Eicher producing. Two themes, Toi qui sais and Déjà la nuit, were first written for Moufida Tlatli's film La saison des hommes.

The three musicians play together on only seven of the twelve tracks. Elsewhere the music is a sequence of duets, oud with piano on De tout ton cœur, oud with accordion on Pique-nique à Nagpur. Many tunes rest on spare broken chords repeated in a childlike way, which reminded critics of Satie and Mompou. Leila au pays du carrousel appears twice, its arpeggios shaded by accordion and piano. Brahem has said that "the overtone is sometimes more important than the tone", and the recording lets the piano's resonance blend with the oud and the breath of the bellows.

The album was an Editor's Choice in Songlines, a Choice of the Month in BBC Music Magazine and a Choc in Jazzman. In The New York Times, Adam Shatz heard the trio evoke "a kind of 21st century Andalusia, in which European and Arab sensibilities have merged". Brian Morton called it "a record of astonishing harmonic richness", one that changes how the pianistic side of Brahem's earlier work sounds in retrospect.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1792, first released in September 2002, with André Kertész's 1928 photograph of the Jardin des Tuileries on the cover.