Le Voyage de Sahar is the second album by the trio of Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem, pianist François Couturier and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier. It follows Le pas du chat noir, the record that first brought them together on ECM. Brahem's pieces stay rooted in Arab modes while finding points of contact with European chamber music, French musette and flamenco. The three instruments keep exchanging roles, so that melody, rhythm and ornament pass constantly from one to another. Alongside new compositions, Brahem revisits three of his most requested pieces, Vague, E la nave va and Halfaouine.
Brahem, born in Halfaouine, Tunisia, in 1957, studied with the master oudist Ali Sriti and has recorded for ECM with producer Manfred Eicher since 1990. Extensive touring after Le pas du chat noir, recorded in 2002, turned the trio into a real band, and Brahem gave his partners more interpretative room. Couturier won France's Django Reinhardt Prize in 1980 and had first played with Brahem in 1985. Matinier, a classically trained player, made his ECM debut on the previous trio album. This one was recorded in February 2005 at the Auditorio Radio Svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, with Stefano Amerio as engineer, and mixed at Artesuono in Udine.
The opening Sur le fleuve sets out the method: long, ever-expanding melodies that suit both oud and accordion, with the piano as a fixed point in the landscape. Solo, duo and trio passages alternate, and the accordion often carries a musette lilt. Été andalous, at seven minutes the longest track, is the most openly Andalusian piece, full of dry heat and light. Two pieces return in shorter variations later in the sequence, La chambre and Vague, and the second of these closes the album.
The record won an Edison Award and was chosen as audiophile jazz CD by Stereoplay and as R10 by Classica-Répertoire. In Jazzwise, Duncan Heining called it "wonderfully evocative music, soaked in the atmosphere of places and time". Ray Comiskey of The Irish Times heard "a closely integrated trio playing markedly individual music whose simplicity and accessibility belie the care and subtlety" behind it. German critics singled out the delicate dialogues between oud, piano and accordion, and the way the trio blends Arabic scales and rhythms with European colours.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1915, first released in February 2006, all compositions by Anouar Brahem.
