Search - Rabih Abou-Khalil :: Yara

The desert, the sea, wide open spaces

Gareth Smyth | Beirut | 03/27/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Yara is both the basis of a film soundtrack and Rahih Abou-Khalil's response to the death of his father. Either might appear unpromising as a starting-point, yet the recording has a startling freshness and entrancing sensuality.
Abou-Khalil once gave an apt explanation. "If you go out into a desert or out on the sea, there's a certain sadness that fills you, but it's not entirely unpleasant. You enjoy it and want it to linger, because it's a precious emotion, even if it's painful."
He was talking both about "Yara" (`wound in the soul') the movie - which is set in the vast steppes of central Turkey - and his own feeling about the loss of his father, William, who died in March 1998. "Yara" the album has a starkness and intensity that reflects both.
There is a lot of space in the music, composed for a quartet with cello (Vincent Courtois), violin (Dominique Pifarely) and frame drums (Nabil Khaiat). The arrangements are often sparse. And there is far, far more of Abou-Khalil's oud-playing than on albums like "Arabian Waltz" and "Odd Times".
There is also an infectious spontaneity. Abou-Khalil wrote the music in two days without sleep after receiving an unexpected phone-call from Turkish director, Yilmaz Arslan, asking for music for a film about a girl who flees a despotic uncle across the wastes of Anatolia. But Rabih's frantic burst of creativity was in large part the outpouring of his feelings about his father, which he had left unexpressed in all the practical problems after his death.
The opener "Requiem" is a thoughtful, slow, sensual tune, established with cello and violin, with the melody and the oud gradually becoming more pronounced over Nabil Khaiat's frame drum. There is a solemnity in the strings that evokes the pessimism of Shostakovich's eighth string quartet, but the oud never allows the outlook to be entirely bleak. And then we are jolted, awoken by "Imminent Journey", before in turn we are once again exposed to the open spaces as "A Gracious Man" evokes most clearly Rabih's emotions about his father.
This is the pattern of the album. Aside from "On A Bus", there is nothing that sustains a faster tempo, and nothing as recklessly joyful as previous tunes like "The Happy Sheik", "Catania" or "Rabou-Abou-Kabou". The album ends with the fragile "The Knowledge of a Child" - perhaps as Rabih says goodbye to his own childhood.
This is one of the best of the 15 or so albums Rabih Abou-Khalil has recorded since he left Lebanon for Germany in 1978, aged just 19, originally to finish his studies on classical flute. "Yara" is both other-worldly and steeped in the elements of earth and fire - savouring the experience of the here and now. This is an extraordinary record from a restlessly creative musician, bravely caught at one of life's great passages."

Yara - a wound in the soul of a great composer

Trim Kabashi | 08/08/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I don't know... I've never really understood why pain and wound existed, but today, now, I realised that one of the many reasons of their existence, is the inspiration it gives us (humans) and especially them (artists) to create something as good as this.



Rabih has reached one of the peaks of his career, but not only his, with Yara, one of the best albums in history of music.



The arabic touch he has given to the songs, combined with the old ottoman music, create what could be called, the perfection of the imperfect. The easy going, but at times fast music, is not only relaxing for one's body and mind, but it's like a journey through all the suferrings (which reminds me of a turkish film called "Yol" or "The Road" bu Yilmaz Guney - Palme d'Or - 1982), to reach the final destination - but only to realize that through the journey, many "wounds of the soul" have been taken...



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