Hatem’s Diaries

A new album of Marcel Khalife have just been released on November 2006 titled Taqasim (Improvisations), a tribute and expression of fidelity from Marcel to Mahmoud Darwish, who marked his life and his music and compositions. The album is really magic with Marcel Khalife on Oud, Peter Herbert on bass and Bachar Khalife on percussion.

A new experience that I really loved just from the samples, and really can’t wait to hear the full album. The communication is very fluent between Percussion, Oud and Bass that will certainly take you to the world of poetry that Marcel wanted to dedicate this work. Only one thing I didn’t like in the album, is the name ! Taqasim is very “classic” as name, and it don’t refer to the sensitivity that chords are creating, nor to the fidelity that Marcel is expressing to Mahmoud Darwich.

Marcel described his new album :

For many years, my music has enjoyed a special, and especially gratifying, association with the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. Our respective corpora have grown to be reminiscent of each other, so that the name of each of the twain, instantly and without reflection, would evoke the name of the other. How very appropriate, for all of my musical milestones that punctuate my thirty-year career, beginning with “Promises of the Storm” and culminating with “The Doves Fly,” are graced with the lyricism and poignancy that are uniquely Darwishian. Even before we got to know each other personally, I felt as though Darwish’s poetry, with its divine assertiveness and prophetic cadences, had been revealed to me and for me. I could nearly savor his “mother’s bread” that has become iconic to his readers. I could feel the eyes of his “Rita” as deeply as I could feel the pain that his “Joseph” suffered at the hands of his treacherous siblings, and I could identify with his passport, which I fancied carried my picture, just as personally as I could identify with his olive grove, his sand, and his sparrows. They were all, at a personal level, mine.

I specifically intended this set of Taqasim (”Improvisations”) as a tribute and an expression of fidelity from Marcel Khalifé to Mahmoud Darwish. Some may wonder, as they listen to Taqasim,
about the meaning of this dedication, for no part can be found in the score for the poetry of Darwish or for my own voice. Yet, nowhere have his poetry and my voice been as intensely present as in this work. With this work, I have overcome my timidity, giving way to a newfound
daring as I dedicate it to Mahmoud, my friend and brother who had found his own daring long
before I did.

In Taqasim, I shall entrust to the broad range of the lower registers of the oud and double bass the task of communicating those tremendous but obscure dimensions that are often ignored by the listeners’ ears – the task of expressing the profound consonance between the poet and the musician.

In Taqasim, my music will not “portray” anything or “refer” to anything. Rather than attempt to reconcile two systems of expression, it will re-create what the poetry of Darwish has created in me, in a manner analogous to the way digital systems process information, with analog material faithfully reproduced after being digitally encoded.

In Taqasim, I will try to reproduce, only as music can, the esthetical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resonance of Darwish’s poetry. Through a purely musical idiom, I will attempt to communicate what my singing voice has never been able to communicate in any setting of Darwish’s poems.

I will “encode” his poetry in a system of rhythm, melody, and harmony. To the listener’s sensitivity, I shall entrust the task of decoding, which I sincerely hope will be truly faithful to the source.

Audio and video samples are available on Taqasim website

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