While I Was Listening to Tony Buck

Last week I was supposed to play the second from a series of three gigs that were to happen in my solo show at the IFA Galerie in Berlin. The series was titled “Mazen Kerbaj invites X. plus one” and the idea was to invite each time a close collaborator from the city and ask him/her to bring along a guest performer that would remain secret to me and the audience until the night of the gig. The three musicians I invited are Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck and Andrew Lafkas, and I was quite excited (and a bit scared!) to discover whom they will each bring along. For the time being those performances are not cancelled yet, just postponed; the exhibition is still closed but might open again soon with measures and limitations, but the good news is that it will stay in place until August (instead of mid-May) which means there is still a chance to play the three gigs for limited audience.

While I Was Listening to You
Since the beginning of the lockdown, I have been trying to replace some of my missed gigs by related home solos.
In place of the “MK invites X. plus one” gigs I started last month the “While Listening to You” homer solos series with Ute Wassermann. The idea is to record a solo piece while listening through headphones to a solo piece by the other musician. His/her solo piece becomes a score to interpret, as if as if he/she was whispering to me what to play in realtime. I do not try to mimic the music i am listening to though, but rather to play with another musician’s pace, sensibility and sense of structure.
It is both an homage and a an open letter to a close musician that I cannot meet for the time being.

Listening to Tony
This time I recorded a solo while listening to Tony Buck’s Tidal, an unreleased piece that he shared with me for this project.
Tony is a musician I know about ever since I started listening to improv music in the late nineties, seeing him playing for the first time in the Mulhouse festival in 1998 (I was not yet a musician back then) and listening to him on record with many of my heroes or with his fantastic trio The Necks. We later played together a bunch of times in various groups in the late 2000, until I moved to Berlin in 2015. Since then, he is one of my closest partner in crime, be it in our Das B. quartet (with Magda Mayas and Mike Majkowski), our various trios (with Michel Doneda, Sharif Sehanoui Andrew Lafkas, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten…) or in our ongoing duo. Besides, he is a very close friend. For all this, I hope he will like the piece.

About the video
Tony’s piece was not an easy one to play with, and I had to do many takes, often stopping them in the middle. As a result, my favourite take (the last one) was shot quite late, in rather low light, which gives it this bad resolution and some focus problems sometimes; but this is the one with the best music…

A Blast from My Past

At the risk of repeating myself, I have nowadays much more time to fill up with things that I have no time for in my normal life. One of these things is looking back at old projects, some of which I barely remember doing, and putting some order in my ever growing archive. And since I have this platform ready to host whatever I am doing these days, I will post here every now and then some of those projects/archive.

2020 is a Double Anniversary Year

I never thought of it in this way, but the year 2000 was very important for my two artistic practices: it was the year of my first concert and of the publication of my first comics. Those two events have been buried long time ago very deep in my memory, with the firm intention that they never see the daylight again. But today, after 20 years, I can finally look at them for what they are and not as something i should (only) be ashamed of. Do not get me wrong, I still think they are very bad works; clumsy at best and crappy at worst. But with the distance, and the evolution accomplished in 20 years, I can now look at them as traces from a research period where I was trying to find out where I want to go with my music and with my art. And as such, I think they are worth being shown, not only from a nostalgic point of view but also as a documentation on the early developments of my two practices.

The Strikes Gig

my first gig flyer design

In August 2000, Sharif Sehnaoui, Christine Abdelnour (Sehnaoui) and myself played what will be dubbed the first free improv gig in the Arab world at the Strikes pub in Hazmieh, Lebanon. The program for the night was in three sets: Sehnaoui solo / Abdelnour-Kerbaj duo / Sehnaoui-Kerbaj duo, and we played a last short piece in trio. The footage below is from the third set and the encore, and the most notable thing in it is not our juvenile faces and the amount of hair on our heads, but the instruments we are using: I was still playing saxophones (and tubes) at that time, and Sharif was doubling on trombone. The music itself is pretty basic and still heavily influenced by the early European free improv we were listening to at the time.
I have to say that I was very surprised to find a footage from this concert in 2015, when we were working on the exhibition Noise on Paper retracing the history of the Lebanese experimental music scene through the posters, flyers, album covers and other design items made in the last 20 years. I am not sure who filmed it, but I can see after the first minute that future film director Nadim Tabet was filming too, so there must be another footage, possibly of the whole concert. I am not sure I want to see it.

we were in our early twenties

Journal 1999

I started drawing comics for newspapers and magazines when I was 14 years old, then more professionally when i turned 18. In 1998 I published a book with all the comics pages I drew for Samir Kassir’s L’Orient-Express. But it is in 1999 that I decided to work on my first comic book planned from the beginning as a book. Since I wanted to get away from everything I was used to (adventures or humour series with recurrent characters), I opted for a diary format, which was THE thing to do in underground comics back then. I didn’t know at that time that all my subsequent work will be autobiographical, nor that I will revisit the diary format many times, and each time with a radically different approach. The Journal 1999 is a very clumsy first attempt, but it contains nevertheless many of the issues I am still dealing with today, from formalism to improvisation, passing by music, depression, drugs, working for money and other niceties.