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
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.
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.
Cool stuff. It flashed me back too, since the 1999 Total Music Meeting was my first live contact with free Jazz and Inpro too. Left me kind of kicked in,…I would say! 🙂
-Marcus
i took my first wife on honey moon to berlin to see this festival. we divorced two years later.
Would I take my wife to such a festival, I would be divorced on the first day ;+)
•Marcus
Seems we all were at the TMM 1999. Beautiful to know!
Myself only visiting Berlin, before moving here at the end of 2000. Remembering the Podewil and the amazing music being played there.
wow. it is incredible to think we could have all met back then!
we were here with sharif, his then wife christine (abdelnour), my then wife and a friend. sharif, christine and our third friend came from paris while we came from lebanon (i put money aside for a whole year to be able to do it). people from the festival were shocked/amused to see those five young lebanese with long hair and a smell of hashish watching every gigs of the festival, then fighting loudly (and in three languages!) about the music after each set or drooling on the merch table; it was the first time we ever saw the whole fmp catalog in one place, and we would spend a good part of the evening looking at all of them and decide what we will buy on the last night (each one of us left with a pile of 20 CDs). from those amused german people, we made some friends, some of which i am still friends with today, like gregor hotz (who actually played a duo gig on that festival, in duo with nicholas bussmann).