Jazz Therapy

Photo by Pasqual Gorriz

Last night a friend took me to see Dhafer Youssef, an Arab jazz musician, for a concert in downtown Beirut. My hopes weren't high: I not a big jazz fan, and since Lebanon is a small country on the brink of war, I figured that the only people wiling to tour here would be second-tier derivative acts who couldn't make it in Europe. But what I heard on stage was something so singular and so universal, I left feeling that I had just experienced a pure expression of modernity.

Youssef's music is an elegant rebuttal to clash of civilization theorists. He secretly began listening to jazz on the radio while at Koranic school, and now his singing and oud playing combine Spanish, Arab and Berber traditions, stripped down to their essentials and backed by a laptop-wiedling Norwegian jazz ensemble. I couldn't imagine how anyone could pack so much emotion into such haunting solos, and then he held his nose and started a nasal chant that sounded like Nina Simone doing the call to prayer through a high school public address system. Totally strange and instantly beautiful.

I looked through You Tube for a quasi-legal sample of his music, and none quite do it justice. But try and get your hands on his album: Digital Prophecy.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut