Live in Berlin captures the Tunisian singer, oud player and composer Lotfi Bouchnak in concert, in a programme made mostly of classical Arabic songs with a few popular titles. Seven tracks, over seventy minutes, give him room for the long forms in which his voice is at its best.
Lotfi Bouchnak is among Tunisia's best-known musicians, and he performs regularly at the Cairo Opera. His repertoire spans classical Arabic song, much of it forgotten even in his own country, and popular genres, along with his own compositions. He accompanies himself on the oud. The ethnomusicologist Ruth Davis describes him as self-taught and unable to read music: he learned the Tunisian malouf in state youth ensembles, from the Rashidiyya and from radio recordings. He was also a student of the masters Salah El Mahdi and Ali Sriti. The concert was recorded on 18 April 1998 in Berlin, and the album appeared in the series Wergo publishes with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
His voice is powerful, and the label points to its range of variants and modulations. That is what lets him reinterpret famous predecessors such as Sayed Darwish, Zakariya Ahmad and Salah Abdel Hay. The concert opens with an instrumental Samai Asbain and an improvisation, the Irtigal. Its centre is the Dawr Imta Al Hawa in maqam Sikah, nearly twenty minutes long, a span that leaves the voice room for those variants and modulations. Nassaya, El Lila Hilwa and Inti Chamsi close the set, the last at almost twelve minutes.
Davis, writing on Tunisian music in the 1990s, notes his eclectic range of Tunisian and Egyptian popular styles and his refusal to present himself as a guardian of heritage; his style, he says, was shaped by no other singer. She also observes that he appears mainly at prestigious, high-profile events rather than in informal settings. Before this concert he had recorded the album Malouf Tunisien (1993) for the Maison des Cultures du Monde, singing with an ensemble of nine instrumentalists.
A CD of about 72 minutes in Wergo's Music of World Cultures series, catalogue SM 1532 2.
