In 1991 the Tunisian oud participant and composer Anouar Brahem launched his first album on ECM, Barzakh, a trio that additionally featured Béchir Selmi on violin and Lassad Hosni on percussion. “Barzakh”—“separation” or “barrier” in Arabic—is a phrase wealthy in significations. In Islamic theology it refers back to the intermediate stage between dying and resurrection, when the spirit is separated from the physique. However inside Sufism and different types of mysticism for which Brahem feels an affinity, barzakh is a bridge between the fabric world and the religious world, a jumping-off level that initiates a means of changing into, transformation, and transcendence.
Brahem has labored on this zone of metamorphosis all through his profession. Steeped within the musical traditions of the Arab world, he’s by no means confined to them. His is an artwork of the in-between, an artwork of liminality quite than “fusion,” carried out by musicians who follow a variety of genres but share a way of journey, of attraction to the unknown.
After the Final Sky, his twelfth album on ECM, has most of the signature options of Brahem’s work: magnificence of articulation and construction, sensitivity to the silence between notes, a way of looking out and striving to beat boundaries, an oscillation between moods of melancholy and rapture. It’s an unabashedly stunning album, without delay a sanctuary from and a protest in opposition to a world that has grown uglier, noisier, and extra violent. As on his earlier album, Blue Maqams (2017), Brahem is joined by the bassist Dave Holland and the pianist Django Bates, the supplest of improvisers, every with many years of expertise in superior jazz. However there may be additionally a brand new voice, hailing from the world of European classical music. It belongs to the cellist Anja Lechner, who infuses After the Final Sky with a stately, lyrical romanticism. The music Brahem and his quartet make right here displays their distinctive personalities, the traditions that fashioned them. Barzakh is, as soon as once more, the place the place they meet.
However the place of encounter is extra sorrowful, extra unsettled, this time round, as a result of dying feels extra current than the promise of resurrection. Brahem completed composing the music on After the Final Sky in the summertime of 2023, however by the point he recorded the album in Could 2024, the Gaza Strip had been topic to probably the most cruel navy campaigns in fashionable historical past, whereas the nations of the “civilized” West both regarded away or abetted the slaughter. Horrified by the West’s indifference to Palestinian struggling, gripped by an amazing sense of anguish and urgency, Brahem reached what he calls “a breaking point.” He might not, he informed me, “perceive the world without the filter of this tragedy.” Within the months that preceded the recording session, his thoughts turned inexorably to the individuals of Gaza and Palestine, and to a query that also plagues him: “What allows for this indifference?”
In selecting track titles that evoke Palestinian expertise, Brahem had little interest in instructing or preaching to listeners—goals totally overseas to his delicate, elliptical sensibility. However neither might he fake that his taking part in hadn’t been formed by the fury, sorrow, and grief that Gaza provoked in him. The album will all the time bear the imprint of those origins, of which it’s a hint. “Music remembers us,” Jeremy Eichler writes in Time’s Echo, his haunting research of music written within the aftermath of the Holocaust. “Music reflects the individuals and the societies that create it, capturing something essential about the era of its birth. Memory resonates with the cadences, the revelations, the opacities, and the poignancies of music.”
On the morning that I first heard After the Final Sky, I had been listening to an interview with the Gazan journalist Rami Abu Jamous, who lives and works in a plastic tent within the coastal metropolis of Deir Al-Balah. Issues might be worse, he stated: “To have a tent is practically a luxury in Gaza these days.” Abu Jamous and his household had been forcibly displaced twice for the reason that struggle started: first from their neighborhood in northern Gaza, which the Israeli Military demolished inside hours of their exodus; then from a brief residence in Rafah, within the south of the Strip, when the identical situation repeated itself. When the household’s tent was flooded within the autumn of 2024 and his son, who loves the rain, started to play, Abu Jamous continued to play with him, “so that he wouldn’t know we’d been flooded.” Every morning, if he has Web, he posts two messages on his WhatsApp group, “Gaza. Life”: “Hi friends” and “Still alive.”
This has been “ordinary life” for the individuals of Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Israel responded to Hamas’s murderous assault by launching a struggle of devastating brutality that may finally purchase the size of a genocidal marketing campaign. Earlier than October 7 it was virtually inconceivable for Gaza’s besieged inhabitants to go away: a seventeen-year punitive blockade had made the territory the world’s largest open-air jail. Since October 7 it has been one of many world’s largest graveyards. Greater than 50,000 formally useless, nearly all of them girls and kids—and probably tens of hundreds mendacity underneath the rubble. A resurgence of polio, widespread malnutrition, a rising famine. An epidemic of amputations, a technology of orphans. There’s nowhere secure: not hospitals (most are destroyed or barely purposeful), not colleges (greater than 200 have been hit by airstrikes), not mosques, not even tents. Folks in Gaza know that each time they appear up on the Israeli fighter jets circling over them, they is likely to be seeing the sky for the final time.
In his 1986 e book After the Final Sky, Edward Stated evoked Palestinian historical past, in musical phrases, as a “counterpoint (if not a cacophony) of multiple, almost desperate dramas” with no “central image (exodus, holocaust, long march)…. Without a center. Atonal.” Within the final yr, nevertheless, the determined, contrapuntal dramas which have punctuated the lives of Palestinians for the reason that lack of their homeland in 1948 have discovered a “center” in Gaza’s merciless and pitiless destruction. In early October 2024, days earlier than he was burned alive in an Israeli strike whereas sheltering in a hospital in Deir Al Balah, Shaaban al-Dalou, a nineteen-year-old engineering scholar, posted an Instagram message a couple of pal who had simply been killed in an Israeli strike on a mosque. “I’ve never felt anything more terrifying than the thought of the dead being absent,” Shaaban wrote. “The human mind, with all its brain cells and all of its capacity to absorb and to create, is helpless in the face of this absence.”
After the Final Sky was made within the shadow of this erasure: what the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish known as “the presence of absence.” Darwish’s phrase was supposed to seize the spectral presence of Palestinians, their historical past and tradition, in Israel. Right now speak of “absence” inevitably conjures the bodily destruction of Gaza and its individuals. I spent many hours with Darwish in his final years, in Paris and in Ramallah, and it appears to me that his spirit, as humane because it was radical, in addition to that of his pal and comrade Edward Stated, permeates Brahem’s album.
The title is drawn from a query Darwish posed in certainly one of his poems, one which has assumed even larger drive for the reason that begin of the struggle on Gaza: “Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” It’s exhausting sufficient to soak up the absence evoked by Shabaan and Darwish. It’s nonetheless tougher to think about the “day after” for Gaza, or the “day after” for Lebanon, the place Israeli bombardment has wreaked havoc as soon as once more; exhausting the truth is to think about a “day after” any of Israel’s wars, which promise unending torment for its neighbors and, above all, for the Palestinians.
You may marvel what all this has to do with After the Final Sky, a piece of instrumental music with out phrases. The glory of music, formalists train us, lies exactly in its pristine, nonreferential nature, its transcendence of politics and historical past. Relaxation assured, formalists: After the Final Sky stands by itself as music. And whereas the music on this album grew out of his horror on the disaster in Gaza, Brahem doesn’t search to foist his personal interpretation on listeners. “Music, and particularly instrumental music, is by nature an abstract language that does not convey explicit ideas,” he informed me. “It is aimed more at emotions, sensations, and how it’s perceived varies from one person to another. What may evoke sadness for one person may arouse nostalgia for another…. I invite listeners to project their own emotions, memories or imaginations, without trying to ‘direct’ them.”
You may select to disregard the titles of the tracks, with their allusions to the orange groves and olive bushes of Palestine, and to its literary chroniclers, Darwish and Stated, and take heed to After the Final Sky as a piece of intricate, improvised chamber music for oud, piano, bass, and cello—which, after all, it’s. However as with “Alabama,” John Coltrane’s harrowing elegy for the 4 ladies killed within the 1963 bombing of a Black church by white supremacists, or Quartet for the Finish of Time, composed by Olivier Messiaen in a German prisoner-of-war camp, your expertise of Brahem’s album can solely be enhanced by an consciousness of the occasions that introduced it into being.
Brahem is not any stranger to the tragedy of the Palestinian individuals. He was born in 1957, a yr after Tunisia achieved independence. “I grew up in a country that had experienced colonization,” he informed me, “which naturally aroused my interest in situations of occupation, and, in particular, the Palestinian cause.” In 1982, after being pushed out of Lebanon by Israeli forces, the PLO discovered a refuge in Tunis. (A precarious one: in 1985 Israel bombed its headquarters; three years later it assassinated one of many PLO’s most revered leaders in Tunis, Khalil al-Wazir, generally known as Abu Jihad.) As a younger musician in Tunis, Brahem befriended Palestinian intellectuals, artists, and musicians, and deepened his data of the Palestine query. He learn the work of Israel’s “new historians,” who dismantled the state’s foundational myths; studied the “dynamics of cultural domination” revealed by Stated’s Orientalism; and found Darwish’s poetry, which left such a deep impression that he would later compose a tribute to him, The Astounding Eyes of Rita (2009).1
What Brahem discovered particularly shifting and suggestive about Darwish’s poetry was (in his phrases) the best way it strikes “between the intimate and the universal.” It’s an outline that applies with no much less drive to Brahem’s music. His allegiance to Arabic custom shouldn’t be literal however poetic: regardless of his formidable data of the maqamat, an ornate system of melodic modes that anchors Arabic music, Brahem seldom bases his improvisations instantly on the maqams. Although evocative of Arabic traditions, his work additionally attracts on European classical music, jazz, tango, and different kinds.
Like Darwish’s “lyric epic” verse, Brahem’s musical language is elegiac and sensuous, steering away from declamatory affirmations in favor of undertones and whispers. An inheritor to Arab musicians like Munir Bashir, the Iraqi “emir of the oud,” he additionally has a lot in widespread with free-thinking jazz musicians who crisscrossed musical geographies and located inspiration in non-Western musical genres, like Don Cherry and Charlie Haden. To take heed to Brahem’s music is to expertise one thing Haden known as “closeness,” the sound of like-minded musicians forging an excellent deeper, ever extra intimate relationship amongst themselves.
On After the Final Sky, that closeness—a fragile, continually renewed dialog that grows out of belief and a shared challenge—feels significantly pointed, maybe as a result of it’s the antithesis of the logic of violence, separation, and destruction to which the album is a response (nevertheless indirect). Take heed to the best way Django Bates mimics Brahem’s phrasing on piano on “Never Forget,” or to the drone of Anja Lechner’s cello beneath Bates’s piano and Dave Holland’s bass on “Endless Wandering,” or to Holland’s heartbeat-like notes behind Brahem on “The Sweet Oranges of Jaffa.” Among the many album’s many pleasures are the shifting configurations of the 4 devices as they enterprise into what Brahem describes as his most popular territory: “the unknown.” The music is filled with refined surprises, maybe probably the most enchanting of which is the presence of Lechner’s cello. That is the primary time Brahem has featured a cellist on certainly one of his albums, and, as a lot as Brahem himself, Lechner—an ECM artist with whom he’d lengthy hoped to work—is the album’s principal voice.
After the Final Sky has arresting passages of dissonance—the longest observe, “Endless Wandering,” is a turbulent evocation of the peripatetic lives of Palestinians expelled from their homeland—however Brahem largely works within the lyrical and mellifluous register attribute of his work. Is there one thing suspect, even one thing ethically improper, about creating artwork of such seductive and disarming magnificence within the midst of such destruction? The German-Jewish thinker Theodor Adorno is legendary for having stated that after Auschwitz it was not attainable to jot down poetry. However in 1962 Adorno revised his imposing maxim. Exactly as a result of the “world has outlived its own demise,” he argued, “it needs art as its unconscious chronicle.” Brahem’s album shouldn’t be merely a chronicle of Gaza’s destruction; by its very existence, it affords an indictment of the “rules-based order” that has allowed this barbarism to occur.
A lot of the music on this album is mournful, and it might hardly be in any other case. “The language of despair is poetically stronger than that of hope,” Darwish stated in a 1995 interview, as a result of it brings the artist “closer to God, to the essence of things, to the first poetic word,” to an “almost absolute solitude in the land of exile.” However After the Final Sky can also be a celebration of the lives Palestinians have solid, and proceed to forge, in probably the most unforgiving of situations. To take heed to “Dancing under the Meteorites,” a breathless, tango-like piece wherein Lechner creates mesmerizing sul ponticello results, is to listen to the spirit of resilience and resistance in Palestine, the ethos of sumud that permits a person whose home is being flooded to proceed taking part in along with his son—and to stay on his land at the same time as it’s being devastated by one of many world’s strongest armies, with the backing (and the arms) of the world’s biggest superpower.
The theme of Palestine, Darwish writes, is “both a call and a promise of freedom.” After the Final Sky reverberates with this name, and this promise, to which tens of millions of individuals all through the world have rallied in demonstrations over the past yr, insisting that their future, the way forward for humanity, is inextricably tied to the destiny of Gaza and of Palestine. “Reducing this conflict to a simple opposition between Jews and Muslims is unbearable me,” Brahem informed me. “The real barriers are neither religious or cultural, but rather result from a growing separation between those who denounce injustice and those who choose to remain indifferent.”
The barrier between opposing cruelty and searching away from it (or explaining it away) is by no means confined to Israel/Palestine itself; it exists in each nation, even in each coronary heart. Listening to this profoundly stirring work of remembrance, homage, and defiance, I discovered myself considering of an ECM basic, the 1982 suite The Ballad of the Fallen, a tribute by Charlie Haden and his Liberation Music Orchestra to the individuals of Central America, made as a protest in opposition to Washington’s assist for the dying squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. After the Final Sky, too, is a “ballad of the fallen,” a tribute to an oppressed individuals that’s neither a requiem nor an act of give up however quite a piece of “liberation music.” After the final sky, after the ruins of Gaza, Brahem and his ensemble think about a way forward for Palestinian freedom—the day when, as Darwish writes, “our blood will plant its olive tree.”
