Festival events are connected by a number of conceptual threads. One thread will forefront the growing scene in Lebanon as a mirror to our own growing Czech scene, bringing to Prague some of the pioneer improvisational musicians of the Middle East: Mazen Kerbaj, Christine Abdelnour, Sharif Sehnaoui, Raed Yassin and others. Yassin, together with Paed Conca, will also present their project Praed+, a collaboration with a local brass band, supporting vs. Interpretation’s goal of bringing together international artists to work with local art communities. Along the same lines, Christof Kurzmann (Austria) will premiere a new in collaboration with an expanded international line up of the Prague Improvisation Orchestra. Similarly, Julyen Hamilton, a respected dancer from the UK, will present new work using international and local performers. The program, which will be published in its final form in early February, comprises about 40 artists, among whom are stars from both abroad and the local scene. Just to name a few: Andrea Parkins and Bob Ostertag from the US, Lê Quan Ninh and Jérôme Noetinger from France, Tony Buck and Steve Heather from Australia, Andrea Neumann and Ute Wassermann from Germany, and many others. HIS Voice magazine will cover selected performers in a series of eight articles that will be published every second Tuesday until the beginning of the festival. The Lebanon scene, having the largest representation in the program, and one of its protagonists, Sharif Sehnaoui, have the privilege of inaugurating the series, and so we present here an archival article from the printed version of HIS Voice as an appetizer. The Guitar Player… … Sharif Sehnaoui (together with trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj) is one of the most important instigators of the experimental and improvisational scene in Lebanon. Not only does he actively perform in the Middle East, Europe and the US, but he is also the guiding light of Irtijal, the only festival in Arab-language countries focusing on improvisation, taking place every spring in Beirut. He also runs the recording label Al Maslakh, which “…publish[es] the unpublishable in the Lebanese art scene”. Sharif Sehnaoui comes from a family in which love for music, and art in general, comes as a matter of course. All of the children in the family took piano lessons, but it was only Sharif who, after several generations, took a serious interest in music. During the Lebanese civil war the family had to change residences repeatedly – not an easy task with a piano – and so the piano was eventually abandoned, only to be replaced by a guitar when he was 14 years old. At first he would play his favourite rock tunes. After leaving for Paris at the age of 18, he discovered jazz, and then free jazz, absorbing the music of John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor (for several years he bought and listened to everything he could come by of Taylor’s work). Then he discovered the music of Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker and AMM, and the improvisational minimalist scene. His relocation to France was not motivated purely because he wanted to, but was rather a practical solution to the situation that reigned in the streets of Lebanon in the 1990s. “I wasn’t going to leave Lebanon at first, but with all those army checks I came into conflict several times with the military. Following one such incident, when I was seriously beaten up (with broken ribs and internal injuries), and my eventual arrest for insulting the military, my family came to the conclusion, after great effort and the help of influential connections to have me released, that it would be for the best for me to go and study abroad.” In addition to music, Sharif Sehnaoui studied philosophy, his main interest being the subject of time. “I was interested in the concept of time, our modern understanding of it when separated from the classically linear conception of it. What I enjoyed about improvisation was, on one hand, the freedom and the endless possibilities it offers, but on the other, I was also fascinated by the perception of time in the course of improvising. To be more specific, I can give the example of a Fred Van Hove concert I attended: He played an uninterrupted solo lasting an hour, and I was so captivated that I had no idea how long he had been playing and how much time had passed, because the flow of the music seemed to be completely detached from any measurement of time, which came to seem irregular and elastic. The concert later came out on Potlatch Records under the title of Flux.” For Sehnaoui, improvisation therefore means liberation from all kinds of moorings, and that naturally implies greater risk. “You lack a safety net, constantly walking on the edge where you could slip at any time. This is a hazard that you carry with you all the time, unless you incorporate it directly into your music and blur the boundaries between sound and music, between precision and error, beauty and ugliness.” It might also have been his long obsession with the pianist Cecil Taylor, which influenced Sehnaoui’s use of acoustic guitar in his playing more as a percussion instrument than a traditional plucked string instrument. He rests his guitar on his knees, sometimes using various sticks (some of them placed between strings), or metal tuning forks to cause parts of the guitar to vibrate in different ways. He often uses small metal cylinders to slide over the strings of the guitar at various points. He plays on the guitar body quite naturally, alternating strokes of sticks on the strings and the wooden board at a fast tempo, creating the illusion of simultaneously playing two instruments. Sometime during the Konfrontationen festival in Nickelsdorf, 2012, Sehnaoui reached such an unexpected bass tone, quite uncharacteristic for the guitar, that some in the audience came closer to see how he could have possibly done it. Many of these sounds do not in fact come from the stroking of a string, but rather emerge as a side effect of the rest of the guitar body. However, before Sehnaoui reached the point where he was able to present such “effects” as an inherent part of his playing, he had to experiment intensively. As he himself says, “When I was starting, I enjoyed various rock and jazz guitarists, and while I didn’t want to sound like them, I had to learn to play. As soon as I discovered different ways to make the guitar sound, I started experimenting with all possibilities. I had various inspirations. One thing that influenced me was for example Cecil Taylor’s description of a piano as 88 tuned drums, or when I saw Barry Guy using drumsticks on the strings of a double bass prepared with iron rods. The long journey of trial and error, searching for new sounds, new techniques and new ways of using old techniques may never end. The true magic of improvisation lies in the incessant trying and searching. As I went along, I found out that developing these ideas to the point of mastery is a natural expansion of the initial improvisational approach. I had been using chopsticks for percussive playing since the mid-1990s but in 2008, I started practising this technique for at least four hours a day. I focused intentionally on technically very demanding exercises until I was able to master them. The sticks had to have the right weight and balance. I experimented with the range of sounds I could create with the basic set of an acoustic guitar, a pair of Chinese chopsticks, two copper rods and a metal tuning fork. Deeper and deeper tones kept coming up. The acoustic guitar is really full of surprises. I had no idea it could produce so many different tones and sound waves that we don’t normally associate with it.” It should be pointed out, however, that practising with such intensity caused him a back injury, so that the Beirut guitarist was prohibited by a doctor from playing the guitar for several months. Another key figure on the Lebanese scene of free improvisation is Mazen Kerbaj who was Sehnaoui’s schoolmate, although their friendship began only later. “We became friends perhaps due to the fact that in post-war Beirut we were both looking for something different than what was at hand, something intellectually challenging. Mazen used to draw comics and was desperate for something that would incite his creativity and push him forward. In fact, it wasn’t easy in Beirut in those days, almost nothing worked. This was before the Internet, there were no music and book stores, live music was hardly played. Mazen had an idea from his parents about the spirited artistic life in the country before the war, his father being a brilliant avant-garde theatre actor and his mother a painter and art critic. I gave him his first trumpet, a cheap student Yamaha. We still stayed in contact after I left for Paris, we would visit each other as far as the situation permitted, and listened to and played as much music as we could.” A group of around twelve musicians formed around Shehnaoui and Kerbaj to improvise and experiment in multiple ways, and standing out among those was Christine Abdelnour and Raed Yassin (double-bass). Others gradually left to pursue different paths, but their places were assumed by like-minded musicians whose approaches to playing matched closely their style. “Quite independently of us they had similar music interests, and when we came to be better known they just came and said they wanted to join us because their playing was close to ours. At first we didn’t believe them but they did great over time.” This is how the core of the Lebanese improvisational scene came into being. Apart from standard collaborations in the world of free improvisation, it is alongside his Lebanese friends that Sehnaoui can be seen most often, as in the acoustic A Trio, with Kerbaj and Yassin, in which the resulting sonic structure is interwoven with rhythmical threads easily discernible to the ear (most of them, obviously, of a percussive character), or in the Wormholes audiovisual project, shared with Kerbaj, who in this case produces a visual counterpart on a glass table with inks, solvents, water and an assortment of brushes. A Slaughterhouse out of the Ordinary The beginnings of the Irtijal festival, and the Al Maslakh label were instigated by the same person, namely Mazen Kerbaj, but the crucial factor was the experience of travel. “Mazen kept talking about the need to organize concerts in Lebanon, but to me it seemed a notably bad idea that could set the local audience against us as they wouldn’t understand what we were doing, and could even threaten us for going against tradition. But in the late 1990s I travelled throughout Europe with a tent, and also attended the Konfrontationen festival in Nickelsdorf. That’s where I fully realized that I wanted to start a festival in Lebanon, at any cost. Preparations took several years, but in the end, in 2001, Irtijal, which means “improvisation”, came into existence. A few years later we founded Al Maslakh (“slaughterhouse”), which came also as a consequence of Mazen’s wish to bring the music he wanted to the country where he lived. In the beginning, we had to fund all events and production ourselves, but over the years the festival became well established, and now it is the oldest music festival in the city of Beirut, receiving support from various funds and institutions. But we always struggle.” Shehnaoui’s concerns before launching the festival were not all unfounded. “The audience at our concerts at first showed incomprehension, shock, or would laugh at us, or accused us of destroying music. They would advise us to first learn how to play before performing in public. The concert halls were never as full at the end of a show as they had been at the beginning. People used to talk, whisper, and laugh, insult us while we played, in the press and on the Internet. However, we received important support from Jack Gregg – a figure of early free jazz in the US and Europe who ended up in Lebanon playing jazz standards and accompanying local stars such as Fairuz. He was a respected personality, anyway, and understood what we were trying to do, which was of immense help to us. Nowadays it is much better, our music has won considerable recognition and we have helped cultivate a rather strong audience and grow the experimental scene: the number of musicians, variety of styles, and the quality in general have risen.” A continuous effort has thus helped establish a new tradition in Lebanon, despite the deep roots of traditional music, which allows for improvisation only within a strict set of rules, and regards complete freedom and unconventional approaches to instruments as something alien. However, the domestic scene is considerably bolstered by the regular import of world musicians who play together with the locals. Looking at the activities of the leading Lebanese improvisers, it becomes apparent that a significant role is played by humour. Be it Kerbaj’s drawings (an inseparable part of the album art of the Al Maslakh label and Irtijal festival posters), the name of the label itself, or not less, the Johnny Kafta Anti-Vegetarian Orchestra. Their promotional posters most often contain photographs of musicians in heavily blood-stained butcher aprons (sometimes with musical instruments, at other times with butcher’s implements), which causes disgust in some sensitive souls. Sehnaoui can only add: “We shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously but you better talk it over with Mazen, this is his number one topic!” Sharif Sehnaoui will perform at the vs. Interpretation festival together with Mazen Kerbaj, Christine Abdelnour, and the drummer Tony Buck whom we in the Czech Republic have come to know over the last several years mostly from his performances of The Necks trio. He will appear as a shifting member of the Rouba3i quartet, to which the Lebanese trio always invites a guest percussionist.