Multi-Ethnic Soundscapes

They're all just slightly too young to have been Sixties flower children. Loy Ehrlich, for example, born in Paris in 1950, grew up in a middle-class family, with piano lessons, Beethoven, Bach, and the Beatles.

While his fellow students of the '68 generation – German student movement to protest against the poor living conditions of student and the perceived authoritarianism of the German government - were trying to "sweep away the mustiness of a thousand years from beneath the professors' gowns", Ehrlich briefly became a member of the progressive rock combo Gong, playing the gembri, a three-string bass guitar.

It was there that he met the wind player Didier Malherbe. They jammed and experimented together, but it was only after travelling through Morocco in 1972 that Ehrlich decided to become a serious musician. He was thrilled by the music of the gnawas – a style of Moroccan music with sub-Saharan origin, as well as by West African blues. The following years were a voyage of discovery, at one point with the band Touré Kunda, at another point ending up in La Réunion.

Morocco – a second home

Ehrlich was also one of those who was caught up in the African music boom of the 1980s: on stage with Youssou N'Dour, with Peter Gabriel in Montreux. Ehrlich played with the most diverse musicians; he learned the kora – a 21-string harp-lute – a little, but became proficient above all on the gembri, first as a student of Brahim Elbekani and increasingly also in performance.

Morocco became to him, through its music, a second home. Ehrlich was also responsible for starting the annual Gnawa Festival, of which he remains the artistic director, was started up in the port city of Essaouira in the mid-1990s.

The biographies of the other two characters in the Hadouk Trio are similarly unusual. Steve Shehan, born in the United States, the son of an Indian father and a French mother, now calls Paris home. He has worked as a drummer and percussionist with all kinds of very different musicians, from Bob Dylan and Paul Simon to Khaled and Salif Keita.

A web of stylistic impulses

And finally there is Didier Malherbe, also a Gong veteran, who spent years studying first the Indian bamboo flute and then the Armenian doudouk, a traditional woodwind instrument.

All this results in a web of stylistic impulses which developed into the distinctive sound of the Hadouk Trio, and was also the inspiration behind the band's imaginative name: a conflation of hajouj, a term for the bass used by the gnawas, and doudouk, the name of the Armenian flute.

The two performances by the band at the Berliner Jazztagen and the European Jazztival in Elmau Castle were a great success. The audiences loved them, because the musicians had succeeded in translating their own ideas into music: 'We seek the original' was Malherbe's answer to questions about the origins of the Hadouk Trio.

​​"We started off as a duo in the mid-1990s, then we were joined by Steve Shehan. Since then we've been working on the alchemy of this combination. The music itself is simple; it makes it easy for people to follow it. The focus is on rhythmic, melodic elements, but at the same time we are trying in our own particular way to extend the language of sound. Loy Ehrlich, for example, has built an instrument out of a fretless bass guitar and a gembri that he calls a 'gumbass'. And I experiment with a doudouk with keys that complement the possibilities of the flute."

The multi-talented instrumentalist Ehrlich adds: "The idea, of course, is not to alter the tradition. That exists in its own right. We just want to satisfy our own curiosity and make something out of it that we and our audiences enjoy".

Gnawa beats à la marocaine

This results not only in amazingly fresh combinations of various stylistic influences, from the Caucasus to jazz sounds of the fusion era, to gnawa beats à la marocaine. Their own creative needs mean that the musicians practise active tolerance and adjustment to the needs of their audiences.

Following the studio album Utopia, their current programme will appear on CD and DVD (Naïve) in January 2008: the live set 'Baldamore', recorded in the Cabaret Sauvage in Paris with guests including the Mauretanian singer Malouma Mint Meidah.

It's a mature and fascinating trip through the potential of sound fusion, inspired by their experiences as cultural globetrotters. And as such it is, after all, a belated heir of ideas that first began to flower in the late 1960s.

Ralf Dombrowski

© Qantara.de 2007

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins

Qantara.de

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