Just Like Family Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand Makes Some New Friends
Thomas May
The internationally acclaimed clarinetist, composer, and improviser Kinan Azmeh became a familiar and frequent presence at the Pierre Boulez Saal during its inaugural season.Yet with each return, the Syrian artist has appeared in a changing guise: whether focusing on his own instrument (including opposite fellow clarinetist Jörg Widmann) or performing with longstanding musical partner Dinuk Wijeratne at the keyboard, or as part of Hewar, the composer-performer collective founded in Damascus. Azmeh has additionally served as a co-curator for the Arabic Music Days last year, when he introduced his New York-based quartet, the Kinan Azmeh C ityBand. For his first appearances this season at the Pierre Boulez Saal, Azmeh forms yet another new ensemble as CityBand shares the stage with three guest artists—Wu Wei on sheng, Bodek Janke on percussion, and Florian Weber on piano—in backto-back concerts. “Having two nights in Berlin at the same venue suggested a great opportunity to invite guests to perform with CityBand,” Azmeh said in an interview from his home base in Brooklyn earlier this month, pointing out that “the symbolism of the Pierre Boulez Saal itself ” encourages a sense of risk-taking, as well as an intimate exchange with the audience and fellow performers. “All of us are com posers, improvisers, and collaborators by nature. So instead of for just one night only, we can expand the family to include three more members in a longer-lived collaboration.” The four members of the “family” in question, CityBand, first started collaborating little by little in what Azmeh describes as a kind of “chain reaction” that led, without premeditated design, to the formation of the quartet. As a 11
