Mazen Kerbaj, Trumpet Solo Vol 2.1 & Vol 2.2

When I heard for the first time heard about Lebanese musician and comic book artist Mazen Kerbaj in July 2006, it was neither through a record nor a concert. It was on the internet that I discovered both the drawn blog through which he reported, as a civilian, on his experience of the «Thirty-Three- Day War» (the Israeli military intervention in Lebanon during the summer of 2006) and via the “Starry Night” soundtrack, recorded by Kerbaj at night on the balcony of his apartment in Beirut in which he improvises a duet on the trumpet with the planes and bombs of Tsahal and the car alarms triggered by their impact and explosions. This first contact with the music of Kerbaj could have easily been a false course or an easy shortcut conjuring up once again – from our comfortable position as distanced European observers – the inevitable cliché of a Lebanon bruised by decades of war (a historical perspective which Kerbaj and his accomplices also try to get rid of, creating new structures, setting up a label and a festival, forging a lively and dynamic musical and artistic scene in Beirut). Nevertheless, in a 2005 interview with Julian Cowley of The Wire, Kerbaj (born in 1975, the year of the beginning of the Lebanese civil war) insists that he «can detect in his solo music a strong influence of the sound environment of war heard during his youth», adding «I have never tried to produce the sound of helicopters or trumpet bombs, but I admit that many sounds I use – and their relationship to silence – are similar to the sounds of war.»

«I always dreamt of being a guitar player»: love / hate of the instrument

Mazen Kerbaj discovered free jazz and free improvisation at the age of seventeen, first just as a listener (Machine Gun by the Peter Brötzmann Octet is the first European record of improvised music he buys). It is almost by accident that he started playing the trumpet when his friend and future musical partner, guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui, offers him the instrument Sehnaoui has trailing, unused, at home. Never having imagined to become a trumpet player one day, Kerbaj begins to play the instrument «like a joke», then steps up and takes a liking to it. At first, he plays in a very energetic and noisy free jazz register. Then, after about two years, at the age of 23, still exploring the sonic possibilities of the instrument as an autodidact and confronted with the sleep schedules of his pregnant wife, he starts playing every night for hours at an extremely low volume, «almost inaudible», which by his own admission will completely change his relationship to the instrument, even when later he will again play at a higher volume. One can hypothesize that part of the sense of grain and micro-structure of the sound in his playing these days probably stems from there.

In several interviews and – with his trademark sense of humor apparent also in his comic books and promotional drawings – in the title of one of the tracks of his two recent albums on the Discrepant label «I Always Dreamt To Be a Guitar Player”, Kerbaj hints at his initial disappointment at not having an easy instrument to «prepare» or an instrument with a long history of «preparation», such as the (prepared) piano or the (prepared) guitar. Initially jealous of guitarists jamming a screwdriver inbetween their strings or making them vibrate using the blades of a small battery-powered fan and thereby dreaming up incredible sounds, Kerbaj gradually finds his own way to tame his instrument, to «prepare» it in turn. Joining a long plastic tube and a saxophone mouthpiece («I Like Your Mouthpiece», another track title of one of his recent albums), Kerbaj often tilts his trumpet along a vertical axis, wedging it between his knees while seated, so as to be able for example to make vibrate all kinds of metal or plastic objects on the now horizontal surface delimited by the bell of his trumpet.

(With / without) cuts, overdubbing, electronics: two solo albums

Presented in two sister sleeves designed by Mazen Kerbaj himself (using the same stylized drawing of a trumpet snowman, but inverting the colors and left and right and playing with the stylization of the amulets containing the words «cuts», «overdubbing» and «use of electronics»), the Discrepant label now releases two sister albums: one allowing the series of interventions mentioned in the subtitle of the albums after recording (cuts, overlays and electronics); the other voluntarily and strictly limiting itself to what was initially played and recorded. This mirror opposition of the two albums (according to this sound processing criterium) can be read as a trace of the way in which Kerbaj generationally positions himself in the history of free improvisation. For a long time, during the 1970s and 1980s, for the first generation of improvisers the «no cuts, no overdubs, no electronics» constituted a kind of doxa, very strongly linked to the idea that their music was a music of the moment and that this founding moment was to be respected as it had been produced, as it had been lived, without rewriting history later – implicitly conveying the idea that as soon as there is editing work, looms the suspicion of manipulation, lies, even treason. Born well after the founding fathers of European free improvisation, Kerbaj no longer asks questions in these terms. He stems from a generation open to other musics of research, rock music, electronic music.

«Acoustic Synthesizer»

Mazen Kerbaj often refers to electronic music to talk about his music, including acoustics. Indeed, for a new listener not aware of Kerbaj’s instrument of choice, his music can sound like electronic music – as in 2001’s beautiful Contest of Pleasures of the three instrumentalists John Butcher (sax), Xavier Charles (clarinet) and Axel Dörner (trumpet - with whom Kerbaj plays in the Ariha Brass Quartet) which without prior knowledge could also be seen as an electronic music record. The link with Xavier Charles is also interesting because, besides his reed instrument, the French musician also plays - solo or in the band Silent Block – «vibrating surfaces»: a series of loudspeakers laid flat on a table that catapult various materials and small objects (seeds, iron filings, etc.) into the air, according to the sound waves sent throught the speakers. Whereas in Charles’s music, the two approaches are separated over two instruments, with Kerbaj they merge into a single device and it is his breath and trumpet that vibrate the surfaces and reveal the sound granulometry of materials (on pieces «Just Before The Flood» or «Insufficient Creative Output» for example).

The electronic ghost that haunts the music of Mazen Kerbaj refers – through its assertive side, at times wild and radical – to analog electronics of early times, close to sound waves and electricity, rather than to more sophisticated electronics, disconnected from contemporary software. The track “Pour Michel» is even dedicated to Michel Waisvisz (1949-2008), musician and inventor of electronic instruments (the crackle box and crackle synthesizer) which Kerbaj sometimes plays. He befriended Waisvisz and invited him to play in Beirut, also releasing a duet recording with Christine Sehnaoui on his Al Maslakh label.

The two solo albums released on Discrepant (and which continue the strain of Brt Vrt Zrt Krt, Mazen Kerbaj’s first solo album on Al Maslakh in 2005) are two intense and frank proposals, sometimes downright endian, without pretense or excess of good manners. Metal vibrates everywhere, waves whirl in spinning movements, his instrument roars, sound breaks up, music becomes a machine, the pipes of the factory leak and spit poisonous gas into the air… In this rather dark and untamed corpus, «I Always Dreamt To Be a Guitar Player», the longest piece of both albums, is a bit of an exception. Thirteen minutes of slowly changing cloths, like a long yoga ohm, like a plateau eroded by tens of thousands of years of wind rather than like an erupting volcano, or like a round-shaped pebble rather than a flint with sharp edges. Hypnotic.

Text by Philippe Delvosalle

Mazen Kerbaj