On Saturday evening, a small crowd packed into the Mashrabia Gallery for the release of an art book by Jacinta Candinas, Manuel Vázquez and Andri Perl. Egyptian oud player Georges Kazazian’s Ensemble Sabil played a short set, marking the beginning of a run of shows around the city.
The book, simply titled “Cairo-Lucerne-Coire,” is made up of postcards that Candinas and Vázquez exchanged between Cairo and Lucerne, Switzerland over the course of about six months, with accompanying poems by Andri Perl, who lives in Coire.
Perl’s poetry is available only in German. Candinas and Vázquez’s pieces are clever and modestly beautiful. Each image responds to the one before it indirectly, delivering an astute parallel in terms of form, color or symbol that dares the viewer to find it.
An exchange of several postcards depicting detached minarets gives way to satellites, and one or two pages later, we’re looking at mushrooms and plant bulbs. The forms evolve naturally, both difficult to define precisely but also pulling the viewer along, so that the whole book could be read as a kind of highly abstracted graphic novel.
Over the course of the months, the postcards become more colorful and texturally daring. It never feels like either artist spent too much time on a single postcard, giving the entire collection a rough, improvised simplicity.
In one postcard, a Pharanoic face is embellished with red vines. Over an eyebrow and the mouth, two red birds stare blindly ahead. In the answering postcard, a very modern face with big lips, a mole and thick eyelashes, looks in and upward at a bird’s head rising up out of its hair.
Only one copy of the book was out for perusing, so it took a long time for everyone to have a look. Eventually, the audience members took their seats in several rows of chairs tightly clustered in the gallery’s biggest room. Georges Kazazian, a highly-regarded Armenian-Egyptian oud player whose music is usually referred to as “Egyptian jazz,” took the stage and introduced his band, the Ensemble Sabil.
This set of music, he said, is called the White Lotus Project, and is sponsored by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, which funds intercultural creative work. The musicians are all Swiss and Egyptian.
Accordionist Patricia Draeger began to play long, plaintive drones, over which Kazazian improvised tentatively, each note like a pin placed into a cushion. Saxophonist Michael Jaeger entered and took over the melody, a set of long introductory phrases, which, like the postcards in the book, built upon and responded to one another.
Bassist Luca Sisera entered and paired up with the accordion, and Chris Jaeger Brown began to sprinkle percussion, including Western jazz set as well as assorted Middle Eastern drums, over the top.
In some ways, jazz and Arabic music are a natural pair. Both revolve around improvisation, and while over the course of the last 50 years jazz has moved towards the drones and freedom of Arabic taqasim, Arabic music has taken on the chords of the Western tradition.
In unsuccessful attempts at fusion, jazz musicians struggle to free themselves from these drones while Arabic musicians fumble awkwardly through chord progressions. When the mixture succeeds, these restrictions become strengths. Musicians from both traditions must rely on an improvisational confidence in which they stop listening to themselves and react to the other players, and if they are truly sophisticated, to the room and the audience.
Kazazian and his Swiss collaborators succeeded in this regard. Everyone in the room was captivated, nodding their heads and tapping their toes when Sisera and Brown would enter into a more rhythmically driving beat, and staring intently at Kazazian when he would take an introspective solo. The music was accessible and innovative, restrained and imaginative.
Chris Jaeger Brown, the percussionist, was the highlight of the evening. He would delicately cascade through splashes of different timbres, Western and Eastern, before settling into propelling grooves, pushing everyone else forward never intruding to take center stage. His subtlety and precision were the hidden gem of the set.
“Cairo-Lucerne-Coire” can be purchased at Mashrabia Gallery, 8 Champollion Street. Ensemble Sabil plays throughout Cairo and Alexandria in October. Their next show is on October 13 at Sawy Culture Wheel.
“Cairo-Lucerne-Coire” is made up of postcards that Candinas and Vázquez exchanged. In one postcard, a Pharanoic face is embellished with red vines.
