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| DuOud (Tunisia / France) | |||
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The oud is one of the most beautiful instruments in the world lending itself to Turkish, North African and Middle Eastern interpretation but this album puts it into a different context. With the electronic programming expertise of Smadj and the virtuoso performances of his teacher and friend Mehdi Haddab the oud is immediately brought into the 21st Century. Tunisian by birth and raised in Paris from an early age, Jean-Pierre Smadja (Smadj) was brought up on a healthy musical diet including Oriental and Brazilian music, jazz, funk and soul. Smadj studied at a jazz school in Paris and after five years of study he began to play in clubs around the city. He became a sound engineer, set up a mobile studio and worked with a variety of musicians from many genres. As the Parisian dance music scene grew Smadj started experimenting with different sounds and styles of dance music that were around at the time. He began to blend Oriental, Latin, North African and jazz with dance beats and in 1997 became involved in the electronic music scene, incorporating drum'n'bass into his mix. Mehdi Haddab was born in Algiers. He spent time in Burundi, Central Africa, before finally settling in Paris where he developed his own style and sound. He was a third of the Parisian based trio Ekova, who specialised in the sort of global meets electronic fusion that thrives in Paris. Both musicians listen to and have been inspired by a whole range of different musical genres from electronic and dance music to jazz and classical. Smadj describes their tastes as "having no frontiers". He says, "I could be listening to anything from Congolese rumba to Squarepusher and be influenced by both". The DuOud project started out as two friends
experimenting with various sounds and eventually turned into something they felt
they could share with other people. | |||
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