• artist:
  Ahoar
• country:
  Iraq
• region:
  Orient
• release year:
  2007
• style(s): Jazz Maqam
• formats:
  • CD (Compact Disc)
• record submitted by:
  alba Kultur
• label:
  Heaven & Earth
• publisher:
  Heaven & Earth

Ahoar is the name adopted by two Iraqi classical-traditional concert musicians, a Belgian jazz pianist and a jazz double bassist from Germany. By combining two very different styles of music and venturing into new musical territory in this project, the four musicians perform a daring, unique experiment.
The secret of Ahoar, so it seems, is the reduction to the very essential, both musically and aesthetically: short, clear melodies, catchy like children's songs, minimalist motifs, rather light piano chords which, hardly changed, are repeated gently and evenly, carefully dipped like in an overall picture of sound. No drums, no richly coloured percussion, with frame drums or Arabian tablas only on some compositions. The sound of the group can be heard immediately in every place.
In their form the compositions are also sparse up to emptiness: usually there is only the sound of a single, simple theme, often only a slightly varied motif. There is no melodic development dragging the listeners along with it, no high-contrast breaks trying to surprise them: a sequence of tones on the djoze, a slowly reeling piano. No movement, only a sound rising and sinking again imperceptibly slowly. Fascinating!
And yet the music of Ahoar always has the effect of an insoluble overall structure and never joined together. It would be impossible to hear the components of the originating styles apart. It would be difficult to find a group in which everyone involved - although unmissably extraordinary virtuosos - withdraws so radically for a mutual overall sound. No synthesis of traditions has taken place here, instead it is a kind of musical core meltdown.
Rarely is the combination of unisonant, filigree maqam melody and Western harmony as successful as it is here. When listening, we become repeatedly unsure whether harmonies are still sounding at all or rather a long, softly streaming bourdon sound. Unfolding equally little is the Iraqi maqam, this long cycle with its predefined songs, rhythm and modulations. The two Iraqi musicians of Ahoar break through the strict forms again and again and shorten its developments.
An example is the dialogue of the two string instruments in "Erwartung", a Western bass and the Iraqi djoze: no melodies, no harmonies, no maqam, just a mutual, calm, abstract flow of sounds. Only molecules, so it seems, have released the quartet from their different musical traditions and merged them together.