Maya Youssef

• country:Syria
• label:not signed
• type:Band, Solo, Trio, Quintet
• gender:male, female
• instrumentation:instrumental, vocal, percussion, string
• artist posted by:JazzBFango - Konzertagentur

Line up

• Shirley Smart (cello)
• Al McSween ( piano /synth)
• Elizabeth Nott (percussion)
• Mikele Montolli (double base)

Links

• Maya Youssef's album "Finding Home" Music as a place of hope
• Maya Youssef's album "Finding Home" Music as a place of hope

Maya Youssef is a virtuoso on the magnificent qanun, the 78-string zither at the heart of Arabic music.


"Finding Home", the second album by Syrian-born, UK-based musician Maya Youssef, works through feelings of loss and destruction until its music reaches a place beyond war and violence.


Maya Youssef began to attract attention four years ago with her debut album Syrian Dreams. It presented the qanun as part of a chamber-music ensemble, with cello and percussion. Syrian Dreams is simultaneously a virtuosic and wistful album, which in part presents a musical response to the war in Syria. Maya Youssef is convinced that music can heal wounds and alleviate trauma. Since the start of the war in Syria, Youssef has been not only an interpreter of other people's work, but a composer too; anger and despair prompted her to start creating her own music. In wartime, she says, music has been "a crucial means to express and come to terms with intense feelings of loss and sadness from seeing my people suffer and my homeland destroyed". This conviction is something she expresses not just verbally or on paper, as her concerts and theatre work with child refugees from Syria attest.


Booking: GAS