Longa Vienna
Marwan Abado & Ensemble
rec. 2023, Niederkreuzstetten, Austria
Gramola 99309 [42]

Imagine sitting in a Marrakesh tea shop, sipping mint tea and listening to local musicians perform. The music would be popular with the clientele, sometimes improvised, sometimes composed (and then in some musical notation in front of the players). This might be your impression when you listen to this disc – although these musicians are not from Morocco.

Marwan Abado, whose compositions we experience here, says in his booklet essay that he has spent over forty years in Vienna but came from Beirut. He left at eighteen due to the war which made the city an unstable place for free-lance musicians. He has been writing music, playing with a group of like-minded musicians, and has ‘continued to cultivate the Arab instrumental music tradition’. Longa ‘is the name of an oriental musical form brought from the Ottoman empire […] around the middle of the eighteenth century’.

The booklet has a beautiful photo of the group and its various instruments. Abado sings on a number of tracks, and plays the oud. (The word al-ʕūd –“wood” in Arabic – is the origin of the name “lute’.) Maciej Golebiowski, who plays clarinets, features notably on the mostly improvised track 6 Taqsim in Maqam “Rast Yakah”. (Here, taqsim means improvisation, maqam a melody type, and RastYakah is a scale.) Arnulf Lindner plays bass guitar, Peter Rosmanith percussion.

Dima Orsho supplies a female voice, with a lovely, lyrical tone – added just before the recording was made. We hear her on track 4, Oh God of Rain, a setting of a Palestinian text on farming. Other vocal pieces are on track 1, If it be granted, and on track 8 A simple Arab, with words by Samih al-Qasim. All texts appear in the original language and in an English translation.

Peter Rosmanith wrote another brief essay. He came to Arabic music for the first time only after his initial association with Abado. He tells us how happy the group were to discover Maciej Golebiowski, whose playing ‘moves between klezmer, classical and jazz’, as we can clearly hear.

If you were to sample just one track, try Connecting Five, not quite Dave Brubeck but certainly in a lilting five-time. The programme is closely and vividly recorded.

Gary Higginson

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Contents
(titles in translation)
1. When it is granted
2. Longa Vienna
3. Blue Window Grilles
4. Oh God of Rain
5. Connecting Five
6. Free Improvisation in “Rast Yakah” Scale
7. Samai from Jerusalem
8. A Simple Arab