DHAFER YOUSSEF DUO FEAT. EIVIND AARSET

• Reduced mobility

It only takes a few seconds of the fascinating Street of Minarets (2023), the ninth album by Tunisian musician Dhafer Youssef, to make you suspect that the muezzins had a hand in forging his voice. In actual fact, his grandfather was a muezzin. He comes from this family tradition. As a child, he had such a beautiful voice that he was encouraged to sing the call to prayer in the mosque. The title of the album says it all.

But all this by itself wouldn’t have meant much had he not combined it over the years with his interest in jazz and his immersion in Western sounds during the time he spent in Vienna or Paris, where he learned to mix Turkish and Asian music with electro, jazz or rock.

A master of singing and the oud, one of the most popular Arabic instruments (similar to the lute), which he has freed from its traditional role, Dhafer Youssef has collaborated or performed throughout his career with the likes of Bugge Wesseltoft, Jon Hassell, Tigran Hamasyan and Omar Sosa, and is one of the world’s leading exponents of the fusion of Eastern and Western sonorities.