Le Cri Du Caire

Description

Cairo, late 2013. In a city in turmoil where the curfew has just been lifted after a second coup d'état, where dream and revolt are still displayed large on the walls, where slogans hostile to Islamists and the army resonate even in downtown clubs, I find myself deeply touched by the voice of Abdullah Miniawy at Studio 100Copies, a stone's throw from Tahrir Square.Singer, writer, poet, slammer and student from the oasis city of El-Fayoum, this voice of Egyptian youth stirs the scene and social networks with his hypnotic voice, his unique blend of electro, jazz and Sufism, at once punk, psychedelic, ancient and avant-garde. Three months later, first stage shocks hatched with Abdullah by the festival La Voix est Libre in Cairo with the "Jimi Hendrix of the oud", Mehdi Haddab, and first meeting with composer and saxophonist Peter Corser at the D-CAF festival (Downtown Contemporary Art Festival), created in the wake of the revolution by theater man Ahmed El-Attar. After three years of administrative battles, as censorship returns to Egyptian artistic circles, Abdullah finally arrives in Paris where he records with Peter Corser a first version of Purple Feathers released on Soundcloud.In 2017, captivated from the first seconds by these vocal and instrumental flights, Erik Truffaz accepts our invitation to rise on Peter's hypnotic loops and Abdullah's electric chants, soon joined by the embodied strings of cellist Karsten Hochapfel. Five years later, Le Cri du Caire continues to turn heads, before an audience often moved to tears. At once free and spiritual, sensitive and elusive, their music touches the vertigo of the soul, flying towards what could well be one of the shortest paths between zero and infinity. After five years of touring in numerous major venues of jazz and French creation (Avignon, La Voix est Libre, Les Suds, Institut du Monde Arabe, Jazz à Marciac, Paris Jazz Festival), the quartet led by Abdullah Minawy, and composed of Peter Corser, Karsten Hochapfel and Erik Truffaz continues its journey and presents its first studio album.