Charbel Rouhana - New World Music Ensemble

We didn't give a name to this concert. Nor did we name the upcoming album with the new compositions we will be playing. This project is the fruit of months of labor and it will see the light on the nights of the performances, when we play it for the first time in front of a Live audience.

We are very excited because this concert will not just be a collection of music and songs that we will play for the first time, but because it's inception and the work that went into it was different this time. This project is the fruit of a collaborative approach to music. While it is Charbel Rouhana who composed the music, it is the musicians collective that gave the harmonic and rhythmic arrangements to the tunes.

This concert comprises 10 pieces in which music and vocals are interwoven freely in an interplay that creates openings in between the Oud and the Persian Sitar; It rides the delicate grooves of the hand percussions and fretless bass, and is set in harmony by Brass and Keys.

In this concert, I sing the poetry of Ibn Hamdees, the Sicilian, through which we will travel back in time in a voyage to the XIIth century. We also will bring back Ibn Hamdees to our modern times with harmonies that he probably thought impossible; and we will bridge this gap in a realm where there will no longer be "old" and "new", and "far" and "near", but where there will be beauty for the listener who seeks it.

Charbel Rouhana