Ibrahim Maalouf @ Teatro Dal Verme, Milano, 10/13/2023

Being able to see a concert at 8.00 PM in Milan is almost an absolute novelty, even if I remember that when I lived in London that was the standard time to attend live events. In fact this is the right time since you have a regular job in the morning, maybe the early morning and you need to get up at dawn. This is not the case since it’s Friday and tomorrow I’ll sleep a little bit more than in the previous days.

Nonsenses or discussions about the weather apart, tonight Friday 13 instead of the usual bad luck we have Ibrahim Maalouf (trumpet, piano) playing with his friend François Delporte at electric guitar. When I see Maalouf live I ain’t got any expectations: everytime he plays something different and with different musicians. But yesterday night in effect Maalouf have surprised me even more, because the most part of the concert was based on interactions with the audience and his talks. But let’s start with some order.

The introduction to the live show is held by Maalouf playing the beginning of a love song by the legendary Oum Kalthoum. The piece would have been last the entire concert, so we heard only a small part of it, but it was a nice beginning. Then Maalouf took the microphone and started talking about the roots of the pieces he would eventually play, like one song for her daughter who is 14 now and who’s life he tried to depict with his trumpet.

But this is still far from the very core of the show, who was a song about hope Maalouf played at the piano asking the audience to sing the melody: possibly one of the most touching moments I attended through live music. In another moment, Maalouf asked us to sing à la Louis Armstrong, thing that we, embarrassed and amused, have been careful not to do. A nice sketch have followed. At the end of the show Maalouf asked for forgiveness to that part of the audience exspecting for a regular jazz show.

But, as he told us at the very beginning, Maalouf after 17 albums and even more years of career needed something different and so he invited Delporte, a mutual friend, to be part of this show that possibly was kind of a therapeutic session for him and also for the public. Atipic as it was, it hit us anyway with Maalouf touching and sympathetic sensitivity.

So, even if I had only the opportunity to remember how much a great musician he is, above all at trumpet, in the end I can’t say I’m not satisfied with what I heard and saw: in these harsh times, Maalouf is finding his own way out from normalisation, and who can tell he’s wrong for now? We’ll see what he we’ll cook us in the future. For the moment, Maalouf passed my exam, for what it’s worth.