Where world music often remains world music, the Lebanese composer and player of the oud – the Arabian lute with a short neck - Rabih Abou-Khalil takes the music a whole lot further. Abou-Khalil succeeds in mixing his own musical culture in a completely natural way with jazz. That, on the occasion of this year’s edition of the festival, the French thoroughbred avant-garde improviser Michel Godard (tuba) is in his band says it all. Abou-Khalil grew up in cosmopolite Lebanese city of Beirut during the sixties and seventies. Forced to leave his country by the civil war, he went to Munich to study the flute, a thorough acquaintance with western music. Although with one foot in the east and the other in the west, both traditions flow together in his compositions and his playing as if they had always belonged together.
