Anouar Brahem: Ashen Sky (Souvenance 2014 ECM Records).
In Ashen Sky, Anouar Brahem pares the language of Souvenance down to an especially exposed ensemble: oud, piano, bass clarinet and electric bass, without the string orchestra heard elsewhere on the album. This absence focuses the listener’s attention on the quartet and brings the timbral detail into sharper relief. Brahem’s oud and François Couturier’s piano do not function simply as melody and accompaniment, but as two voices sharing and extending the same harmonic space, while Björn Meyer’s bass adds depth without fixing the music to a rigid pulse.
One of the piece’s most distinctive qualities is its dynamic range. Brahem shifts the intensity of the music through subtle changes in volume, register and density. Klaus Gesing’s bass clarinet is crucial to this process: it can descend into a dark, almost breath-like register before rising into more lyrical lines, gradually altering the balance of the ensemble. Ashen Sky therefore unfolds as a continuous transformation of colour rather than through conventional thematic development.
The title, “Ashen Sky, ” takes on particular significance within Souvenance, an album conceived in the aftermath of the political and social upheavals that followed the Tunisian Revolution of 2011. Brahem never presents the piece as a direct depiction of those events, yet that atmosphere of uncertainty runs through the album and helps to illuminate its tone. In Ashen Sky, it is transformed into musical terms: low registers, lines that seem to move forward cautiously, finely controlled shifts in intensity and harmonies that resist clear resolution. Rather than telling a specific story, the piece conveys the impression of an altered landscape, still covered by the memory of what has taken place.
