Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - Just leave it all behind (2023) [Hi-Res]

After being tortured for the fourth time, Wassim Mukdad realized that he had to leave his country, Syria. Arrested ten years ago on the occasion of a protest against the government of Bashar Al-Assad, together with thirty other protesters, Mukdad, who has been living in Germany for four years where he resumed his activity in music, has become, with the support of the European Center for Constitutional Rights. In Berlin, after a residency in Istanbul, Mukdad began a career that spans studies in musicology and commitment through music to support Palestinian and Syrian children who are victims of war. He is currently involved in a variety of musical and theatrical projects. For once, instead of the music, let's start from the musicians' story, without fear of ending up off topic, because the human and social events in which Mukdad was involved find precise confirmation in the construction and emotions that his music, like that contained in this CD manages to evoke. Here the oud player is in good company. David Rothenberg is an American naturalist clarinetist, who manages to establish meaningful dialogues with both humans and animals, as demonstrated by the previous experience of the trio in question in the work "Nightingales in Berlin," played live with birds singing in a Berlin park. Volker Lankow is a percussionist and tablas player, a role that combines with that of project manager of Doctors Without Borders, constantly engaged in areas affected by war situations such as the Syrian one. The music often has trance-like accents, trembling on the strings of the oud and on the heads of the tablas, with Rothenberg's clarinet underlining the pathos, delving into feelings that are almost too painful to talk about, or supporting the most intimate moments or moments aimed towards the hope. Among the eleven tracks is the meeting between Middle Eastern musical idioms and a Western vision, where the processional rhythms and the hypnosis of the oud riffs are combined with echoes of blues, with a recognizable melodic style, to the freedom of jazz improvisation. An hour of great music, far beyond the great symbolic value of the testimony.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - Winter sleep (5:37)
1.02 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - Just leave it all behind (5:15)
1.03 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - So we will survive (5:19)
1.04 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - Hiding - Listening (4:12)
1.05 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - See you on the other side (5:06)
1.06 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - Wartime March (5:18)
1.07 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - Into the lurch (6:05)
1.08 - Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow - Shadow (4:01)