Maurice el Medioni

Born on 18 September 1928 in Oran, Algeria, the Jewish pianist El Medioni began studying the instrument at the age of nine. When Allied forces entered Algeria in 1942, he performed current popular tunes in establishments patronized by American troops, absorbing jazz, boogie woogie and Cuban rumba directly from them. In the postwar years he supported himself through tailoring while performing alongside assorted Western ensembles then active in Algeria. The year 1948 brought his introduction to rai, the music of the country’s Arab population, prompting him to assemble a multi-cultural ensemble that appeared at both Muslim weddings and the Café Oran in Oran’s Jewish Quarter. Two years afterward he joined Jewish orchestras as well, presenting the Andalusian repertoire of Algeria’s Jewish community. With the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence he relocated to Paris, where he again took up tailoring and accompanied many of the leading French Jewish vocalists. In 1967 he acquired a clothing enterprise in Marseilles and, apart from sporadic single engagements with Jewish singers, withdrew from musical activity. During the 1980s, spurred by renewed attention to rai, El Medioni reconvened several of the Arab musicians he had worked with in the 1940s and 1950s, reviving his singular cross-cultural Algerian idiom. Resuming a full-time career, he collaborated with younger Arab musicians based in France as well as with Jewish singers in both France and Israel. His long-delayed international debut album, Café Oran, was produced by Hijaz Mustapha of 3 Mustaphas 3 and included guest contributions from Mahmoud Fadl of Salamat together with members of the Klezmatics, joined by several of the instrumentalists who had supported El Medioni nearly fifty years earlier. The resulting sound fuses Arabic, Jewish and Cuban elements, over which the pianist improvises his own distinctly Algerian/Jewish interpretation of boogie woogie and jazz.