DUDU TASSA & JONNY GREENWOOD PRESENT LIVE PERFORMANCE OF ‘YA MUGHIR AL-GHAZALA’ FEATURING IRAQI VOCALIST KARRAR ALSAADI

WATCH NOW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYAH7XZGOC8

NEW ALBUM JARAK QARIBAK OUT 9TH JUNE ON WORLD CIRCUIT

LIVE AT LONDON’S PITCHFORK FESTIVAL ON 10 NOVEMBER 2023

Dudu Tassa and Jonny Greenwood present a filmed live performance of ‘Ya Mughir al-Ghazala’, featuring guest vocals from Iraqi singer Karrar Alsaadi. The song will feature in studio recording form on their recently announced collaborative album ‘Jarak Qaribak’ (translating from Arabic as ‘Your Neighbour Is Your Friend’), out 9th June on World Circuit Records. Produced by Tassa & Greenwood and mixed by Nigel Godrich, the album brings together vocalists and musicians from throughout the Middle East.

LIVE PERFORMANCE OF ‘YA MUGHIR AL-GHAZALA’ HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYAH7XZGOC8

Of the video, Dudu comments: “This song originates from Yemen, my father’s country of origin, and Kiri (Karrar) is from Baghdad, my mother’s hometown. I met Kiri in Vienna and all I could think about was how much beauty, culture and humanity we miss while we are busy stressing differences, borders and limitations. That’s how, together with Jonny, the idea for this whole album started to take shape, through the notion of crossing borders, and looking for connections rather than differences.”

Tassa and Greenwood have also this week announced a performance at London’s Pitchfork Festival on November 10th.

Tickets here: https://dice.fm/

‘Ashufak Shay’, featuring Lebanese vocalist Rashid al-Najjar, was the first track to be unveiled from the album and can be heard and viewed below:

WATCH/LISTEN TO DEBUT TRACK ‘ASHUFAK SHAY’ HERE: https://worldcircuit.lnk.to/JarakQaribakPR

“When people listen to this music,” says Dudu Tassa, “I really love to imagine them thinking. . . what is this? It sounds 1970s, but there are drum machines, there are guitars but they’re singing in Arabic. . . what’s going on?”

What’s going on is a remarkable collaboration between two remarkable musicians. Israeli rock star Tassa and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood have known each other a long time. They’ve collaborated before - Jonny played guitar on ‘Eize Yom’ (‘What A Day’), a track on Dudu’s 2009 album ‘Basof Mitraglim Le’Hakol (‘In The End You Get Used To Everything). Asked what he likes about Jonny’s playing, Dudu replies “It’s everything I can’t do, and don’t know how to do.” Jonny, who is married into an Israeli family hailing originally from Iraq and Egypt, remembers hearing Dudu’s music twinkling amid the prevailing gloom of mid-noughties Israeli rock when Radiohead first visited. “What Dudu was doing had its roots in the Middle East,” says Jonny, “and I just found that more interesting. I was hearing that music at home a lot, as well.”

JARAK QARIBAK translates, more or less, as ‘Your Neighbour Is Your Friend‘. It’s an expansive, inclusive sentiment. The songs on the album, and the singers, are drawn from all over the Middle East - and, in keeping with the theme established by the album’s title, each singer takes a turn at a tune from a country other than their own. So ‘Djit Nishrab’, a sultry, slow-building lament to love gone wrong by 1940s Algerian singer Ahmed Wahby, is performed by the 2020s Egyptian singer Ahmed Doma. ‘Taq ou-Dub’, a defiant kiss-off, is performed by the Palestinian singer Nour Freteikh. When Dudu takes a lead vocal himself, it’s on ‘Lhla Yzid Ikhtar, borrowed from Morocco. When a Moroccan - in this instance Mohssine Salaheddine - steps up, it’s on the Egyptian track ‘Leylet Hub’. The Jordanian traditional ‘Ya ‘Anid Ya Yaba’ is sung by a Syrian. And when the song is Israeli - as ‘Ahibak’ is - it’s sung by Safae Essafi, from Dubai.

JARAK QARIBAK is scarcely the first time that Jonny has stepped beyond the boundaries of guitar rock. He has had a parallel career as a solo artist going back 20 years, to his soundtrack for ‘Bodysong’ - he has since composed the soundtracks for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread and The Master and Jane Campion’s The Power Of The Dog, among others; he has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

But while Dudu grew up with this music, Jonny had to learn it, which meant unlearning a lot about being a rock guitarist - a challenge he’d previously confronted when working with another Israeli musician, Shye Ben Tzur. “‘Jarak Qaribak’ presented a similar set of problems,” says Jonny, “in that, you have all these scales which don’t conform to western major/minor scales, and have notes which involve quarter-tones, and it’s very hard to impose a chord sequence on these melodies. It usually makes them collapse. It’s like reducing the resolution on a colour photo until it’s just squares”.

When assembling the tracks on ‘Jarak Qaribak’, Jonny reflects he was “trying to imagine what Kraftwerk would have done if they’d been in Cairo in the 1970s,” which is actually a pretty deft characterising of the overall sound of ‘Jarak Qaribak’.

“It’s a letter in a bottle, thrown into the ocean,” decides Dudu. “Who will get it, who will hear it, I don’t know. But someone will love it.”

Tracklisting:

Djit Nishrab (feat. Ahmed Doma)
Ashufak Shay (feat. Rashid Al Najjar)
Taq ou-Dub (feat. Nour Freteikh)
Leylet Hub (feat. Mohssine Salaheddine)
Ya Mughir al-Ghazala (feat. Karrar Alsaadi)
Ahibak (feat. Safae Essafi)
Ya ‘Anid Ya Yaba (feat. Lynn A.)
Lhla Yzid Ikthar
Jan al-Galb Salik (feat. Noamane Chaari & Zaineb Elouati)

https://jarakqaribak.com/
https://worldcircuit.co.uk/

DUDU TASSA
https://www.instagram.com/dudutassaofficial/

JONNY GREENWOOD
https://twitter.com/jnnyg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Greenwood