After the Last Sky

Eight years after Blue Maqams, Anouar Brahem returns with a poignant project, titled after a line of verse by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which asks “Where should the birds fly, after the last sky?” Graceful chamber pieces for oud, cello, piano and bass subtly address the metaphysical question and its broad resonances in a troubled time. While drawing upon the traditional modes of Arab music, Brahem has consistently sought to engage with the wider world, too, and found inspiration in many sources from different cultures. Bassist Dave Holland and pianist Django Bates are again part of the Tunisian oud master’s international quartet, joined now by cellist Anja Lechner. Brahem’s rapport with Holland — first established on the Thimar album of 1998 — is meanwhile legendary. “Dave’s playing gives me wings”, Anouar has said, an observation that materializes repeatedly across the record. Django Bates’ piano, an important supportive force throughout, contributes swirling solos. The album marks the first time that Anouar has included a cellist in his group music. Anja Lechner, a leading voice in the recording, has long been conversant with Brahem’s compositions and included them in her own recitals. The cello is given the first and last statements here. 

After the Last Sky was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in May 2024, and produced by Manfred Eicher. The album is issued as the Brahem quartet embarks on a European tour with concerts in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium.

Remembering Hind
After the Last Sky
Endless Wandering
The Eternal Olive Tree
Awake
In the Shade of your Eyes
Dancing under the Meteorites
The Sweet Oranges of Jaffa
Never Forget
Edward Said's Reverie
Vague

"Tunisian oud star and composer Anouar Brahem is rejoined by old associates Dave Holland (bass) and Django Bates (piano) with eclectic cello luminary Anja Lechner on the all-original ‘After the Last Sky’ (ECM). Lechner’s rapturous long tones and Holland’s darting counterpoint against Brahem’s nimble urgency and Bates’s attentive piano figures create a restlessly beautiful soundscape – deeply affected, as Brahem stresses, by the disaster of Gaza."
John Fordham
The Guardian

"Acclaimed cellist Anja Lechner completes the sound for the first time with Brahem in a setting on this latest and makes all the difference recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in May last year. Braham’s plangent modalities in his compositional compass are remarkable and Bates’ rapport with his stately melodies, the Arabic scales they inhabit and the dark tonalities of the mood, makes all the difference. […] As we all, surely, remain moved by the dreadful suffering of the innocent civilians of war in the middle east these past few years listening here is an act of humane solidarity on one level and on another the latest and maybe even greatest work yet by the master Brahem."
Stephen Graham
Marlbank

"His latest work, ‘After the Last Sky’, takes its title from the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and is deeply inspired by the harrowing experiences of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Rather than guiding listeners toward a specific message, Brahem seeks to evoke raw emotion, a goal he achieves with the support of three distinguished European musicians. While bassist Dave Holland is a familiar collaborator, pianist Django Bates returns after ‘Blue Maqams’, but the novelty here is cellist Anja Lechner, who infuses the music with extra poignancy and depth. […] It’s easy to find delight in Brahem’s poignant narratives and sounds. His unique musical perspective triggers thoughtful responses from his peers, who help the music brim with soul."
Filipe Freitas
Jazz Trail

"On has latest ‘After The Last Sky’ Anouar Brahem takes yet another direction. Returning from the ‘Blue Maqams’ sessions are pianist Django Bates and bassist Dave Holland, both of whom perform with Brahem in a highly sympathetic manner. New to the ensemble is the German cellist Anja Lechner, whose presence adds a distinct European classical vibe to the proceedings. The album as a whole has a somber feel, due to the influence of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war as these works were being composed and recorded.  […] There are many uplifting performances and moments, though. A duet between Brahem and Holland, ‘The Eternal Olive Tree’ is a celebration of survival and resilience, and also of the musical bond between these two players. And ‘Dancing Under The Meteorite’ involves the entire quartet, the cello and oud romping in unison through the main melody, then cello, oud and piano, with Brahem inserting a long and sparkling improv section that’s among my favorites across his many albums. Likewise he plays another lengthy improvisation on the bittersweet ‘The Sweet Oranges Of Jaffa,’ as does Lechner, whose training is classical but who has long experience in improvised music. The album’s closing piece finds Bates and Lechner taking on ‘Vague,’ one of Anouar Brahem’s most beloved melodies. […] The impeccable recording and production by Manfred Eicher at ECM’s beautiful recoding space in Lugano, Switzerland, certainly add to its aura of somber majesty."
Gary Whitehouse
Greenman Review

"It is an unabashedly beautiful album, at once a sanctuary from and a protest against a world that has grown uglier, noisier, and more violent."
Adam Shatz
New York Review of Books

"Begun before October 6, 2023, it is nonetheless deeply inspired by the horror and suffering experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. Brahem wrote new compositions and reworked some of the earlier ones to communicate and evoke raw emotion about this situation. Lechner’s poignant cello is primary, up front. She and Brahem move through Eastern modes and motifs, blurring the lines between folk, classical, and jazz. Opener ‘Remembering Hind’ is a case in point. Under two minutes, the cello and piano deliver Brahem’s minor-key melody with nearly processional grace and, despite the relative quiet, rippling emotion. The title track, at nearly six minutes, commences with an oud solo that foreshadows the melody. When Bates enters, he accedes to the restraint, at least until the cellist joins in, and it becomes a melancholy fantasia. The interplay between Holland and Brahem is almost symbiotic. […] The release also includes a long liner essay (for ECM) by U.S. editor of The London Review of Books Adam Shatz, who is also a noted journalist and critic. He offers key reflections on Brahem’s music, the Palestinians’ fight to exist, and the culture around both. ‘After the Last Sky’ is a reflective, yet powerfully emotional and virtuosic listening experience."
Thom Jurek
All Music
 

"In a bold move the oud player opts for an all string ensemble and backs up his decision with some incredibly powerful and moving compositions that have a unique sound world and beauty of their own. The combination seems to provide an almost infinite variety of sound and textures, and the ensemble of oud, cello and double bass create an intoxicating blend of strings that are bowed, plucked or strummed. This leaves Django Bates with a rather ambiguous role, with the strings of the piano being hit with hammers, and the pianist’s function moves from accompanist to soloist, and on occasion occupying a space where Bates appears to be inhabiting a space of his own. In doing so, he is somewhat distant from proceedings as if commenting from another perspective outside of the main event. Brahem continues his exploration of Arabic maqams, but with his three colleagues for this journey also delves deeper into Western classical music and jazz improvisation. If the music is in danger of falling into a chamber ensemble, this is cleverly avoided by use of powerful rhythmic motifs, often provided by bassist, Dave Holland. The lower register string instruments of the cello and double bass are beautifully utilised, with Lechner and Holland both displaying virtuoso techniques with strong and vibrant voices."
Nick Lea
Jazz Views

"Brahem began this project before the horrors of Gaza unfolded. But it remains a powerful response to the tragedy of the Middle East […] It’s hard to imagine a more poignant sound than an oud with it’s yawning bass bends as on ‘Never Forget’, with Bates, sparingly, bluesily, singing around Brahem’s lament. ‘The Sweet Oranges of Jaffa’ is a fantastical yet melancholic remembrance of an Eden that probably never existed, yet somehow the oud and cello yearn to conjure it into existence. […] The spirit of the American-Palestinian Edward Said, co-founder of the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, underwrites much of this music which refuses to yield truth and beauty, to horror and brutality."
Andy Robson
Jazzwise (Editor’s choice)

"Anouar Brahem’s latest album, eight years on from the wonderful ‘Blue Maqams’, and his 12th release on the ECM label, carries with it, in my opinion at least, a relevance, clarity and importance that goes beyond the music itself. Perhaps I wouldn’t be making such a comment if the music wasn’t as deeply moving as it undoubtedly is, but with the tragedy of Gaza very much on the composer’s mind when writing and performing this stunning music, it feels particularly pertinent here. The album’s title is drawn from a question the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish posed in one of his poems: ‘Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?’ This thought resonates deeply as I listen to this album’s often mournful soul-searching, through the medium of such inspirational music. […] On ‘After The Last Sky’ bassist Dave Holland and pianist Django Bates are again part of the Tunisian oud master’s international quartet, joined now by cellist Anja Lechner. […] There is a particular pleasure in hearing the combined sonorities of oud and bass and cello which combine to stunning effect throughout the entire recording, warmly embraced in the responsive acoustics of the Lugano studio, creating an exceptional ensemble sound. As with “Blue Maqams”, Django Bates’ piano has an important, patiently-supportive role, throughout. His understanding of the music is exceptional, knowing when to flow freely and when to rest, when to mirror a melody and when to add his beautiful embellishments to the music being performed. Brahem’s Arabic maqams, which are at the heart of his musical identity, do also offers space for individual statements, and Bates’ swirling and elegant solo on ‘Awake’, feels all the more potent for the restraint shown hitherto. ‘After The Sky’ marks the first time that Brahem has featured a cellist in his group music. Anja Lechner, who performs with such grace and style, is a leading voice in the recording. (…) ‘After The Last Sky’ is a very special album. A recording which has the capacity to remind us all of what it means to be human. Incredibly moving and unbearably poignant, it is a profound work of art from Anouar Brahem."
Mike Gates
UK Vibe

"Given that the new album features four stringed instruments being plucked, strummed, bowed and beaten, you might expect it to be a little lacking in colour. Not at all; Brahem is constantly shifting the instrumentation between various solos, duets, trios and the full quartet, just as you might be listening one moment to something seemingly North African or Middle Eastern in essence, and the next to something distinctly flavoured by jazz, tango, classical, folk or whatever. […] the music itself, with lovely interplay between the superb musicians, is in no way didactic; indeed, while some of it is imbued with an elegiac melancholy, other parts are surprisingly upbeat, evocative of happier times, hope and resilience. And all of it is not only eloquent and elegant, but unassertively beautiful – perhaps an act of resistance in itself, as well as an expression of communal creativity that knows no borders."
Geoff Andrew
Notes & Observations
 

"Anouar Brahem albums are a rare delicacy. […] The players’ sensitive melodic dialogue blurs the lines between form and freedom."
Andy Cowan
Mojo

"All the compositions are by Brahem except for ‘The Eternal Olive Tree’, which is by Brahem and Holland. The interplay among the four musicians flows naturally and unforced, the music coming across as an amalgam of chamber and world music. The opening track, for example, ‘Remembering Hind’, is a brief duet for cello and piano that sounds as if it could be an excerpt from a cello sonata. […] The endresult is an album of extraordinary beauty, the four musicians combining to produce an album of breathtaking beauty, chamber music of haunting emotional subtlety. The warm, natural, spacious ECM engineering makes this just adds to the luster of this sparkling gem."
Karl W. Nehring
Classical Candor

"Au long de onze compositions, toutes signees Anouar Brahem, se déploie une musique de chambre planante, meditative où se mêlent aux modes traditionnels de la musique arabe les influences variées de la musique occidentale, voire du jazz et des musiques issues d’autres cultures. […] Saluons ce retour inspiré."
Thierry P. Benizeau
Jazz Magazine

"Aborder Anouar Brahem, c´est rencontrer une musique qui avance à pas feutrés. Elégante et envoûtante, imprégnée de mélancolie et scintillante de grâce. Des pièces pour oud, piano, contrebasse (les Britanniques Django Bates et Dave Holland) et, pour la première fois, violoncelle (Anja Lechner). Plus que des musiciens complices, des ciseleurs de rêves et d´émotions. Anouar Brahem ancre sa musique dans les modes de la musique traditionelle arabe, mais il l´emmène toujours ailleurs, vers le jazz, la musique classique occidentale, l´indéfinissable. Sa manière d´être depuis toujours."
Patrick Labesse
Le Monde

"L’oudiste tunisien y joue avec une gravité, une sensibilité et une économie d’effets qui laissent transparaìtre, au delà de son effroi (évoqué explicitement dans le livret), son attachement à un peuple et une culture menacés d’anéantissement. D’arpèges solitaires en lentes méditations, d’évocations nostalgiques en fragiles élans d’espoir, Anja Lechner (violoncelle), Django Bates (piano) et Dave Holland (contrebasse) font plus que le seconder. L’une est allemande, les deux autres britanniques. Leur grande implication dans cette musique le dit assez: ce qui se passe à Gaza concerne l’entière humanité."
Louis-Julien Nicolaou
Télérama

"An seiner Seite Django Bates, Piano, Anja Lechner, Cello, und Dave Holland, Bass. Diese Musik lässt sich nur künstlich trennen von dem Drama von Gaza nach dem Horror der Hamas. Adam Shatz‘ Begleittext zur CD reflektiert die Wertigkeit solch intensiver, weltoffener, folkgetränkter  Jazzkammermusik im Angesicht unfassbaren Grauens. Versenkt  man sich in dieses im Mai 2024 im Auditorio Stelio Molo aufgezeichnete, und von Manfred Eicher produzierte Album, öffnet sich immer auch eine utopische Sphäre, ein Raum der Hoffnung, nicht allein in den tänzerischen Wirbeln von Brahems ‘Dance Of The Meteorites’."
Michael Engelbrecht
Deutschlandfunk

"Sein aktuelles Quartett teilt seine hochsensible Wahrnehmung und mit ihr seinen Tiefsinn. Die Besetzung mit Dave Holland (b) und Django Bates (P) überschneidet sich mehrheitlich mit der 2018/19 tourenden ‘Blue Maqams’-Band, kommt aber ohne Schlagzeuger aus: An die Stelle von Jack DeJohnette tritt Anja Lechner. Die deutsche, international ensembleerfahrene Cellistin gibt sich von Anfang an als Kernmitglied zu erkennen. […] Ihr nuanciert phrasierendes, präsentes, aber irgendwo auftrumpfendes Cellospiel erscheint wie geschaffen, um Brahems Klangwelt gemeinsam mit den Mitmusikern im akustisch bewährten Auditorio Stelio Molo (RSI, Lugano) auszugestalten. Ähnliches gilt für Django Bates, der Pianist mischt substanziell Farben hinzu, ohne einen Hauptrolle zu übernehmen, ohne sich aber auch aus dem Spiel zu nehmen:  im Falle von ‘Awake’ tritt Bates zumindest vorübergehend in den Vordergrund. Gut erinnerlich meinte Brahem einmal gesprächsweise, dass ihm Dave Hollands Bassspiel Flügel verleihe. Dies wird bei dem aktuellen Album noch deutlicher als bei ‘Thimar’ oder bei ‘Blue Maqams’.  Besonders bei ‘The Eternal Olive Tree’ befeuern die beiden einander im eng verzahnten, ausnehmend virtuosen Duo. […] Brahem legt zusammen mit Lechner, Bates und Holland eine weitere Wegetappe in seinem Schaffen zurück und setzt einen Meilenstein, ohne sich neu erfinden zu müssen."    
Wolfgang Gratzer
Jazzpodium (‘Platte des Monats’)


"Gemeint sind Musikerinnen und Musiker, die auf sehr feine und zurückhaltende Art Klänge mit starker Substanz schaffen. Ein solcher Musiker ist auch der tunesische Oud-Spieler Anouar Brahem. Seit vielen Jahren lässt er aufhorchen mit ungewöhnlich filigran gearbeiteten Stücken, in denen sich sein nordafrikanisches Instrument zum Beispiel mit einem Konzertflügel trifft. In seiner jüngsten Aufnahme sind mit ihm der Pianist Django Bates, der Bassist Dave Holland und die Cellistin Anja Lechner zu hören – lauter international herausragende Gestalten. […] eine Musik, die getragen ist von starker Empathie in Zeiten großen menschlichen Leids an unterschiedlichen Orten der Welt.  […] Übrigens ist es das erste Mal, dass Anouar Brahem ein Cello in seine Musik integriert. Das Ergebnis ist eine sehr feine, reizvolle Kammermusik mit unterschiedlichsten Elementen, von der arabischen Musik über den Jazz bis hin zu Einflüssen aus der klassischen Musik Europas."
Roland Spiegel
Bayerischer Rundfunk
 

"In betörender Klangsinnlichkeit gelingt dem Quartett in elf Kompositionen Brahems ein beeindruckender Brückenschlag zwischen Kulturen und Kontinenten, Stilen und Stimmungen. Arabisch-maghrebinische Traditionen, europäischer Kammermusik-Gestus und jazzige Improvisation verbinden sich zur eigenständigen Kunstmusik."
Reinhold Unger
Münchner Merkur

"Eingespielt von einem internationalen Quartett, bestehend aus den beiden Engländern Dave Holland (Bass) und Django Bates (Piano), der deutschen Anja Lechner (Cello) und Brahem selbst, ist im schweizerischen Lugano eine Musik entstanden, die traditionelle arabische Musik, europäische Kammermusik, Improvisation und Individualität in sich vereint. Den vier Musikern gelingt es faszinierend ihre jeweiligen Identitäten zu erhalten und gemeinsam eine westöstliche Klangkultur zu entwickeln, die sich weitab aller stilistischen Eingrenzungen bewegt. Brahem hat in der Vergangenheit mit seinen Alben für ECM diesen enormen Spagat schon häufiger vollzogen. Ihm gelingt es dabei immer wieder, eine unruhige wie beruhigende Musikalität zu kreieren, die natürlich über reines Virtuosentum hinausgeht – obwohl alle vier Instrumentalisten sehr wohl hierzu in der Lage wären. […] Inhaltlich hat sich Anouar Brahem von Schmerz und Leid, aber auch von Hoffnung und Lebensbejahung leiten lassen. Kein Wirklichkeitspathos, stattdessen Tiefsinn, Melancholie und vibrierende Nachdenklichkeit. ‘After The Last Sky’ steht einerseits in einer Reihe von faszinierenden Brahem-Einspielungen der letzten Jahrzehnte und ist zugleich eine neuerliche, fortführende komplexer Klangerforschung – weitab kulturell einengender, wie ausgetretener Pfade. Hier wird alles evident Fremdartige zum zuversichtlich Vertrauten."
Jörg Konrad
Kultkomplott

"Aufgenommen wurden die Stücke von ‘After the Last Sky’ im Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, hier wurden sie auch phantastisch abgemischt: In jedem Moment ist ein wunderbarer Klang-Raum zu hören, der den Aufnahmen Tiefe und Seriosität verleiht. Das können die elegischen, melancholischen Kompositionen von Anouar Brahem gut gebrauchen – eine Musik, bei der die Intensität der Töne ebenso wichtig ist, wie die Stille zwischen den Klängen.  Das Spiel von Anouar Brahem und seinen drei Quartettkollegen zeichnet sich nicht durch billige Effekte oder Exotismen aus, sondern durch tiefgründige Überlegtheit: Weniger ist mehr, scheint die künstlerische Devise zu sein. Jeder Ton ist wohl überlegt, die Kraft, aus der die vier Musiker schöpfen, kommt aus einem langen Atem. Das macht das Album ‘After the Last Sky’ zu einem einzigartigen Hör-Erlebnis."
Ulrich Möller-Arnsberg
Bayerischer Rundfunk

"Anouar Brahem hat ‘After the Last Sky’ aufgenommen mit Anja Lechner am Cello, Django Bates am Klavier und Dave Holland am Bass – nie laut, nie wütend, auch nicht bitter – aber oft in seiner Intensität erschütternd – wenn man mich fragt, jetzt schon eins der Alben des Jahres."
Ralf Dorschel
Norddeutscher Rundfunk

5★ "Münchner Merkur" (Germany)

Platte des Monats (Record of the Month), "Digital Jazz Podium" (Germany)

Sélection albums (Albums' selection), "Le Monde" (France)

4★ "Télérama" (France)

4★ "Jazz Magazine" (France)

4★ "Mojo" (United Kingdom)

Recording of the week, "Presto Music" (United Kingdom)

4,5★ Editor’s choice, "Jazzwise" (United Kingdom)

5★ "Morning Star" (United Kingdom)

Eight years after Blue Maqams, Anouar Brahem returns with  a new project, and a programme of powerfully-moving pieces for oud, cello, piano and bass.

Asked about the nature of his artistic journey, Brahem has drawn analogies with the growth of a tree, its branches spreading out above ground, while roots dig ever deeper.  Over time and the course of a remarkable discography beginning with Barzakh, his music has become steadily more inclusive. While evoking the modes of Arab music as a primary resource, he has consistently sought in his work to engage with the wider world, finding inspiration in many idioms, including jazz improvisation, European classical music and contemporary composition, and shaping a highly personal music that could only have been created by him.

“Today, the sonic materials that seem particularly transformable and stimulating to me are those that combine tradition and modernity,” said Brahem recently. “For example, the Arabic maqams, which are at the heart of my musical identity, fascinate me with their melodic richness and their ability to integrate into contemporary musical contexts. They offer an infinite terrain for experimentation. I find it exciting to juxtapose these ancient modal structures with harmonic approaches from jazz, creating a dialogue between past and present, between cultures and styles.”

On After The Last Sky bassist Dave Holland and pianist Django Bates are again part of the Tunisian oud master’s international quartet, joined now by cellist Anja Lechner.  Brahem’s rapport with Holland – first established on the Thimar album of 1998 – is meanwhile legendary. “Dave’s playing gives me wings”, Anouar has said, an observation verified on the striking duo improvisation “The Eternal Olive Tree”.  Throughout the album, in fact, from the exploratory edges of “Endless Wandering”, a piece that vibrates with emotion,  to the driving propulsion of “Dancing Under the Meteorites”, Holland’s soulful bass impulses prompt some of Anouar’s most outstanding playing.  There is also a particular pleasure in hearing the combined sonorities of oud and bass and cello, warmly embraced in the responsive acoustics of the Lugano studio (where Brahem recorded Souvenance a decade ago).  The ensemble sound is exceptional.

The album marks the first time that Anouar has featured a cellist in his group music. Anja Lechner, who has the uncommon distinction of being a classical musician with much experience in improvisation, is effectively a leading voice in the recording. She has long been conversant with Anouar’s compositions and included some of them in her own recitals, and in work with Brahem-associated pianist François Couturier (see for instance the album Lontano). The cello is given the first and last statements on After The Last Sky. The album begins with “Remembering Hind” – played here by Lechner and Bates – music of mourning for a young victim of war. It ends with “Vague”, one of Anouar’s best-loved pieces (a composition he has recorded on Khomsa and Le Voyage de Sahar), its gentle buoyancy in this rendition like the lapping waters of the eastern Mediterranean.

As with Blue Maqams, Django Bates’ piano has an important, patiently-supportive role throughout. Bates, whose work elsewhere (see for instance The Study of Touch), may often prioritize swing and quick-witted dynamic contrasts, understands that an ongoing sense of flow is crucial to the development of Anouar’s music. Its effect is cumulative. Yet it also offers space for individual statements, and Django’s swirling and elegant solo on “Awake”, is the more potent for the restraint shown hitherto. 

"Where should we go after the last frontiers?/Where should the birds fly after the last sky?" – These lines of verse by Mahmoud Darwish provided a title, 40 years ago, for After The Last Sky, Edward Said’s meditation on exile and memory. In his liner notes, Adam Shatz considers Anouar Brahem’s music in the contexts of this aesthetic-literary continuum as well as the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights, a subject preoccupying Brahem’s mind during the preparation of material for the album. In this regard, track titles become pointers for the interested listener to consider. But, as Anouar also tells Shatz: “Music, and particularly instrumental music, is by nature an abstract language that does not convey explicit ideas. It is aimed more at emotions, sensations, and how it’s perceived varies from one person to another.  What may evoke sadness for one person may arose nostalgia for another… I invite listeners to project their own emotions, memories or imaginations, without trying to ‘direct’ them.”

After the Last Sky was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in May 2024, and produced by Manfred Eicher. 

While preparing the music for this album, the tragedy of Gaza was very much in my mind. After reading author Adam Shatz's previous writing on the subject, I invited him to contribute this essay.

Anouar Brahem

In the Presence of Absence

In 1991, Anouar Brahem released his first album on ECM, Barzakh, a trio featuring Brahem on oud, Béchir Selmi on violin, and Lassad Hosni on percussion. “Barzakh” –“separation” or “barrier” in Arabic – is a word rich in significations. In Islamic theology, it refers to the intermediate stage between death and resurrection, when the spirit is separated from the body. But within Sufism and other forms of mysticism for which Brahem feels an affinity, barzakh is a bridge between the material world and the spiritual world: a space of transit, a jumping-off point that initiates a process of becoming, transformation, and transcendence. Brahem has worked in this zone of metamorphosis throughout his career. Steeped in the musical traditions of the Arab world, he is in no way confined to them. His is an art of the in-between, an art of liminality rather than “fusion,” performed by musicians who practice a range of genres, yet who share a sense of complicity, of adventure, of attraction to the unknown. 

After the Last Sky, his 12^th album on ECM, has many of the signature features of Brahem’s work: elegance of articulation and structure; sensitivity to the silence between notes; a sense of searching and striving to overcome barriers; an oscillation between moods of melancholy and rapture. It is an unabashedly beautiful album, at once a sanctuary from, and a protest against, a world that has grown uglier, noisier, and more violent. As on his previous album, Blue Maqams, Brahem is joined by the bassist Dave Holland and the pianist Django Bates, the supplest of improvisers, each with decades of experience in advanced jazz. But there is also a new voice, hailing from the world of European classical music. It belongs to the cellist Anja Lechner, who infuses After the Last Sky with lithe lyricism. The music Brahem and his quartet make here reflects their distinctive personalities, the traditions that formed them. Barzakh is, once again, the place where they meet.

But the place of encounter is more sorrowful, more unsettled, this time around, because death feels more present than the promise of resurrection. Brahem finished composing the music on After the Last Sky in the summer of 2023, but by the time he recorded the album in May 2024, the Gaza Strip had been subject to one of the most merciless military campaigns in modern history, while the countries of the “civilized” West either looked away or abetted the slaughter. Horrified by the West’s indifference to Palestinian suffering, gripped by an overwhelming sense of anguish and urgency, Brahem reached what he calls “a breaking point,” and could no longer “perceive the world without the filter of this tragedy.” In the months that preceded the recording session, his mind turned inexorably to the people of Gaza and Palestine, and to a question that still plagues him: “What allows for this indifference?” 

In choosing song titles that evoke Palestinian experience, Brahem had no interest in instructing or preaching to listeners: aims utterly foreign to his delicate, elliptical sensibility. But neither could he pretend that his playing hadn’t been shaped by the fury, sorrow, and grief that Gaza provoked in him. It is too early to say whether this “quartet for the end of time” will be remembered as prefiguring the end of Gaza, or the end, at last, of Gaza’s suffering. But we can be sure that the album will always bear the imprint of its origins, of which it is a trace. “Music remembers us,” Jeremy Eichler writes in Time’s Echo, his haunting study of music written in the aftermath of the Holocaust. “Music reflects the individuals and the societies that create it, capturing something essential about the era of its birth. Memory resonates with the cadences, the revelations, the opacities, and the poignancies of music.”

On the morning that I first heard After the Last Sky, I had been listening to an interview with the Gazan journalist Rami Abu Jamous, who lives and works in a plastic tent in the coastal city of Deir Al-Balah. Things could be worse, he said: “To have a tent is practically a luxury in Gaza these days.” Abu Jamous and his family had been forcibly displaced twice since the war began: first from their neighborhood in northern Gaza, which the Israeli Army demolished within hours of their exodus; then from a temporary residence in Rafah, in southern Gaza, when the same scenario repeated itself. When the family’s tent was flooded in the autumn of 2024 and his son, who loves the rain, began to play, Abu Jamous continued to play with him, “so that he wouldn’t know we’d been flooded.” Each morning, if he has internet, he posts two messages on his WhatsApp group, “Gaza. Life”: “Hi friends” and “Still alive.” 

This has been “ordinary life” for the people of Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Israel responded to Hamas’s murderous attack by launching a war of devastating brutality that would ultimately acquire the dimensions of a genocidal campaign. Before October 7, it was almost impossible for Gaza’s besieged inhabitants to leave: a 17-year punitive blockade had made the territory the world’s largest “open-air prison.” Since October 7, it has been one of the world’s largest graveyards. More than 44,000 officially dead, the majority of them women and children – and possibly tens of thousands lying under the rubble. A resurgence of polio, widespread malnutrition, a growing famine. An epidemic of amputations, a generation of orphans. There is nowhere safe: not hospitals (most are destroyed or barely functional), not schools (more than 200 have been hit by airstrikes), not mosques, not even tents. People in Gaza know that every time they look up at the Israeli fighter jets circling over them, they might be seeing the sky for the last time. 

In his 1986 book After the Last Sky, Edward Said evoked Palestinian history, in musical terms, as a “counterpoint (if not a cacophony) of multiple, almost desperate dramas” with “no central image (exodus, holocaust, long march)…Without a center. Atonal.” In the last year, however, the desperate, contrapuntal dramas that have punctuated the lives of Palestinians since the loss of their homeland in 1948 have found a “center” in Gaza’s cruel and pitiless destruction. In early October 2024, ten days before he was burned alive in an Israeli strike while sheltering in a hospital in Deir Al Balah (the same city where the Abu Jamous family lives in their tent), Shaaban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old engineering student, posted an Instagram message about a friend who had just been killed in an Israeli strike on a mosque. “I’ve never felt anything more terrifying than the thought of the dead being absent,” Shaaban wrote. “The human mind, with all its brain cells and all of its capacity to absorb and to create, is helpless in the face of this absence.”

After the Last Sky was made in the shadow of this erasure: what the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called “the presence of absence.” Darwish’s phrase was intended to capture the spectral presence of Palestinians, their history and culture, in Israel. Today, talk of “absence” inevitably conjures the physical destruction of Gaza and its people. I spent many hours with Darwish, in his last years, in Paris and in Ramallah, and it seems to me that his spirit, as humane as it was radical, as well as that of his friend and comrade Edward Said, permeates Brahem’s album. The title is drawn from a question Darwish posed in one of his poems, one that has assumed even greater force since Gaza: “Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” It is hard enough to absorb the absence evoked by Shabaan and Darwish. It is still harder to imagine the “day after” Gaza, or the “day after” Lebanon, where Israeli bombardment has wreaked havoc once again; hard in fact to imagine a “day after” any of Israel’s wars, which promise never-ending torment for its neighbors and, above all, for the Palestinians. 

You might wonder what all this has to do with After the Last Sky, a work of instrumental music without words. The glory of music, formalists teach us, lies precisely in its pristine, non-referential nature, its transcendence of politics and history. Rest assured, formalists: After the Last Sky stands on its own as music. And while the music on this album grew out of his horror at the catastrophe in Gaza, Brahem, an oud player and composer, does not seek to foist his own interpretation on listeners. “Music, and particularly instrumental music, is by nature an abstract language that does not convey explicit ideas,” he told me. “It is aimed more at emotions, sensations, and how it’s perceived varies from one person to another. What may evoke sadness for one person may arouse nostalgia for another...I invite listeners to project their own emotions, memories or imaginations, without trying to ‘direct’ them.” 

After the Last Sky is in no way a didactic work of art and still less an anthemic expression of “protest.” You can choose to ignore the titles of the tracks, with their allusions to the orange grove and olive trees of Palestine, and to its literary chroniclers, Darwish and Said, and listen to After the Last Sky as a work of intricate chamber music for oud, piano, bass, and cello – which, of course, it is. But as with “Alabama,” John Coltrane’s harrowing elegy for the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of a Black Church by white supremacists, or Quartet for the End of Time, composed by Olivier Messiaen in a German prisoner of war camp, your experience of Brahem’s album can only be enhanced by an awareness of the events that brought it into being.

Brahem is Tunisian, not Palestinian, but he is no stranger to the tragedy of the Palestinian people. Born in 1957, a year after Tunisia achieved independence, “I grew up in a country that had experienced colonization, which naturally aroused my interest in situations of occupation, and, in particular, the Palestinian cause.” In 1982, after being driven out of Lebanon by Israeli forces, the PLO found a refuge in Tunis. (A precarious one: in 1985, Israel bombed its headquarters; three years later, it assassinated one of the PLO’s most respected leaders in Tunis, Khalid al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad.) As a young musician in Tunis, Brahem befriended Palestinian intellectuals, artists, and musicians, and deepened his knowledge of the Palestine question. He read the work of Israel’s “new historians,” who dismantled the state’s foundational myths; studied the “dynamics of cultural domination” revealed by Said’s Orientalism; and discovered Darwish’s poetry, which left such a deep impression that he would later compose a tribute to him, The Astounding Eyes of Rita.^[1]

What Brahem found especially moving and suggestive about Darwish’s poetry was (in his words) the way it moves “between the intimate and the universal.” It’s a description that applies with no less force to Brahem’s music. His relationship to Arabic tradition is one of poetic, not literal, allegiance: despite his formidable knowledge of the maqamat, an ornate system of melodic modes that anchors Arabic music, Brahem seldom bases his improvisations directly on the maqams. Though evocative of Arabic traditions, his work also draws upon European classical music, jazz, tango, and other styles. Like Darwish’s “lyric epic” verse, Brahem’s musical language is elegaic and sensuous, steering clear of declamatory affirmations in favor of undertones and whispers. While he is an heir of Arab musicians like Munir Bashir, the Iraqi “emir of the oud,” he also has much in common with free-thinking jazz musicians who crisscrossed musical geographies and found inspiration in non-Western musical genres, like Don Cherry and Charlie Haden. To listen to Brahem’s music is to experience something Haden called “closeness,” the sound of like-minded musicians forging an even deeper, ever more intimate relationship among themselves. 

On After the Last Sky, that closeness – a fragile, constantly renewed conversation that grows out of trust and a shared project – feels particularly pointed, perhaps because it is the antithesis of the logic of violence, separation, and destruction to which the album is a response (however oblique). Listen to the way Django Bates mimics Brahem’s phrasing on piano on “Never Forget”; or to the drone of Anja Lechner’s cello beneath Bates’s piano and Dave Holland’s bass on “Endless Wandering”; or to Holland’s heartbeat-like notes behind Brahem on “The Sweet Oranges of Jaffa.” Among the album’s many pleasures are the shifting configurations of the four instruments, as they venture into what Brahem describes as his preferred territory: “the unknown.” The music is full of subtle surprises – perhaps the most enchanting being the presence of Lechner’s cello. This is the first time Brahem has featured a cellist on one of his albums, and, as much as Brahem himself, Lechner—an ECM artist with whom he’d long hoped to work—is the album’s principal voice. 

After the Last Sky has arresting passages of dissonance – the longest track, “Endless Wandering,” is a turbulent evocation of the peripatetic lives of Palestinians expelled from their homeland – but Brahem largely works in the lyrical and mellifluous register characteristic of his work. Is there something suspect, even something ethically wrong, about creating art of such seductive and disarming beauty in the wake of such destruction? The German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno is famous for having said that after Auschwitz it was no longer possible to write poetry. But in 1962 Adorno revised his imposing maxim. Precisely because the “world has outlived its own demise,” he argued, “it needs art as its unconscious chronicle.” Brahem’s album is not simply a chronicle of Gaza’s destruction; by its very existence, it offers an indictment of the “rules-based order” that has allowed this barbarism to happen. 

Much of the music on this album is mournful, and it could hardly be otherwise. “The language of despair is poetically stronger than that of hope,” Darwish writes, because it brings the artist “closer to God, to the essence of things, to the first poetic word,” to an “almost absolute solitude in the land of exile.” But After the Last Sky is also a celebration of the lives Palestinians have forged, and continue to forge, in the most unforgiving of conditions. To listen to “Dancing under the Meteorites,” a breathless, tango-like piece in which Lechner creates mesmerizing sul ponticello effects, is to hear the spirit of resilience and resistance in Palestine, the ethos of sumud that enables a man whose house is being flooded to continue playing with his son – and to remain on his land even as it is being devastated by one of the world’s most powerful armies, with the backing (and the arms) of the world’s greatest superpower. 

The theme of Palestine, Darwish writes, is “both a call and a promise of freedom.” After the Last Sky reverberates with this call, and this promise, to which millions of people throughout the world have rallied in demonstrations over the last year, insisting that their future, the future of humanity, is inextricably tied to the fate of Gaza and of Palestine. “Reducing this conflict to a simple opposition between Jews and Muslims is unbearable to me,” Brahem told me. “The real barriers are neither religious or cultural, but rather result from a growing separation between those who denounce injustice and those who choose to remain indifferent.” The barrier between opposing cruelty and looking away from it (or explaining it away) is in no way confined to Israel/Palestine itself; it exists in every country, even in every heart. Listening to this profoundly stirring work of remembrance, homage, and defiance, I found myself thinking of an ECM classic, the 1982 suite TheBallad of the Fallen, a tribute by Charlie Haden and his Liberation Music Orchestra to the people of Central America, made as a protest against Washington’s support for the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. This, too, is a “ballad of the fallen,” a tribute to an oppressed people that is neither a requiem nor an act of surrender but rather a work of “liberation music.”  After the last sky, after the ruins of Gaza, Brahem and his ensemble imagine a future of Palestinian freedom – the day when, as Darwish writes, “our blood will plant its olive tree.”

Adam Shatz

[1] The writing of the music for The Astounding Eyes of Rita was interrupted by Israel’s 2006 war with Hizbullah in Lebanon, which left well over a thousand dead, many of them civilians, and devastated large parts of the country. “I couldn’t return to music as if nothing had happened,” so the day after the Beirut Airport reopened, he flew to Lebanon to interview some of its leading intellectuals, journalists and artists. Set to his own music and released in 2007, Brahem’s documentary, Mots d’après la guerre, has acquired a newfound pertinence since Israel’s most recent war on Lebanon began.