Driss El Maloumi: A Beginner's Guide

With its intricately carved sound hole, the oud – a short-necked, fretless, pear-shaped lute – is the most emblematic instrument of the Middle East and North Africa, and ranking high on the list of the instrument’s greatest players is Driss El Maloumi.

Born into a Berber family in Agadir, Morocco in 1970, Maloumi has always embraced his North African-Arab Andalusian roots, yet a large part of his success stems from the fact that he has a dual sensibility for both classical Arabic and Western classical music.

As a youngster Maloumi would craft his own instruments, using pieces of wood for the neck and bicycle brake cables for strings. It was, he says, his first introduction to trying to understand tones, semi-tones, construction of phrases and how to co-ordinate the left and right hand. Although Maloumi’s primary studies were in Arabic literature, he combined this with music at the National Conservatoire in Rabat where he regularly won prizes. There was, he says, no particular reason why he started playing the oud over any other instrument, but when he did, the connection was instant: “The oud is like a real friend for me, I don’t have any secrets from it. It gives me [a] sense of inner equilibrium.”

There have been plenty of inspirational oud players over the years, among them the Lebanese Marcel Khalife, Tunisia’s Anouar Brahem, the late Moroccan player Said Chraibi, and of course the great Iraqi oud player, Mounir Bashir. “He was extraordinary,” says Maloumi. “He touched me the most. I adored the way he would use his right hand and his way with silence and how he’d work the idea of meditation and rest into his music.”

Growing up, Maloumi would avidly listen to the radio and cassettes, in particular the music of Bob Marley, Ravi Shankar, Hariprasad Chaurasia and Ali Farka Touré. “I was gourmand, I still am!” he says. “I love listening to all sorts of music, as it gives me the strength to reinvent myself and not stagnate in just one style.”

This insatiable musical curiosity has certainly been evident in his choice of collaborators; over two decades he’s played with an impressive cast of international musicians including Debashish Bhattacharya, Françoise Atlan and Paolo Fresu. One of the artists who has been most influential is the musician and composer Jordi Savall and his early music ensemble Hespèrion XXI. “My meeting with the Catalonian maestro was a determining factor in my career,” Maloumi told Songlines in #136 (April 2018). “There are people you meet in your life who leave their footprint, who inspire you to change your conception, your vision of things. Jordi is one of those.” Maloumi has featured on numerous albums from Savall and Hespèrion XXI, including Istanbul (Alia Vox, 2009), Orient-Occident II, Hommage à la Syrie (Alia Vox, 2013) and The Routes of Slavery 1444-1888 (2017).

For most of Maloumi’s career, he’s worked with two superb percussionists: his younger brother Saïd El Maloumi and Lahoucine Baqir, with whom he has been playing for around 25 years: “He’s a friend, practically a brother,” Maloumi says. “He’s accompanied me across five continents and in almost all my projects.”

Besides this long-standing trio, Maloumi has another ongoing and highly-acclaimed partnership with Ballaké Sissoko and Rajery called 3MA – the name corresponding to the countries they are from: Morocco, Mali and Madagascar. Their collaboration began when Rajery and Maloumi met by chance in 2006 in Agadir and decided their instruments would combine well with the kora, at which point Ballaké Sissoko joined them for an artist residency at the French Institute in Madagascar. Their debut album 3MA: Madagascar, Mali, Maroc was recorded in La Réunion and released in 2008 on the Belgian label Contre-Jour. Following its success, the trio toured extensively and finally reconvened almost a decade later to record a follow-up: Anarouz. Shortly after its release, the trio performed a memorable concert at Songlines Encounters Festival in 2018.

Throughout his career, Maloumi has played everywhere from the Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo, Norway’s Førde Festival, a WOMEX showcase in Santiago de Compostela in 2014 and in 2017 at the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture. Besides all the touring and recording, Maloumi is also the director of the Music Conservatoire in Agadir, with which he’s had a long relationship – initially as a student, then as a teacher and since 2010 as their music director. “It’s like my little nest,” he says. “It’s here that I started as a student, where I learned about harmony and chords. It’s like my second home.”

Driss El Maloumi’s most recent undertaking is the fulfilment of a life-long dream – a live orchestral project with his trio called Tafassil (Details in Arabic). From a young age, Maloumi would listen to film orchestras and be fascinated with this world, always wondering how the oud would sound next to the first and second violins, the double bass, woodwind and brass instruments. Over the years he’s delved into the theatre and film world, including writing scores for La Source des Femmes and Le Maroc Vu du Ciel (by Yann-Arthus Bertrand). Tafassil is the culmination of two years of writing his own compositions and working with Spanish artist Javier Blanco, who did the orchestral arrangements. It premiered with the Tonkünstler Orchester at the Musikverein in Vienna in November 2023. As Maloumi says, he’s always longed to contribute to this meeting of Oriental and Western musical styles, so to be surrounded by all these instruments is like a sonic paradise.

Besides these live orchestral performances, he’s recorded an album called Details with his percussion trio and a string ensemble from Brussels, the Watar Quintet. The pieces are Maloumi’s observations about the small everyday habits that are so crucial to our lives. As he says, “Details is a musical reflection on the sensations of joy, pain, hope, gratitude, tenderness, contemplation, grief, sorrow, and relationships with others, the dimension of the self, wonder… This is how I like music, or rather how I perceive it.”

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today