Obituary: Maurice El Médioni (1928-2024)

Maurice El Médioni was a shape-shifting irrepressible force. A sharply dressed streetwise teenager who learned boogie-woogie and mambo bass lines from the US GIs who came to liberate Oran and Algeria from the threat of Nazi forces in WWII. An in-demand piano player who played ‘mambo in an Andalous style’; one of a group of Muslim and Jewish musicians including El Anka, Lili Boniche, Line Monty and Lili Labassi who, in the late 1940s and 50s, forged a new Maghrebi music together in North Africa. An exile who fled the horrors of the Algerian War of Independence with his family, eventually to Paris, where exiled Algerians flocked to see artists from their old country on a thriving cabaret circuit. 

But it was the Piranha label’s Cafè Oran album (1996) that opened the doors for many of us and kicked off the truly international career of this charming, innately hip, compulsive musician, then in his 70s but still hungry for new musical adventures. One of the triumphs of these years of appearing in concert halls across the world was his 2006 release on Piranha, Descarga Oriental. His collaborator, New York-based Cuban percussionist and band leader Roberto Rodriguez described Maurice as ‘...such a master and a true original which is something so often missing in the world today. He doesn’t read a note of music, but like Arsenio Rodriguez, he plays from the heart.’ The next year, Maurice and Roberto deservedly received the Culture Crossing award at the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards.

In 2007 there was also a potent glimpse of the golden age of 50s Algerian chaabi music when the El Gusto orchestra – reformed for a chaabi documentary – toured Europe. At their soundcheck in Marseille, when Maurice began to solo, I witnessed the entire Algerian percussion section, average age probably around 30, stand up and film him on their mobile phones. The exile had remained a legend in his homeland, 55 years after his departure! 

In 2011, at age 83, he moved from Marseille to live close to his children in Israel, to cope with the slings and arrows that advancing years deliver. In his first few years there, he played concerts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with the Mediterranean-Andalusian Orchestra Ashkelon led by Tom Cohen. His last live appearance in the UK was at Casablanca Evening at London’s V & A Museum in 2012, part of an annual festival celebrating the work of refugee artists. His health increasingly prevented him from travelling great distances and, in 2021, Maurice and his beloved wife Juliette (plus piano of course) moved to an old age home, with Juliette passing in 2022. 

Ben Mandelson, legendary producer of Maurice’s recordings for Piranha, has written of how the El Médioni stylings have opened the ears and hands of younger pianists: long, decorated, modal lines in double octaves; the Mediterranean touch and Mediterranean world-voice; the open, modular solo passages that start when they start, end when they end, and are governed by the El Médioni logic. His PianOriental school lives on in the work of musicians like Nikki Yeo, Faraj Suleiman and Darya Mosenzon and, who knows, in the hands of future generations yet to take to the keyboard, Inshallah. Long may his music be around us, along with the memory of a genial, joyous spirit who achieved so much for so long, despite all the disadvantages and dangers with which he was confronted.

Lemez Lovas, founder and bandleader of Oi Va Voi, adds: “There are some people whose life story seems to define the 20th century. Thanks to Josephine at DashArts, my band Oi Va Voi toured with Maurice in 2002-3. To a young musician, Maurice was an agent of history: each melody under his fingers, each story from his lips straddled multiple worlds, cultures and epochs. Everyone was under his spell – at London’s Momo restaurant, chefs would emerge with dishes for ya maalem, on the house bien sûr, bashfully requesting a photograph. A unique musician with a big heart, Maurice may have left us, but the influence of his art is only growing.”

Maurice El Médioni: A Memoir From Oran To Marseilles 1938-1992 was published by Repeater Books in 2017. Translated from the French by Jonathan Walton and edited by Max Reinhardt, the book tells the story of Maurice, considered to be one of the key artists in the development of Algerian chaabi and rai music. Every page of his original handwritten diary appears in the book, along with Jonathan’s detailed interview with him from 2003 when his later career was at its zenith in a thriving era for world music.