Salhi

Imed Alibi is a France-based Tunisian percussionist who likes to take risks. His 2015 debut, Safar, saw him playing alongside a Brazilian percussionist and enlisting the services of polymath producer Justin Adams. Also playing on that record was the French jazz trumpeter Michel Marre, and the pair are reunited here in a trio with Sufi singer Mounir Troudi.

In comparison to Alibi's last album, this is a much sparser, more elegant and meditative affair. The title, Salhi, refers to a Tunisian musical form closely related to other Berber folk styles, one deeply immersed in the mystical Sufi tradition. Considering that Troudi hails from the town of El Kef, near the Algerian border, this is no surprise. El Kef houses the mausoleum of Sidi Bou Makhlouf, the man who brought Aissawa Sufism to Tunisia. It is a centre for the salhi musical form.

The reflective tone of the album only picks up into something closer to a Sufi trance-like rhythm on the final track, ‘Chiraz’. For the most part, the languid poetic airs of Troudi weave with mournful trumpet lines and Alibi's delicate percussion. The resulting whole has all the wide-open space and the background silence of the great tablelands and plains of North Africa.