The famous trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf celebrates Christmas in a double album, “First Noel” by orchestrating the great standards of these end-of-year celebrations.

An album that celebrates Christmas and family

In this new album, The Last Christmas Eve is an unreleased track composed by the musician in tribute to his grandmother. “I always thought that it was wonderful music, and that we had to find the beauty of these melodies and harmonize them my way,” says Ibrahim Maalouf. Ibrahim Maalouf therefore addresses the theme of Christmas, but also of the family. He recorded some of his pieces in one of the oldest churches in Paris, where his father was sacristan in the 1960s. A father for whom Christmas should be celebrated with modesty. “My father told us about our cousins, our brothers and sisters who lived at the time in Lebanon under the bombs . All my childhood there was a feeling of guilt, of how we can have Christmas without feel guilty “, explains the musician. 25 great classics and three new compositions that Ibrahim Maalou plays on tour, and played yesterday at the Zénith of Paris.

Obssessed with the World Trade Center

Gifted at the trumpet, the young Ibrahim nonetheless dreams of a different path from the one his father gave him. “From middle school I was obsessed with the World Trade Center. The twin towers were posted in my room, drawn on my notebooks. I wanted to do the same in Beirut since I made it easy to rebuild my hometown. “On September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers collapsed, he decided he would not be an architect. He is 19 years old. Six months later, he goes to Ground Zero. The same year, he meets Vincent Segal. The cellist opens the doors to jazz, improv, rap and rock. He introduced him to Matthieu Chédid or the Montreal singer Lhasa de Sela, a major influence. “Thanks to Vincent, I discovered that music is more than a series of competitions. I started to compose, to discover freedom. ” Ibrahim Maalouf has since become the only trumpeter in the world to play Arabic music with the “quarter-tone trumpet”, invented by his father in the 1960s. Ibrahim is also a winner of the world’s largest classical trumpet competitions. In July 2010, he received the Victoire for instrumental revelation of the year (Frank Ténot prize) [1] at the Victoires du Jazz, in Juan-les-Pins.