Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian pianist who fused Jewish and Arab musical traditions right into a singular model he known as “Pianoriental,” died on March 25 in Israel. He was 95.
His demise, at a nursing residence in Herzliya, on Israel’s central coast, was confirmed by his supervisor, Yvonne Kahan.
Mr. Medioni was a final consultant of a as soon as vibrant Jewish-Arab musical tradition that flourished in North Africa earlier than and after World Struggle II and proudly drew from each heritages.
In Oran, the Algerian port the place he was born, he was wanted by Arabs and Jews alike to play at weddings and at banquets, within the years between the conflict and 1961, when the specter of violence and Algeria’s new independence from France drove Mr. Medioni and hundreds of different Jews to flee.
Together with his bounding octaves, his quasi-microtonal shifts within the model of conventional Arab music, his cheeky rumba rhythms realized from American G.I.s after the 1942 Allied invasion and his roots within the Jewish-Arab musical heritage known as andalous, Mr. Medioni had honed a particular piano model by his early 20s. The singers he accompanied typically alternated phrases in French and Arabic in a mode generally known as “Françarabe.” His uncle Messaoud El Medioni was the well-known musician generally known as Saoud L’Oranais, a number one practitioner of andalous who was deported by the Germans to the Sobibor demise camp in 1943.
The Medioni model remained buried and practically forgotten for 4 many years as he pursued his commerce as a males’s tailor. He saved it alive in non-public, acting at weddings and bar mitzvahs after he was pressured to flee to France, till he launched a breakthrough album, “Café Oran,” in 1996 on the age of 68. That led to a belated second life as a star of so-called world music — live performance excursions in Europe, appearances in documentary movies and a significant function as mentor to a brand new era of Israeli musicians anxious to recuperate the musical heritage of their Sephardic heritage. In 2017, he revealed an autobiography, “A Memoir: From Oran to Marseilles (1938-1992),” which reproduces Mr. Medioni’s cursive scrawl, with a translation from the French.
Mr. Medioni has “come to represent one thing, the final of his era,” stated Christopher Silver, a specialist within the Jewish musical custom of North Africa, who teaches at McGill College.
“Maurice is a compulsive and innately hip musician, at all times looking for different music and musical kinds,” the British radio broadcaster Max Reinhardt wrote within the introduction to the memoir, “a part of a gaggle of Muslim and Jewish musicians who fairly naturally within the Forties and ’50s cast a brand new music collectively in North Africa.”
Two occasions have been decisive within the shaping of Pianoriental, and each occurred early within the lifetime of Mr. Medioni, who grew up poor — “one shared bathroom for our complete flooring on which there have been six flats,” Mr. Médioni wrote in his memoir — in Oran’s Jewish quarter, or “Derb.”
The primary was his encounter with the American G.I.s in occupied Oran on Nov. 8, 1942, when he was 14. “From the second the Yanks arrived in Oran, our household’s lifestyle fully modified,” Mr. Medioni wrote. The G.I.s launched him to a rollicking boogie-woogie model that pushed the French pop songs on which he had been raised to the background.
The road-smart younger teenager shortly turned indispensable to the Individuals, taking them to bars and brothels. “I might crisscross the 9 piano bars,” Mr. Medioni advised an interviewer in 2015. “When one of many pianos was free, I might play all of the American hits which I’d realized, and that will entice the G.I.s.” He recalled being awed by the Black American jazz musicians that he noticed carry out: “I noticed them improvise. I used to be open-mouthed,” he stated. “After I got here residence I might attempt to reproduce what they did.”
The second decisive occasion occurred in 1947 when three younger Arab musicians walked right into a bar the place he was ingesting, and so they all started to sing and play collectively. “That was how the primary trendy Arabic music group was born, a gaggle which might make me the most well-liked Jewish man amongst all of the Muslims in the entire Orani province,” he wrote in his memoir. Mr. Medioni’s synthesis of jazz, boogie-woogie, andalous and Arab rai and chaabi, two types of Algerian in style music from the streets, in some circumstances characterised by prolonged narrative track, was born.
“There are few figures which are making an attempt to play this oriental piano,” stated Mr. Silver. “Medioni is doing it very effectively, with the left hand and the proper hand. He’s making an attempt to replace, modernize, and nonetheless have it’s oriental or Arab music.”
Maurice El Medioni was born on Oct. 18, 1928, in Oran, in what was then French Algeria, to Jacob Medioni, who ran the Café Saoud together with his brother Messaoud, and Fany Medioni. His father died when he was 7, leaving his mom in poverty to boost 4 kids — three boys and a lady.
His musical presents have been obvious early; virtually completely self-taught, he honed his abilities on a piano that his brother introduced residence from a flea market. The conflict intensified the household’s hardship, and all of the Jewish kids have been expelled from Oran’s colleges by the French authorities. “We have been wanting every thing,” Mr. Medioni wrote.
The invasion of the Individuals in 1942 was “a deliverance for all of the Jews of North Africa,” he wrote. And by the mid-Nineteen Fifties, he was not solely a profitable tailor amongst Oran’s Muslims but in addition a a lot sought-after musician, as was his brother Alex: “All of the Arab orchestras wished to work with me,” he wrote. “‘These are our guys,’ is what they used to say.”
However as Algeria’s conflict of independence intensified, one in every of his unique Arab music companions was shot by Algerian revolutionaries, and Mr. Medioni stopped enjoying at Arab celebrations.
Within the spring of 1961, he and his younger household boarded a ship for Israel, then left six months later for France. Years of wrestle adopted, as he established tailor outlets, first in Paris, then in Marseille. However he continued to play at weddings and galas with stars from the Jewish-Arab North African music scene that had existed earlier than the conflict and was now transplanted to France. They included Lili Boniche, Line Monty, Reinette l’Oranaise and Samy Elmaghribi.
On the finish of the Nineteen Eighties Mr. Medioni recorded himself on a cassette in his front room in Marseille and despatched it to a producer at Buda Musique, a specialist document label in Paris. That was the start of his revival. After the “Café Oran” document, there was a live performance on the Barbican in London in 2000 with Mr. Boniche; a tour with a widely known British Klezmer band, Oi Va Voi; and an album with a Cuban percussionist in New York, Roberto Rodriguez. He performed a number one function in “El Gusto,” a 2012 documentary and album venture concerning the reunion of an orchestra of older Jewish and Arab musicians from Algeria.
In 2011 he moved to Israel from Marseille together with his spouse, Juliette (Amsellem) Medioni, to be near his kids. He continued to document and carry out, notably with the Mediterranean-Andalusian Orchestra Ashkelon.
His spouse died in 2022. He’s survived by his kids, Yacov, Marilyne and Michael, and 5 grandchildren.
Mr. Medioni was acutely conscious that he may very effectively have been the final of his breed. In a 2003 interview within the appendix of his memoir, he advised the British musician Jonathan Walton that he doubted andalous would survive him.
“It received’t,” he recalled saying. “Maurice Medioni is telling you that it received’t. It should solely be listened to every so often by individuals who have some nostalgia, and by children who love their dad and mom.”
