Doors 7:30 PM, Music 8:15 PM – 1 set of music
Line-up:
Nikki Yeoh -Piano
Demi Garcia Sabat- Percussion
Shirley Smart -Cello
With special guest Stuart Hall – Double Bass, Oud and Violin
About
Nikki Yeoh celebrates the music of French Algerian Jewish Composer Maurice El Medioni interpreter of Andalusian, Rai, Sephardic and Arabic music with a new band “Cafè Oran”
The concert will be focused on the music of Maurice El Medioni especially arranged for the trio additional compositions by Nikki Yeoh as contrasting works.
Médioni was born in1928, taught himself the piano at an early age and frequented Oran‘s American bars in the 1940s. His big loves were boogie-woogie and Cuban music, and his style is born of the fusing of these distinct influences with Arabic music. The piano is, of course, a European instrument, but in Médioni‘s the melodies take on a middle eastern character, subtly decorated and turning round on themselves in modal arabesques.”
Cafè Oran was initiated following a performance of two of Maurice’s compositions at the launch of the Max Reinhart-edited autobiography Maurice El Médioni — A Memoir: From Oran to Marseilles at Steinway Hall in 2017.
Subsequently Nikki was asked to present a full concert of music at Ronnie Scotts international Piano trio festival in 2019.
“By the evening’s final cavort, this intriguing project had captured Médioni’s music with a joyful and contemporary spirit.” – Mike Hobart, Financial Times, August 2019
“A piano trio but not as you know it Jim – cello, plucked and bowed, rather than bass, a sprawl of percussion rather than conventional kit and fittingly given the unusual small group format there was a lot of beyond the blue horizon thinking too from …” Stephen Graham -Marlbank – full review
Photo credit: Nick White