Maurice Louca – Saet El Hazz (The Luck Hour) (2021) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Maurice Louca – Saet El Hazz (The Luck Hour) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 38:02 minutes | 756 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Northern Spy Records

Maurice Louca, one of the most gifted musicians and composers on Egypt’s thriving underground music scene, announces his new album Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour), to be released September 24, 2021 via Sub Rosa and Northern Spy.

The forthcoming full-length album draws voraciously on Arabic music, psychedelic folk, and free improv and the lead single “Bidayat (Holocene)” mesmerises with a feral groove centered around percussion, guitar and violin.

The title Saet el Hazz is a coded saying in Egypt to refer to a good time and usually implies a great deal of debauchery. “When you mention to someone that you’ve had a saet hazz, there are no questions asked. It is what it is.”

The initial spark for Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour) was Louca’s desire to collaborate with “A” Trio, the Lebanese improvisational group featuring Mazen Kerbaj on prepared trumpet, Sharif Sehnaoui on prepared guitar, and Raed Yassin on prepared double bass. “When the three of them come together they create a sonic cosmos entirely their own. I started by composing music that I wanted to have exist within this sonic world— at times in harmony, or clashing with it, and all the emotional ranges in between.”

Just as “A” Trio served as the spark, a commission from Mophradat, an arts organization based out of Brussels, was the tinder. The commission was for a new composition to be performed using instruments that Louca would modify to play microtonally. This led him to Turkey and Indonesia. In Istanbul, he worked with a Lutheran to custom-make a guitar. In Surakarta, he ended up with an instrument maker tuning a Serang—referred to as the Indonesian xylophone, part of the family of Gamelan tuned percussion instruments.

These new modified instruments opened up the compositions to new tonal possibilities which drove Louca to expand his line up to include Khaled Yassine, a longtime collaborator and versatile percussionist and drummer, Christine Kazaryan, a dynamic harpist whom he met via Praed Orchestra, and Anthea Caddy, a cellist who came highly recommended from the Berlin free improv scene.

“There is something about linking luck to decadence that resonates with me, and even if I can’t fully articulate it in words, the drive behind the music of this album and how it came to be, and the energy between us at the studio rehearsing and recording it, was in a lot of ways for me a saet hazz.”

Saet El Hazz (The Luck Hour) is a long form composition of six movements, recorded over the course of a week in August 2019 at A/B studios in Brussels.Egyptian guitarist Maurice Louca has, with Saet El-Hazz, produced a dizzying, consequential, and ultimately unclassifiable piece of work. With roots thrust deep into multiple soils—free jazz, contemporary electro-acoustic composition, traditional Middle Eastern musical forms—this is a dense and complex piece that is occasionally difficult, but consistently dynamic. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes long, Saet El-Hazz is a single piece, divided into six movements and highly improvised, with Louca working alongside two core groups of gifted musicians. One is the Lebanese “A” Trio, renowned for their improvisational skills on prepared instruments (trumpet, guitar, double bass). The other—playing percussion, cello, and harp—is a bespoke group of collaborators Louca put together specifically for this project. These seven players gel seamlessly throughout the piece’s six movements, from the opening intensity and sonic chaos of “El-Fazza’ah (The Slip and Slide)” through more hypnotic and occasionally pastoral moments like “Higamah (Hirudinea),” blurring the line between forcefulness and introspection. Throughout, Saet El-Hazz alternates between feeling like a one-take improv explosion and an intricately composed and meticulously constructed masterwork; in the end, it is both and neither. When the players start firing on all cylinders, as on “Yara’ (Fire Flies),” the emotional intensity can be a bit overwhelming; it’s noisy and free, but deeply engaging and welcoming. Although Louca is certainly known for being a talented guitarist, his role here seems more like a curator or conductor. Even on a track like “El-Gullashah (Foul Tongue),” where his delicate playing seems to be the focal point, it ultimately is rendered into a cyclical loop to support an improvisational tour de force from guest saxophonist Devin Brahja. This happens throughout the album; motion and momentum imperceptibly shift the mood and texture of the piece, so while a piece like “El Fazaa’ah” may start off sounding like a chaotic barrage of electronic industrial ambience, it winds up being a much more beautiful and sturdy piece of acoustic musicianship. As a whole the listener is taken on a similarly rich voyage, one that’s insistent and dissonant one moment, hypnotic and introspective the next. A truly impressive feat. – Jason Ferguson

Tracklist:

1-1. Maurice Louca – El-Fazza’ah (The Slip and Slide) (10:21)
1-2. Maurice Louca – Bidayat (Holocene) (04:23)
1-3. Maurice Louca – Yara’ (Fire Flies) (04:19)
1-4. Maurice Louca – Saet El Hazz (The Luck Hour) (08:31)
1-5. Maurice Louca – El-Gullashah (Foul Tongue) (04:16)
1-6. Maurice Louca – Higamah (Hirudinea) (06:11)

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