Moonshine

Initially a pioneer in electronic dance music with a specific Egyptian flavour, culminating in a perfect synthesis with shaabi and maghraganat (two types of highly danceable music that are popular among the lesser privileged masses of Egypt) on his album Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan(Salute the Parrot), Maurice Louca has more and more moved into experimental collaborations, for instance with Maryam Saleh and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh on the brilliant Lekhfa, and with singer/performer Nadah El Shazly, and with people from the Lebanese free jazz-scene on Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour).

A free jazz/art rock approach continues to be his approach on this new album. The album’s press materials cite as similar artists 80s art-rockers the Sun City Girls, Nadah El Shazly, American-Indian performer Amirtha Kidambi, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, and the legendary Sunil Ganguly, who popularised the knee-top Hawaiian slide-guitar in Indian music, an instrument that Louca uses in the composition ‘Moonshine Part III’. I myself can’t help but think of Sun Ra, as well as Frank Zappa in his Hot Rats era, in Louca’s ‘Moonshine Part II’.

Apart from the three-part Moonshine Suite a pivotal track is ‘Achilles Heel’ (in this case certainly not the album’s Achilles heel), in which each artist contributes in their own way to a coherent 12-minute symphony. Just the delicate opening solo on an instrument as un-romantic as the tuba is worth the album alone. When after that the saxophone takes the lead, it becomes clear why the album’s creators name Eric Dolphy as one of their sources.