Creative, unconventional, passionate, full of intrigue, defiance, love, desire, and hope. This is Bachar Mar Khalife a French-Lebanese singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist.
Since he graduated from the Conservatory of Paris, he has worked with conductors Lorin Maazel, James Gaffigan, the Orchestre National de France and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. He has collaborated on many projects that fuse jazz, world music, electronic and hip-hop.
He explores a repertoire of traditional songs, which he appropriates in his own way, accompanied by his piano. Tenderly, gently, he releases his words and his energy, to shape his own scores on a heady and poetic music.
On his third album, “Ya Balad” (‘O Homeland’), the singer tells us of his lost proximity to his native country. He talks about the nostalgia that connects him to his roots and the loss of memory leading him onto a path of peregrination. The country itself has been driven into exile, expelled by a nationalistic (sectarian) conception of governance. Landscapes have been replaced by maps, the horizon by frontiers, songs by national hymns, the truth of voices by the fallacies of the bugle call. Thus, unfolds the tragedy of a country that is at the crossroads of civilisations but whose limitations are becoming apparent to its children. They find themselves cut off from the fundamental way in which one interacts with the world: language.
Mixing piano, harpsichord, percussion, drums, synthesizers, melodica and nay, this third album attempts to reconcile the musical path Bachar has taken (percussion and the piano) and uses his singing in Arabic as his central means of expression.
Bachar has released two previous albums for InFiné, “Oil Slick” in 2010 and “Who`s Gonna Get The Ball” in 2013. He’s composed soundtracks for various films such as Layla Fourie, directed by Pia Marais and praised in 2013 Berlinale, as well as Fièvres by Hicham Ayouch praised in 2015 Fespaco.