Alla(II)
- Composer
Alla, real name Abdellaziz Abdallah Ben Embarek, is an Algerian musician born June 15, 1946 in Béchar (Algeria). Musician, composer, he has enhanced traditional Algerian Sahrawi music and its genre Foundou to give it a universal dimension.
Son of Abdelaziz Embarek from Taghit (south-east of Béchar), and a mother from Tafilalet, south-east of Morocco. Last of a family of 12 children, he left school at the age of 15 to start a fairly hard professional life, he began by working as a simple electrician then a baker before opening his own furniture store in 1986. At the age of 16 he made his own makeshift lute out of a can, a piece of wood as a handle and bicycle brake cables for the strings. Those first fans were those neighborhood buddies who adopted him very quickly. In 1972 Alla managed to buy his first lute and thus began to play traditional variants of the region, soon after a period of development and mastery, Alla refusing to conform to the classical musical notes developed a style unique to him and named it the Foundou which resides on lute songs of improvised calm music combining Berber, Arabic and African dimensions (some evoke the origin of the term soft background, others of his father who was nicknamed Embarek Foundou, because he worked at that time at "bottom 2" of the Kenadsa mine).
At the beginning of 1992, he traveled to France to represent Algeria in a concert given at Unesco, and against all odds he decided to settle there, and to facilitate this he entered the studio (Disque Al Sur today Concord ) to record his first albums (in 1992, 1994, 1996), although he only half accepted this fact because he always had an absolute, mystical relationship with music and for a long time he prohibited himself to trade and make a career out of it. He performs in concert around the world, from Paris to Stockholm, via Belo Horizonte and Casablanca. In 2001, Lyndaris Production managed to convince him to make a comeback; he records Zahra distributed by Night & Day.
Alla's approach is made of improvisation over the evenings. He never remembers what he played the day before; his inspiration: "everything that hurts me comes out", he says.
Alla remains more than ever one of the masters of the lute, of international stature. One of his peers, the Iraqi Mounir Bachir, once declared to a group of Algerian journalists: "but you have an exceptional lutenist in Algeria, whose playing escapes the patterns of Arab music".
Its musical genre can be defined as a rhythm beaten on a lute (oud). An improvisation, based on a few themes borrowed from the musician, a rhythmic accompaniment with makeshift utensils, and by those who wish, long impromptu silences, an aerial shelling of sounds, a serious and vibrant darbouka, struck in the style of a tabla, all in timelessness, the plenitude of moments, wide open spaces... Since then, from Béchar, the Foundou spreads and Alla contributes to introduce it to the Algerian and international public. In June 2018, an artistic stele representing a giant Oud (lute) was installed on a roundabout in Bechar, the artist's native village.
Son of Abdelaziz Embarek from Taghit (south-east of Béchar), and a mother from Tafilalet, south-east of Morocco. Last of a family of 12 children, he left school at the age of 15 to start a fairly hard professional life, he began by working as a simple electrician then a baker before opening his own furniture store in 1986. At the age of 16 he made his own makeshift lute out of a can, a piece of wood as a handle and bicycle brake cables for the strings. Those first fans were those neighborhood buddies who adopted him very quickly. In 1972 Alla managed to buy his first lute and thus began to play traditional variants of the region, soon after a period of development and mastery, Alla refusing to conform to the classical musical notes developed a style unique to him and named it the Foundou which resides on lute songs of improvised calm music combining Berber, Arabic and African dimensions (some evoke the origin of the term soft background, others of his father who was nicknamed Embarek Foundou, because he worked at that time at "bottom 2" of the Kenadsa mine).
At the beginning of 1992, he traveled to France to represent Algeria in a concert given at Unesco, and against all odds he decided to settle there, and to facilitate this he entered the studio (Disque Al Sur today Concord ) to record his first albums (in 1992, 1994, 1996), although he only half accepted this fact because he always had an absolute, mystical relationship with music and for a long time he prohibited himself to trade and make a career out of it. He performs in concert around the world, from Paris to Stockholm, via Belo Horizonte and Casablanca. In 2001, Lyndaris Production managed to convince him to make a comeback; he records Zahra distributed by Night & Day.
Alla's approach is made of improvisation over the evenings. He never remembers what he played the day before; his inspiration: "everything that hurts me comes out", he says.
Alla remains more than ever one of the masters of the lute, of international stature. One of his peers, the Iraqi Mounir Bachir, once declared to a group of Algerian journalists: "but you have an exceptional lutenist in Algeria, whose playing escapes the patterns of Arab music".
Its musical genre can be defined as a rhythm beaten on a lute (oud). An improvisation, based on a few themes borrowed from the musician, a rhythmic accompaniment with makeshift utensils, and by those who wish, long impromptu silences, an aerial shelling of sounds, a serious and vibrant darbouka, struck in the style of a tabla, all in timelessness, the plenitude of moments, wide open spaces... Since then, from Béchar, the Foundou spreads and Alla contributes to introduce it to the Algerian and international public. In June 2018, an artistic stele representing a giant Oud (lute) was installed on a roundabout in Bechar, the artist's native village.