Moroccan oud master collaborates with Hindustani slide guitar wizard in a summit of string virtuosos.

A summit of string virtuosos, as the Moroccan oud master Driss el Maloumi collaborates with the Hindustani slide guitar wizard Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya. The award winning “Oud Magician” Driss el Maloumi has been praised for the quality, purity, and delicacy of his playing and music. Trained in Arabic and Western classical music, his music travels between different colours and genres, nourished by encounters with international artists such as Spain’s Jordi Savall, Mali’s Ballake Cissoko and Madagascar’s Rajery (as 3M), Iran’s Keyvan Chemirani, France’s Francoise Atlan, and many others.

One of the world’s greatest slide guitarists, Debashish Bhattacharya developed a unique approach to the slide guitar rendition of Raga on the Hindustani slide guitar, synthesizing selected features of various other instruments such as the veena, sitar, sarod and sarangi to a new school of guitar, the Kolkata Gharana. Through decades of disciplined study of Indian vocal technique combined with his instrumental work, Debashish can sing perfectly in parallel with every blindingly fast melody he plays. Debashish is a frequent collaborator with musicians from other traditions, including Ustad Zakir Hussain, John McLaughlin, Jerry Douglas, and Derek Trucks.

This shared performance between Driss and Debashish marks a commissioned expansion of a previous encounter between the two masters in Paris in 2009.