Tunisian Oud Master Offers Lyrical, Meditative Originals

Anouar Brahem has a well-deserved reputation as a genre-slipping musical shape-shifter. Although the Tunisian artist is a trained master of classical oud playing, he has collaborated with French jazz musicians, practitioners of classical Indian music and such major jazz artists as bassist Dave Holland and saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

So the expectation for his trio’s performance at the Skirball Cultural Center Thursday night, in the opening event of the venue’s Mediterranean Odyssey Concert Series, was that he would offer a substantial opportunity to experience his musical eclecticism.

But that’s not quite how things turned out. Performing with two longtime musical companions, clarinetist Barbaros Erkose and percussionist Lassad Hosni, Brahem concentrated on a series of gently subtle, dynamically laid-back original compositions.

Many can be traced to his ECM albums “Astrakan Cafe” and “Le Pas du Chat Noir,” and most featured Brahem’s lyrical oud work. The exceptions were the occasional passages in which Erkose had the opportunity to stretch out in improvisations and the less frequent segments featuring Hosni’s startling manipulation of the bendir (frame drum) and darbouka (Middle Eastern hand drum).

Although Brahem didn’t display the sort of stylistic versatility he has elsewhere, what he did have to offer was equally intriguing: music with improvisational invention and pulsing rhythms, positioned in meditative settings.

At a time when cultural confrontation and separatism seem to be the political order of the day, it was a pleasure to experience a performance in which differences in manner and heritage were transformed into the creative resources for an engaging, beyond-boundaries artistic expression.