I first heard Ibrahim Maalouf on TSF Jazz, the French radio station with the tagline (back then) “Tout le jazz, toutes les emotions” — all the jazz, all the feelings.
I started listening after a trip to Paris. TSF Jazz became a kind of emotional regulator, something steady during long nights of work or when the kids were asleep. After relocating from Greece to Australia, Maalouf’s melodies pulled me back to a version of myself that belonged to Athens. So, seeing him on stage at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival felt like coming home for a wedding, with Maalouf in the role of the narrator.
Maalouf’s Trumpets of Michel-Ange tells a love story; a marriage unfolding through sound, tracing a couple’s life from the proposal to the moment their children leave home.
It’s about family, time, and how love changes shape. From the moment he got on stage, at 170 Russel, he turned the room into one heartbeat: six trumpets, saxophone, drums, bass, guitar, clapping, no pause, no breath. “I was expecting fifty people,” he laughed, glancing at the packed club. “You’re into sports, right?”
Photos: Will Hamilton-Coates
Between songs, he talked about growing up between Lebanon and France, and the ache of saying goodbye every summer. His song ‘Au revoir‘ is about those goodbyes; about his eldest daughter, now sixteen, who spends more time with her chosen family of friends and will soon take off. “In France, you leave home at 18 or 19. In Beirut, maybe 48 or 49,” he joked, before pausing. “But lately, when I think of the thousands of children killed in Gaza, my ‘au revoir’ feels different.”
The room stilled.
“Music is never just music,” he said softly.
“It’s always so much more.”
He kept the tone personal all night. He talked about his father, Nassim, an acclaimed classical trumpets who invented the four-valve quarter-tone trumpet so Arabic modes could blend with Western scales. Ibrahim learned to play it at seven. His T.O.M.A. project continues that legacy, pairing the music itself with a free academy for new players, provided they buy the trumpet. “I’m Lebanese,” he laughed, “I have to sell something.”
The show was loud, celebratory, deliberate — it was the kind that reminds you what live music does to the human system. He made everyone in the club dance, sweat, jump and sing. “Sorry to those who came to listen to jazz,” he grinned near the end, just as I felt the loop close between a Paris radio station, my Athenian past, and a Melbourne night.
Music I was used to playing quietly in the background was front and centre, and reality could wait a little longer. My expat friend and I left dazed, catching the train from Fed Square, carrying toutes les emotions.
