Le Trio Joubran

Samir, Wissam, and Adnan Joubran grew up in Nazareth in a house where instruments were made. Their father, Hatem Joubran, is among the best-known makers of stringed instruments in Palestine and the Arab world; their mother, Ibtisam Hanna Joubran, sang muwashshahat. Samir began a solo career in 1996 and recorded Tamaas with Wissam in 2003 before proposing that the three of them play together. The trio came into being in August 2004 in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.

The instrument is the constraint and the point. The oud is traditionally a solo or accompanying instrument; three of them together have no standard repertoire, no established division of roles, and no ready-made way of avoiding muddiness in the same register. The Joubrans divided the parts — melody, counter-line, rhythmic ground — and built a body of composed instrumental work for the combination, with the percussionist Youssef Hbeisch. Their albums include Randana (2005), Majâz (2007), AsFâr (2011), and The Long March (2018).

Samir’s first professional engagement, in 1996, was to accompany a live reading by Mahmoud Darwish. That collaboration continued until the poet’s death in 2008 and grew into some thirty-four evenings of poetry and music performed together around the world, under titles including In the Shadow of Words. Since Darwish died the trio has not accompanied another poet.

Selected works

• Randana (2005)
• Majâz (2007)
• AsFâr (2011)
• The Long March (2018)

Sources

• Le Trio Joubran — official site
• “Adnan Joubran on Le Trio, Mahmoud Darwish, and hearing Palestine” — The National
• Le Trio Joubran — Wikipedia