"I do not care if I'm jazz."

In the center, fifteen trumpeters. On the court side, Ibrahim Maalouf has come together, with his musicians playing modern instruments. On the garden side, jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, accompanied by his pianist and double bbadist. On stage, the mix is ​​explosive.

Wynton Marsalis & Ibrahim Maalouf @Jazz_in_Marciac 2018

"To meet Wynton Marsalis, to compose for him, it's just giant," confided the French-Lebanese trumpet player three hours before his concert. "It's a big challenge, to show that Wynton's traditional jazz and the African-American legacy he defends are not incompatible with what I propose musically, which has nothing to do," explained the trumpet player. laureate of four Victoires de la Musique and a César for the Best Film Music

The one who is nevertheless a regular at festival Jazz in Marciac showed anxious to "do things well". Because, he said, suddenly serious, "if we muster, we have many bad intentions that could jump on the occasion to show that the compatibility between our visions does not exist, that it is a fad"

"Not a world of bisounours"

But what "bad intentions"? Ibrahim Maalouf admits with surprising lucidity: "You know, the jazz world is not a world of kissing." "There is always a debate about whether what I'm doing is jazz or not," explains Ibrahim Maalouf, an unclbadifiable person who mixes pop, rap, electro, clbadical, jazz and world music. "Yet, he stresses, it's music that conveys notions of freedom, openness". "I have known green and not ripe for 15 years," he says. "Many times I have been insulted by jazz musicians, especially from the French milieu".

He says: "One year, I won the Victoires de la musique at the same time as another trumpet player, it did not please him that we both win in jazz, me as an artist of the year, he for the album of the year. " "Arrived at his place, he published (on the internet) a photo of me with a spit on my face" on the image, he explains. "It was extremely violent." "I do not care if I'm jazz," he finally concluded, baduring that "jazz is no more terrible" than other music circles. Violence, the musician has experienced others, he who arrived in France as a result of the civil war in Lebanon. "I saw bombs, I saw bodies, that's why there is a lot of cynicism in the booklets of my albums."

Remains that Friday evening, the complicity between Ibrahim Maalouf and his 56-year-old New Orleans counterpart, the Pulitzer Prize for Music, sparked under Marciac's skies. What rebadure the Franco-Lebanese, who at 37, is now focused on the release of his next album, "Levantine Symphony No.1", scheduled for September 2018. "Humbly, I try to make our realities a a little softer, a little softer, and our dreams a little more real "he slips into a smile.