Ahmed Maher's arrival

Tomorrow, oud player and composer-bandleader Ahmed Maher [AKH-med MAY-her, roughly] releases his debut album Maktoub. He recorded the album between his native Egypt and Vancouver, with sessions about a decade apart.

Maher plays an album release show tomorrow night at the Alliance Française Theatre, presented by Infidels Jazz. The band will include clarinetist Geoff Claridge, accordionist Anthony Schulz, bassist Conrad Good, and percussionist Atin Cheraghchi.

These musicians aren't the ensemble on Maktoub (which has one track available to hear as of today). There, Vancouverites Sam Davidson on clarinet and Nathan Shubert on keyboards join Egyptians Mohammad Antar on nay, accordionist Wael El-Said, and percussionist Ayman Mabrouk; a clarinetist currently based in Los Angeles, Lety ElNaggar; and Lebanese bassist Andre Segone.

Before moving to Vancouver in 2017, Maher had a multinational corporate career. "I was traveling a lot, so technically I came from Germany," Maher said in an interview last week. "And I didn't have residency at the time, so I wasn't living in Egypt at the time. I was basically living out of my suitcase and five different offices. One in Tangier, Morocco; in Nairobi, Kenya; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Amman, Jordan. So that was like my... I spent three and a half years just circling around, and at the end of it, I was like, I'm done. I got my suitcase and came here."

Maktoub's post-production happened in Vancouver with engineer Spencer Carson.

"I was working in a company and was producing radio ads for them, so I was producing with [Carson]," Maher said. "We would record a radio ad, and then the talent would leave, and then Spencer and I’d just hang out and play some music to each other. Like, hey, I like this track. I like this track. You know what I mean? That was the start, and then we would go to shows together."

Maher met Sam Davidson through Carson and went with the clarinetist to hear Peregrine Falls, the experimental rock duo of Gordon Grdina and Kenton Loewen, at All-City Athletics on March 2, 2024. (I was also there, though we didn't meet.)

Grdina is the obvious comparison for Maher's music: two oud players in Vancouver who constantly collaborate with jazz musicians. Maher said Grdina was welcoming from their first conversation at All-City; Grdina even referred some oud students to him. "It meant a lot to me that someone of this calibre who's like a local legend [would do that]," Maher said. "Someone that I didn't know who he was, honestly. I heard his name, but I never heard any of his music until Sam mentioned him to me. I looked him up, and I started listening. I was like, oh, this is cool. I want to go see this guy."

Through going to shows, Maher made contact with Tim Reinert of Infidels Jazz and Farhad Ebnejalal of Zameen Art House. The Maktoub project played Zameen on February 20th of this year with a lineup similar to tomorrow's: Claridge, Good, and Cheraghchi.

The same quartet played on April 18th at Notional Space, located on East Pender Street between Clark and Commercial. A week later, Maher "crashed" a 2nd Floor Gastown gig by two younger musicians he recently befriended: vocalist Khamisa Wilsher and guitarist Ben Wayne Kyle, who play there monthly. "I just showed up with my [oud]. It's like, hey, can I play with you guys? Yeah, sure, come on in [...] We were just going, and we just jammed, and it was spectacular."

Then a couple days after that, Maher and I again went to the same show without meeting: Pat Metheny at The Centre.

Maher spoke excitedly of the Metheny show; he compared the audience's vibe with the band's. "Our energy, and our synergy with theirs, created this ball of energy that I could see in the room, where everybody's enveloped by it," he said.

"I was thinking about this image, I just couldn't get it out of my head. I was chatting with Khamisa after. I was like, it’s almost like there was an equilibrium of forces suspending this ball of energy in the room. How cool would it be if we would do that, you, me and Ben?" Maher thus played another show at Zameen, with Wilsher and Kyle, and called it Equilibrium. They improvised together there on May 22nd.

The Maktoub sessions started back in 2015 in Egypt, Maher said. Around that time, he played a set of instrumental music at a festival with his accordionist and percussionist, apparently to a couple thousand people. His description of the concert suggested that the invigorating experience blew open all at once his perspective of a white-picket-fence, middle-class aspiration; his feeling of life in Egypt, navigating the fallout of what he called the "Arab Spring, quote-unquote"; and the potential of his musical training, including studies with the Iraqi oud legend Nasser Shamma.

"From that point on, the doubt that, oh, I have to remain in this area and think in this way and do it this way, because this is the right way," Maher said. "I realized there's no such thing. I believe that I have this green light to explore ideas the way I hear them, the way I feel them, to express what I want to express, which is this journey. And coming from doubt and uncertainty and identity dissonance to purpose... I love this. I'm going there. I'm going to [immigrate] to Canada. I'm going to do this. [Maktoub] was a scoring soundtrack to this journey, right?"

"My life was in a different spot at the time," he earlier said. "It was a whole immigration journey, and finding my foot here, and all that. And then a couple years ago I decided, okay, it's time." Since he made that decision, he has been a frequent concertgoer and performer in the scene: now visible enough that the next time we both go to the same show, I can't miss him.