Figure of Arab-Andalusian music, the pianist Maurice El Médioni, born in Algeria, died at the age of 95 in Israel, where he had settled after having lived for a long time in France, his relatives announced on his official Facebook page on Tuesday March 25.
This artist is considered the inventor of the “oriental pian”, also written “oriental piano”, a hybrid musical cocktail, between Arab-Andalusian touches, swing and Latin rhythms. A recipe developed as a teenager, in contact with American soldiers who landed during the Second World War in Oran, a city in Algeria where he was born in 1928, within the Jewish community. His uncle was Saoud El Médioni, a famous musician known as Saoud l’Oranais.
Maurice El Médioni will have honored his musical genre until an advanced age. “I was fascinated, I had been able to hear him play when he was already 83 years old and there was not a fault in his playing,” said Denis Cuniot, a French musician, himself a pianist, who had encountered his elder during the recording of the album Oran-Oran.
“A brotherhood between Jews and Arabs”
The famous singer Khaled, figure of raï, said that Maurice El Médioni represented “the time when there was no war between Jews and Arabs and where we met to share and make music”. The pianist never stopped repeating in his latest interviews that he dreamed of “rediscovering a brotherhood between Jews and Arabs”.
He touched on this ideal within the El Gusto collective, a group of veteran Jewish and Muslim musicians from Algeria, finally reunited after being separated by the torments of history. A documentary released in 2012, directed by Safinez Bousbia, retraces the journey of this collective, sometimes a little quickly compared to the Buena Vista Social Club.
Maurice El Médioni settled in Israel at the end of his life, after a first failed attempt in 1961. “Algeria was in flames and blood. I was afraid for my children and myself. I did not want to come to France because we feared that a civil war would break out there. But I was not able to acclimatize in Israel,” he told the newspaper Le Monde.
In 1962, he arrived in Paris, but, put off by the climate, then chose Marseille in 1967. “I wanted to get closer to my Mediterranean climate. I opened a men’s clothing business with my older brother on Canebière,” he reported in the daily newspaper.
Tailoring was his training profession, which he practiced regularly throughout his life alongside playing the piano, which he started at the age of 9.
