Anouar Brahem brings four decades of reshaping the oud for a jazz setting to the Barbican Hall, in a quartet performance for the EFG London Jazz Festival.
Anouar Brahem has spent four decades expanding what the oud can do inside a jazz setting, and on Sunday 15 November 2026 he brings that work to the Barbican Hall for the EFG London Jazz Festival.
He was born in 1957 in Halfaouine, inside the old medina of Tunis, studied the oud at the national conservatory and then privately with the master Ali Sriti, and left for Paris in 1981. The oud is the Arab lute, fretless and quiet, settled long ago inside Arab classical music; Brahem has spent the decades since writing for it as a composer and setting it beside European jazz musicians, a pairing he refuses to call fusion. He has recorded for the same German label since the early 1990s, in a sound spacious and unhurried enough that the silence is audible.
He has worked with Jan Garbarek, Dave Holland, John Surman and Django Bates across that period, each record credited as a Brahem album rather than a collaboration. After the Last Sky, the record behind this tour, came out in March 2025, its title taken from a line by the poet Mahmoud Darwish.
He plays the Barbican Hall at half past seven with Django Bates on piano, Anja Lechner on cello and Mats Eilertsen on double bass, chamber music for four players, one holding an instrument this room has rarely heard alone.