Anouar Brahem performs After the Last Sky with his quartet in the Barbican Hall on Sunday 15 November 2026, part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.
Anouar Brahem 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, and it had a settled role in Arab classical music that Brahem has spent forty years enlarging: he writes for it as a composer, puts it in front of European jazz musicians, and refuses the fusion label that gets applied anyway.
He has recorded for the same German label since the early 1990s, which has given the work an unusual consistency of sound — spacious, unhurried, recorded so that the silence is audible. He has worked with Jan Garbarek, Dave Holland, John Surman and Django Bates over four decades, and every one of those records is credited as a Brahem album rather than a collaboration, which is a deliberate distinction.
After the Last Sky came out in March 2025 and takes its title from a line of Mahmoud Darwish. He brings it to the Barbican Hall on Sunday 15 November 2026 at half past seven, inside the EFG London Jazz Festival, with Django Bates on piano, Anja Lechner on cello and Mats Eilertsen on double bass. Chamber music for four players, one of whom is holding an instrument the room has probably never heard alone.