Anouar Brahem's love of jazz took him to Paris, but a return to Tunis gave him the freedom he craved, the great oud player tells Ray Comiskey.

Anouar Brahem is so gentle, soft-spoken, polite almost to the point of deferential, that you have to remind yourself that here is one of the great musicians of the Arab world; one, moreover, who has crossed the boundaries of the tradition that nourished him to play with people as diverse as jazzmen Jan Garbarek, John Surman and Dave Holland, the French accordion master Richard Galliano, and musicians from Turkey and all round the Mediterranean.

Behind the gentleness, however, lie tenacity and, ultimately, the self-belief that any ground-breaking artist needs. He is a master of the oud, the short-necked, half pear-shaped lute of the Arab world. Equipped with five pairs of strings, it's regarded as the king of all instruments in the classical lineage of Arab music.

"Arabic musical tradition," he explains, "and also the classical tradition, is based a lot on singing - even if we have in our tradition an instrumental history, the instrumental pieces you can play only between songs. The oud is one of the favourite instruments to accompany a singer. But it also has a very strong role in a small ensemble. The oud player is in some way the conductor of the small orchestra.

"The oud is important for improvising also, in the traditional, classical music. Perhaps people know more the pop phenomenon of Arab music, like the rai, like the chaabi, but normally people in Europe don't know the classical tradition. It has nothing to do with the folkloric. The classical tradition is the one I studied, and in this music the oud is very important."

HE WAS BORN 49 years ago in Halfaouine in the Medina, the old town of Tunis and, with his father's blessing, studied with the great traditional master, Ali Sriti, for more than 10 years. He was to find some aspects of the classical tradition constraining - of which more anon - but in the meantime, he discovered jazz around the age of 14; Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Dizzy Gillespie.

"We had a jazz festival here, the Carthage Festival, and sometimes I had the possibility to see musicians such as Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis. But the music which really opened my mind and gave me the chance to meet jazz musicians and to do something in this music, was the music of Keith Jarrett. I felt something very modern, very special, and gradually I got into this music."

This led him to move to Paris, where he lived from 1981 to 1987. Its cosmopolitanism appealed to him. "I am a fan also of the cinema," he says, "and Paris was a city of the cinema, where you can see films of Bergman, Fellini. And in music there were many nationalities, Egyptian, Tunisian, Turkish, Iranian, jazz musicians."

But it didn't necessarily lead right away to the cross-cultural fertilisation he was looking for.

"At that time everybody was working in his own area. Arab musicians, for example, were working mainly in cabaret," he laughs. "Jazz musicians were working in their own styles. There was no real connection between styles. Michel Portal [the great French multi-reedman and bandoneon player] was playing contemporary classical music, but he was also playing with jazz ensembles. And this was very rare in that time. This phenomenon called world music didn't exist then."

Although it was "very bizarre" for an Arab musician to want to play other music, he was lucky. "At that time I was also composing music for Tunisian movies, and this gave me the possibility to ask other musicians to come in for rehearsal. For example, the first jazz musician I met in France was François Jeanneau, a saxophone player. I phoned him because I had music for a play to do, and met him for this. And I met musicians from other traditions of African music."

Why, with his horizons expanding like this, did he go back to Tunis? "I don't really know," he answers slowly. "It came little by little. First of all my father died, and I had to come back to help my mother, because my two brothers were studying in France at that time and my mother was alone. I was living between Paris and Tunis for one or two years, and little by little I had a feeling that it was more important for me to stay here, that I had much more rethinking to do here in Tunis."

Musically? "Yes. And also we had a much more open situation culturally. It was difficult, of course, because I started to play new music, which was not easy for the people to listen to."

By then he had been appointed leader of the Musical Ensemble of the City of Tunis, and began to rub more frequently against the boundaries of Arab musical history. Given the vocal tradition in Tunisia, some felt that the concerts of purely instrumental music he composed and put on were too much to take.

"But sometimes," he says, "there was a lot of curiosity from the people and sometimes the concerts were a very polemic situation, people saying that it was very good, others saying it was very bad. And this made sense for me to play here.

"In France I could say I was a jazz musician and I was an Arab musician, but I didn't really find a real area to develop my work as a composer. Je n'ai pas trouvé ma place. Because at that time also, as I am an oud player, the record labels wanted you to play traditional music. If I say 'no, I want to play my music', they were not interested at all. And all things were organised in France that way at that time.

"Of course, I knew how to play traditional music, but what interested me was to play what I was composing, and this interested nobody. You know what I mean? If you want to play Arabic traditional oud, maybe you can find some opportunity to play for immigrant people. I was not interested in that. I wanted to be more open. Maybe this was part of what was telling me to go back."

Usually, people leave home because they find it stifling and need more freedom to choose, so it's paradoxical that coming back from exile did give him the liberty he sought as a composer. Did he find he was more at home, finally, in Tunis than in Paris?

"Not really. When I went to Paris I didn't feel any nostalgia. But the only thing I didn't feel comfortable with was because of my Arab face. Because of that you always have an image of an immigrant and I don't like this. I wanted to feel free of that. And maybe this was part of what gave me the idea to come back to Tunis and live. But I didn't have the nostalgie."

But in terms of expanding his audience, his meeting with Manfred Eicher, the founder, heart and soul of the great ECM label, at the start of the 1990s was very important. It led to a series of recordings distinguished not only by their creativity and musicianship, but also by their variety; Barzakh (1991) with Turkish musicians Bechir Selmi and Lassad Hosni; Conte de l'Incroyable Amour (1992) with clarinettist Barbaros Erkose; Madar (1994) with Garbarek and the Pakistani tabla player, Shaukat Hussain; Khomas (1995) with Galliano and Selmi, and Thimar (1998) with Surman and Holland.

THROUGHOUT HIS DIVERSE experience with ECM, he acknowledges, he has found Eicher's gifts as a producer to be extraordinary.

"I think he has an acute sense of judgment, and a demanding nature, and also a great affinity. I think he is very talented to produce, but more than produce - de mettre en scéne - to put it in sound. And I can say that little by little over the years I understood how important his support was for me."

Eicher, of course, is a musician himself. "More than a musician," Brahem responds, emphatically. "He listens as a composer. Sometimes I rehearse many times with the musicians - and I played with a lot of very talented musicians - but when I come to the studio with them and Manfred listens to the music, I have the feeling that he understands very quickly what the musician needs. And I am astonished at him, because the music I play is not from his cultural area."

Typical of the unclassifiable nature of his music, with its mixture of Arab, jazz, flamenco and European classical elements, is his latest ECM CD, Le Voyage De Sahar. It was made by himself, pianist François Couturier and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier, the same trio responsible for the acclaimed Le Pas du Chat Noir, released four years ago.

But this is no Hollywood-style retread of a box-office hit for the international music scene. The success of that earlier album didn't tempt him to repeat it with the same trio.

He had originally begun composing the music for that first project at the piano, instead of the more usual oud. "I am not a piano player at all," he explains, "but sometimes I need to have a little distance from the oud, and the piano helps for that."

Looking back on recording Le Pas du Chat Noir, he found it an exciting experience. "But I came back to Tunis after the recording very tired, complètement vide, empty, you know, and I stopped playing oud for a few months. During that time I started to compose, but with the piano, not with the oud, although it was absolutely not my intention to compose with the piano at all."

What he found was that the music he was writing sounded much better with the piano, the same dilemma he had faced composing the music for what became Le pas du chat noir. "Initially I never think about instrumentation when I start to compose. This comes after; Le Pas du Chat Noir came like that."

For both it and Le Voyage De Sahar, the problem had to do with how to write the arrangements.

"In the beginning I had a lot of difficulty. I tried to find some kind of equilibrium for the instruments and I knew that my need was to have a singing instrument. And little by little I took the decision for all the pieces to have accordion."

Perhaps it was a good thing, he suggests, that it happened like that again, rather than as a deliberate sequel to the trio's earlier success. "Maybe I would have made Le Pas du Chat Noir II." He laughs at the idea.

"I didn't plan to do that. Really at the end I started to listen to the piano and to the accordion for this one, and why not for that one, and another one. François and Jean-Louis were very surprised. They thought I was joking when I asked them to do a rehearsal, when I told them, I am changing my mind about the trio."

Anyone who has heard and liked the trio's first album will be grateful for the fact that he did. The music has all the grace, balance and delicacy of its predecessor, and it seems the critics will be invoking the same references to pin down its elusive roots - jazz, Satie, Paris cafe music, flamenco, Balkan music, all suffused with the Arab musical tradition of North Africa that he grew up in and transformed into a chamber music subtly different from anything else.

Anouar Brahem, Jean-Louis Matinier and François Couturier will play at the National Concert Hall next Sunday