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The Key to Granada is a great ud player's fetching dream of Arab-Andalusia, the fabled and still longed-for Moorish kingdom that married the lands north and south of the Gibraltar Strait. At age fifty, with thirty-seven years of playing behind him, Chraïbi has achieved not just mastery of his instrument but a personal aesthetic unique in the minions of maqam and taqsim. For not only his native Morocco is honored in his approach but also Turkish-Balkan, Persian, and ancient Hispano-Moslem, traditions, even flamenco. The opening suite "Andaloussiyyat" is proof that Chraibi knows intimately both the yearning saudade, and the ever-inspiring beatific vision, of what was life in southern Spain a thousand years ago. At thirteen minutes "Andaloussiyyat" takes us through three moods separated by unexpected string-damped harmonics. The unaccompanied performance initiates the listener into an unrushed suspension of time, contemplating the key to a door somewhere once in Granada, no longer the home entry of an ancestor departed for North Africa a hundred years after the Christian reconquest. Nostalgia does not stop the unfolding of the three-piece solo set, which is played alternately with fire ("The Lover") and solemn dignity ("Musical Embroidery"). It is at this point of this hour long recording that Chraibi involves a variety of hand percussion by Jamal Rioui in a second set that pays individual tribute to each of his three daughters and his master Farid El-Atrache. The flavors of the four pieces are as differently colored as a map. In total, The Key to Granada is not merely a tour-de-force of the Mediterranean ud, nor just a modern, imagined instrumental portrait of Al-Andalus. It is seven distinct acoustic pieces that are detailed with the nuance of story through Chraïbi's humbling skills, while remaining an object of contemplation in it's own right. Between the stillness of its exquisite architecture and the movement of human narrative within, the vision of Chraïbi's Arab Andalusian music amazes and soothes. - Steve Taylor
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