Charleston musician Peter Kfoury’s new album, The Journey Together, doesn’t sound like anything else that’s been released on the city’s scene this year. That’s because there is only one Peter Kfoury.
A musical omnivore who refuses to accept genre boundaries, Kfoury’s main instrument is the oud, a Middle Eastern, short-neck, pear-shaped, fretless stringed instrument. The sound it produces has the sparkling high end of a mandolin but also rib cage-rattling bass tones and the fluent flexibility of an acoustic guitar. In fact, the oud is such a vital part of Kfoury’s sound that he’s informally known around town as “The Oud Dude.”
That oud is in fine form on The Journey Together, a dazzling and largely acoustic tour de force that feels like a breath of fresh air. Five of the six tracks are instrumentals, and Kfoury’s lively and intuitive playing splashes up against jazz horns, prog-rock time signatures and more than a little funk on “Laughing Llama,” “Lockdown” and “Survival Of The Fittest,” pausing for a reflective ballad called “Summer Magic,” and the propulsive but contemplative title track, written for Kfoury’s son’s wedding.
And that’s just the instrumentals. The one track with vocals on the album, “Mussawat (True Liberty)” is a strident reggae-spiked track with a standout performance by singer Audrey Martell calling for love, peace and wisdom to win the day.
By Kfoury’s own admission, The Journey Together, recorded in New York with producer Russ DeSalvo (Celine Dion, Kool & The Gang, Lou Reed) and a group of top-notch players, is a peak in a decades-long musical career.
“I have to say that as far as producers and recording engineers go, this is the first guy that really got what I was trying to do,” Kfoury said. “He really got it, and players on the album were largely a result of his contacts, because he understood my music. He knew what it should sound like in a produced fashion and he knew who could make it sound that way.”
Most importantly, the musicians Kfoury worked with (bassist John Ziegler, producer DeSalvo on guitar, Premik Russell Tubbs on horns, Frank Vilardi on drums and percussionist Jamie Papish) shared the same disregard for genre that has marked Kfoury’s career.
“Everybody I dealt with on this album was a beautiful, peaceful person who just wanted to do their best to make a really good album,” Kfoury said. “I couldn’t say anything more positive about any of that experience. They all were gracious and patient and willing to do things over and over again to get things just right. For me, it was a step up in every way because I felt, ‘Wow, these people really get it.’”
Blending influences
The potential damage of identifying an artist’s music as strictly one genre is something that Kfoury thinks about a lot, he said.
“There was a famous musician who had a quote that was something to the effect of, ‘We have to stop thinking about music in terms of genres,’” Kfoury said. “There is just good music and bad music; that’s pretty much what it comes down to. You either like it or you don’t. If you like my music, that’s awesome; if you don’t, you don’t. But don’t pigeonhole it.”
It’s a fitting philosophy for a musician who grew up surrounded by Middle Eastern music but also loved jazz, blues, rock and pop.
If you are familiar with Kfoury at all, you know that he is never one to sit idle for long. So now that The Journey Together is out (released on April 17), he already has a new project in mind, and it sounds like it’s going to be just as musically adventurous as his previous work.
“I’m always working on something new,” he said. “I just started playing with a guy who recently came to Charleston from Morocco, and this young man is a genius in not only percussion but in electronic music as well. We have done a couple of shows together that blended electronic music with the stuff that I’m doing, so that’s something that may appear on the next album, whenever that may be.”
Learn more at peterkfoury.net.
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