Assafir – Traversées – Concert 04/29/25 – Studio de l’Ermitage, Paris

With their second opus “Traversées” – (Pérasma), the Greek-Anatolian sextet Assafir sign an album with multiple influences from the Aegean shores.

The members of this astonishing ensemble hail from France, Greece, Israel, Tunisia and Italy… lands that all border the Mare Nostrum.

In this beautiful album, the musical origins are closer to the shores of Anatolia and (southern) Macedonia, with a poignant stop on the island of Makronissos.

Let’s take a look at the cover, reminiscent of some of Henri Cartier Bresson’s photographs, which evoke suspended time, as much as passage, crossing, but also the leap into another dimension. Hara Kaminara, a Greek-Belgian photographer and scriptwriter, designed the cover, interior and back cover images. An invitation to travel and listen

©Photo Alain Smilo

For this album, Assafir has chosen to draw on a traditional repertoire in which Rebetiko (a musical genre belonging to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage) is very present. That’s also why we’ve chosen to talk about this album, which isn’t really jazz, but rather blues. But not the blues we usually refer to.

A blues, the Rebetiko, from the bars of ports such as Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Piraeus and, more specifically, Smyrna (now Izmir), at the time of the migratory waves – mainly Greek speakers from Asia Minor, during the “Great Catastrophe”.

Like the American Blues, this music has great evocative power

Watch the Assafir video presentation

Traversées tells all these stories of people, the drama of exile, loss, dark times, harsh living conditions. But it also reminds us of the poetry of life, the flight of a bird, love, the pleasures of the festival that will return, with dancing and the hope of better days.

And then there’s the incredible song about the Makronissos girls, (Oi Kores tis Makronissou) mentioned above.

Macronissos is that long, uninhabited, inhospitable, arid island between Cape Sounion, home to Poseidon’s temple, and Kea, the nearest of the Cyclades, a stone’s throw from Athens. This land is a prison island, to which, during the civil war of 46-49, the colonels in power deported thousands of people, including women, communists (or those judged as such), those who had fought to liberate the country from the Nazis. 100,000 people, including 5,000 women, from all regions of Greece passed through Makronissos between 1947 and 1958. Brainwashing, torture and death were the common lot of these beings. One of the disgraces of humanity, quite fertile and perfectly unimaginative. History repeats itself.

(Cf. Macronissos Island )

Listening to the 14 evocative tracks on this album, in which Greek, above all, Arabic and Romaniote rub shoulders, reveals the profound interplay between the musicians, who use almost exclusively traditional instruments: oud, kanum, davul, ney, derbouka, bendir, daf, quarter-tone accordion, etc., not forgetting the vocals, particularly those of Clémence Gabrielidis, in the tradition of the great voices of the Mediterranean.

The arrangements, like the compositions, are of the highest quality. It took three years of work and fine-tuning to achieve this result.

Traversées is an album that should grab you by the gut, if this music speaks to you. We recommend that you listen to it often, to grasp its rich nuances, to perhaps intimately perceive the links between blues of different origins, what profoundly unites men and women from every continent.

A jazz color as original as it is origins.