Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian-born pianist who combined Jewish and Arabic musical traditions into a unique style he called “Pianoriental,” died March 25 in Israel. It was 95.
His death, in a nursing home in Herzliya, on Israel’s central coast, was confirmed by his manager, Yvonne Kahan.
Mr. Medioni was the last representative of a once-vibrant Jewish-Arab musical culture that flourished in North Africa before and after World War II, and drew proudly from both legacies.
In Oran, the Algerian port where he was born, he was sought after by Arabs and Jews to play at weddings and banquets in the years between the war and 1961, when the threat of violence and Algeria’s new independence from France led Mr. Medioni and thousands of other Jews to leave.
With his bounded octaves, his almost microtonal shifts in the style of traditional Arabic music, the cheeky rumba rhythms he learned from American GIs after the Allied invasion in 1942, and his roots in the Jewish-Arabic musical heritage called Andaludish, the Mr. Medioni had honed a distinct piano style since his 20s. The singers he accompanied often alternated phrases in French and Arabic in a style known as “Françarabe”. Messaoud El Medioni’s uncle was the famous musician known as Saoud L’Oranais, a leading andalous practitioner who was deported by the Germans to the Sobibor death camp in 1943.
The Medioni style remained buried and almost forgotten for four decades as he pursued his profession as a men’s tailor. He kept it alive privately, playing at weddings and bar mitzvahs after being forced to flee to France, until he released a breakthrough album, “Café Oran,” in 1996 at the age of 68. This led to a belated second life as a star of so-called world music — concert tours of Europe, appearances in documentaries and an important role as a mentor to a new generation of Israeli musicians eager to reclaim the musical heritage of their Sephardic heritage. In 2017, he published an autobiography, “A Memoir: From Oran to Marseilles (1938-1992),” which reproduces Mr. Medioni’s tedious writing, translated from the French.
Mr. Medioni “came to symbolize something, the last of his generation,” said Christopher Silver, an expert on the Jewish musical tradition of North Africa who teaches at McGill University.
“Maurice is a compulsive and inherently hip musician, always looking for other music and musical styles,” wrote British broadcaster Max Reinhardt in the introduction to the memoir, “part of a group of Muslim and Jewish musicians who of course in the 1940s and the 50’s they created a new music together in North Africa”.
Two events were instrumental in shaping Pianoriental, both of which occurred early in the life of Mr. Medioni, who grew up poor — “one shared toilet for our entire floor where there were six apartments,” Mr. Médioni wrote in his memoirs. — in Oran’s Jewish quarter, or “Derb.”
The first was his encounter with American GIs in occupied Oran on November 8, 1942, when he was 14 years old. “From the moment the Yanks arrived in Oran, our family’s way of life changed completely,” Mr. Medioni wrote. The GIs introduced him to a rolling boogie-woogie style that pushed the French pop songs he’d been raised on into the background.
The bright young teenager quickly became indispensable to the Americans, taking them to bars and brothels. “I would cross the nine piano bars,” Mr. Medioni said in an interview in 2015. “When one of the pianos was free, I would play all the American hits I had learned, and that would attract the GIs,” he recalled. awed by the black American jazz musicians he saw perform: “I saw them improvising. I was speechless,” he said. “When I came home I tried to replicate what they did.”
The second decisive event occurred in 1947 when three young Arab musicians entered a bar where he was drinking and began to sing and play together. “Thus was born the first modern Arabic music group, a group that would make me the most popular Jewish guy among all the Muslims in the entire province of Orani,” he wrote in his memoirs. Mr. Medioni’s composition for jazz, boogie-woogie, andalous and Arabic rai and chaabi, two forms of Algerian folk music from the streets, sometimes characterized by long narrative singing, were born.
“There are few figures trying to play this oriental piano,” Mr. Silver said. “Medioni does it very well, with her left and right hand. It tries to update, modernize and continue to be oriental or Arabic music.”
Maurice El Medioni was born on October 18, 1928, in Oran, then French Algeria, to Jacob Medioni, who ran Café Saoud with his brother Messaoud and Fany Medioni. His father died when he was 7 years old, leaving his mother in poverty to raise four children – three boys and one girl.
His musical talents were evident early on. almost entirely self-taught, he honed his skills on a piano his brother brought home from a flea market. The war intensified the family’s hardships and all the Jewish children were expelled from the Oran schools by the French authorities. “We missed everything,” Mr. Medioni wrote.
The American invasion of 1942 was “a redemption for all the Jews of North Africa,” he wrote. And by the mid-1950s, he was not only a successful tailor among the Muslims of Oran, but also a much sought-after musician, like his brother Alex: “All the Arab orchestras wanted to work with me,” he wrote. “These are our guys,” is what they said.
But as Algeria’s war for independence intensified, one of his Arab musical partners was shot dead by Algerian rebels, and Mr. Medioni stopped playing at Arab festivals.
In the spring of 1961, he and his young family boarded a boat for Israel, then left six months later for France. Years of struggle followed, as he established tailoring shops, first in Paris and then in Marseilles. But he continued to play at weddings and galas with stars from the pre-war North African Jewish-Arab music scene now transplanted to France. Among them were Lili Boniche, Line Monty, Reinette l’Oranaise and Samy Elmaghribi.
In the late 1980s Mr. Medioni recorded himself on a tape in his living room in Marseille and sent it to a producer at Buda Musique, a specialty record label in Paris. This was the beginning of his revival. The ‘Café Oran’ record was followed by a concert at London’s Barbican in 2000 with Mr. Boniche. a tour with a well-known British Klezmer band, Oi Va Voi; and an album with a Cuban percussionist in New York, Roberto Rodriguez. He played a leading role in “El Gusto,” a 2012 documentary and album about the reunion of an orchestra of former Algerian Jewish and Arab musicians.
In 2011 he moved to Israel from Marseille with his wife, Juliette (Amsellem) Medioni, to be near his children. He continued to record and perform, most notably with the Ashkelon Mediterranean-Andalusian Orchestra.
His wife died in 2022. He is survived by his children, Yacov, Marilyne and Michael, and five grandchildren.
Mr. Medioni was well aware that he could very well be the last of his breed. In a 2003 interview in the appendix to his memoirs, he told British musician Jonathan Walton that he doubted Andalos would survive him.
“It won’t happen,” he remembers saying. “Maurice Mendioni tells you he won’t. It will be heard from time to time only by people who have some nostalgia and by young people who love their parents.”
