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. Medionis was one of the last representatives of a once alive Jewish-Arabic musical culture which flourished in North Africa before and after the Second World War 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 drove Mr. O Medioni and thousands of other Jews to leave.
With its bounded octaves, its almost microtonic shifts in the style of traditional Arabic music, the cheeky rumba rhythms learned from American GIs after the Allied invasion in 1942, and its roots in the Jewish-Arabic musical heritage called Andaludish, it had Mr. Medioni has 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”. His uncle Mesaoud El Medioni was a famous musician known as Saoud L’Oranaisleading andalous practitioner who was deported by the Germans to the Sobibor death camp in 1943 and killed there.
The Medioni style remained buried and almost forgotten for four decades as Mr. Medioni 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. Then in 1996, when he was 68, he released a breakthrough album, “Cafe Oran.” His success has led to a belated second life as a so-called world music star — concert tours of Europe, appearances in documentary films and an important role as a mentor to a new generation of Israeli musicians eager to reclaim the musical legacy of their Sephardic heritage.
In 2017 he published “A Memoir: From Oran to Marseilles (1938-1992) which reproduces Mr. Medioni’s tiresome scaly, with a translation 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 in Montreal.
British broadcaster Max Reinhardt wrote in the memoir’s introduction: “Maurice is a compulsive and inherently hip musician, always on the lookout for other music and musical styles, a member of a group of Muslim and Jewish musicians who naturally in the 1940s and 50s forged a new music together in North Africa”.
Two events were instrumental in shaping Pianoriental, both of which occurred early in Mr. Medioni’s life, as he grew up poor in Oran’s Jewish quarter, Derb. (“One common toilet for our whole floor, in which there were six apartments,” he wrote in his memoirs.)
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,” he wrote.
The Americans introduced him to a boogie-woogie clock that fueled the French pop songs on which he had been featured in the background.
A bright young teenager, he became indispensable to the Americans, taking them to bars and brothels.
“I would cross the nine piano bars,” Mr. Medionis he said in a 2015 interview. “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 being in awe of 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 all 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 Muslims in the entire province of Orani,” Mr. Medioni wrote. The composition of jazz, boogie-woogie and andalus 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. His father, Jacob Medioni, ran the Café Saoud with his brother Messaoud and died when Maurice was 7, leaving the boy’s mother, Fany Medioni, to raise four children – three boys and a girl – in poverty.
His musical talents were evident early on. almost entirely self-taught, he honed his skills on a piano his brother had 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, just 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 of independence intensified, one of his original Arab musical collaborators was shot dead by rebels, and Mr. Medioni stopped playing at Arab festivals.
In the spring of 1961, he and his young family boarded a ship for Israel. six months later, they left for France. Years of struggle followed, as Mr. Medionis established tailoring shops, first in Paris and then in Marseilles. But he continued to play at weddings and galas with stars from the North African Jewish-Arab music scene who had by then been 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 recorded in New York with Cuban percussionist Roberto Rodriguez. Mr. Medionis had a leading role “El Gusto” a 2012 documentary and album project about the reunion of an orchestra of former Algerian Jewish and Arab musicians.
In 2011, he moved to Israel 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.”