Born and raised in Beirut, Tarek is a self-taught jazz pianist and award-winning composer who is reinvigorating the genre by exploring relationships between Black American and Arabic music. His 3rd studio album "Peninsular" fuses jazz with quarter-tones and the rhythms of the Arabian Peninsula.
The combination of Arabic microtonality with 'well-tempered' tonality - or vice versa - sounds to my ear not only incredibly exciting, but musically forward-looking and fascinating in a completely new way! Thank you for this video!
This overlap between the jazz chord and the maqam scale arises as a result of playing the regular chord shape on a keyboard set up with a 24-TET layout, but the two are otherwise unrelated, and can hardly be combined in a musically meaningful way. One interesting possibility for utilizing the 24-TET system within the context of the chord could be to use the extra notes to play the harmonic (#)11th (11th key from the tonic) and the harmonic 13th (17th key from the tonic), both of which are about a quartertone flat compared to their 12-TET approximations. A scale could then be built using the neutral seconds these notes form with their neighbors, thereby integrating a recognizably Middle Eastern melodic interval within the Western harmonic framework.
