French-Algerian acoustic guitarist Pierre Bensusan has absorbed music from around the world to create his own mesmerizing and sometimes otherworldly sound. You can hear classical, folk, Celtic, eastern European, jazz, Brazilian, North African and even bluegrass music in his melodies that range from delicate to rollicking.
A master guitarist, he’s also an entertaining singer with a pleasant voice, who scats and performs wordless vocalizations, called nigunim, in the Jewish tradition.
Ironically, Bensusan had no interest in playing guitar when his father presented him with one, after selling his piano. The guitar “grew on me,” he recalled. Unenthusiastic about formal studies – he’d quit piano lessons – he began teaching himself guitar at the age of 11.
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After touring the world for 42 years as a concert performer, he maintains that working on an instrument continues to be endless. He spoke about his aim as a guitarist, to almost bring his consciousness into his fingers.
“You need to give your fingers the memory of where they can go along the fretboard. Then, in situations, they will have to go there without you expressing an intention or desire to hear something. That’s the goal,” he said.
Bensusan was born to a Jewish family in Oran, Algeria, in 1957, during the war that led to the country gaining its independence from France. Oran was safe at the beginning of the war, but by 1960 violence had swept the city. The apartment building his family lived in was bombed, and he remembers seeing the ceiling collapsing in front of him one afternoon. In 1962, his family “left Algeria for good, to move to mainland France, along with one million French people and Jews,” he said.
His great-grandmother, who was born in Spanish Morocco, spoke Arabic, Spanish and Ladino. “My mother knew some Ladino lullabies that she would sing to me,” Bensusan said. “Were they essential influences? Probably not, but 58 years later I still remember them and could sing them, so… They have been transformed into the music I express.”
Speaking about his myriad influences, including North African music, he said he’s doing what Jewish artists in the Diaspora have always done, borrowing from other cultures.
“To use Oriental flavours and mix them with something else would be a parallel to what Jewish people have been doing for the last 2,000 years, to mix themselves with different cultures to make something of their own,” said Bensusan, speaking on the telephone from his home in Chateau Thierry, a village outside Paris. “They have developed something very rich. So I think that has been something that has been given to me.”
Bensusan has recorded 15 albums and sold a half million records of mainly original songs. They’re complex musically, sometimes with lyrics penned by his wife, Doratea.
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Bensusan is touring North America this spring and stopping in Toronto for a rare appearance. He’ll be playing and singing selections from his latest CD, Encore, a retrospective collection that won in the Live Performance Award category at the 2014 international Independent Music Awards.
On tour, he’s in the zone and relaxed enough to let go onstage, he said. “I try to never play the same thing twice. I change a few things around and go into different improvisations.”
Bensusan performs at Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields Church, 103 Bellevue Ave., Toronto, on May 7 at 8 p.m. For tickets, $35 plus processing fee, click here. For more information about Bensusan, click here.