Julien Jalâl Al-Din Weiss

Alsatian by his father, Swiss by his mother, Bernard Weiss was born in Paris in 1953 and died in Paris January 02, 2015. In the beginning of the Seventies, like many of teenagers of his generation, this guitarist of western classical formation (he entered the " Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris " in 1965) calls in question the values of the Western culture and started to hit the road of the trip. His voyages took him to California, to Morocco, then to the Antilles; that opened his cultural horizons and was given the name Julien by a young Venezuellian woman, Isabelle Sotto, daugther of the founder of kinetic art. When return to France in 1974, he composed several plays for the traditional guitar, and took part in a creation of the Tunisian director Sharif Allaoui. In 1976 in Paris, during a reception at the future minister of the Egyptian culture, Farouk Hosni, the listening to a disc of the Iraqi musician Mounir Bachir, large main of Oud (Oriental lute captivated him so much so that he gave up the traditional guitar and the jazz harmonies to launch out body and soul in the study of the Arab lute and the refined laws governing the Oriental micro tonal music. But very quickly, the limits of the instrument frustrated him and when he discovered the richnesses offered by the Oriental zither " the qanûn " the search of Julien Weiss took all its dimensions. Consequently he crossed the Orient, from Tunis to Beirut, Baghdad to Cairo, Istanbul to Damas, he followed the teaching of great Masters. Thus he became the disciple then the friend of Mounir Bachir in the honor of whom later he composed a " Bagdadian Suite " interpreted at the time of the Festival of Babylon in Iraq.