Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian-born pianist who combined Jewish and Arab musical traditions into a single style he called “Pianoriental,” died March 25 in Israel. He is 95.
His death, in a nursing home in Herzliya, on Israel’s central coast, was confirmed by his manager Yvonne Kahan.
Mr. Medioni is a late representative of a once vibrant Jewish-Arab musical culture that flourished in North Africa before and after World War II and proudly derived from both heritages.
In Oran, the Algerian port where he was born, Arabs and Jews sought him out to play at weddings and at banquets, in the years between the war and 1961, when the threat of violence and Algeria’s new independence from France pushed Mr. .
With his boundaries of octaves, his quasi-microtonal shifts in the style of traditional Arab music, his cheeky rumba rhythms learned from American GIs after the 1942 Allied invasion and his roots in Jewish-Arab musical heritage called andalous, mr. Medioni honed a unique piano style in his early 20s. The singers he accompanied often alternated phrases in French and Arabic in a style known as “Françarabe.” His uncle Messaoud El Medioni is the famous musician known as Saoud L’Oranaisa leading practitioner of andalous who was deported by the Germans to the Sobibor death camp in 1943.
The Medioni style remained entrenched and largely forgotten for four decades as he pursued his trade as a men’s tailor. He kept this life private, performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs after being forced to flee France, until he released a breakthrough album, “Café Oran,” in 1996 at the age of 68. That led to a late second life as a star of so-called world music — European concert tours, appearances in documentary films and a key role as mentor to a new generation of Israeli musicians eager to rise. the musical heritage of their Sephardic heritage. In 2017, he published an autobiography, “A Memoir: From Oran to Marseilles (1938-1992),” reproducing Mr. Medioni’s cursive scrawl, 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.
“Maurice was a compulsive and naturally hip musician, always looking for other music and musical styles,” wrote British radio broadcaster Max Reinhardt in the introduction to the memoir, “part of a group of Muslim and Jewish musicians who naturally in the 1940s and ’50s made new music together in North Africa.”
Two events were decisive in shaping Pianoriental, and both occurred early in the life of Mr. Medioni, who grew up poor — “a shared toilet for our entire floor where there were six apartments,” Mr. Médioni wrote in his memoirs — in the Jewish quarter of Oran, or “Derb.”
The first was his encounter with American GIs in occupied Oran on Nov. 8, 1942, when he was 14. “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 raucous boogie-woogie style that fueled French pop songs where he was elevated to the background.
The street-smart teenager quickly became indispensable to Americans, taking them to bars and brothels. “I’ll crisscross the nine piano bars,” Mr. Medioni told an interviewer 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 being impressed by the Black American jazz musicians he saw perform: “Saw I improved them. I was open-mouthed,” he said. “When I get home, I’ll try to reproduce what they did.”
The second decisive event occurred in 1947 when three young Arab musicians entered a bar where he was drinking, and they all began to sing and play together. “That’s how the first modern Arabic music group was born, 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 memoir. Mr. Medioni’s synthesis of jazz, boogie-woogie, andalous and Arab rai and chaabi, two forms of Algerian popular music from the streets, in some cases characterized by long narrative songs, were born.
“There are some figures trying to play this oriental piano,” Mr. Silver said. “Medioni is very good, with the left hand and the right hand. He tries to update, modernize, and it still has oriental or Arab 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, leaving his mother in poverty to raise four children – three boys and a girl.
His musical gifts were evident early; 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 misery, and all the Jewish children were expelled from Oran’s schools by the French authorities. “We are short of everything,” Mr. Medioni wrote.
The American invasion of 1942 was “a liberation 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 popular musician, like his brother Alex: “All the Arab orchestras wanted to work with me,” he wrote. “‘These are our boys,’ they used to say.”
But as Algeria’s war of independence intensified, one of his original Arab music partners was shot dead by Algerian revolutionaries, and Mr. Medioni stopped playing at Arab festivals.
In the spring of 1961, he and his young family boarded a boat to Israel, then left six months later for France. Years of struggle followed, as he established tailor shops, first in Paris, then in Marseille. But he continued to play at weddings and galas with stars from the Jewish-Arab North African music scene that existed before the war and was now relocated to France. They include Lili Boniche, Line Monty, Reinette l’Oranaise and Samy Elmaghribi.
In the late 1980s, Mr. Medioni recorded himself on a cassette in his living room in Marseille and sent it to a producer at Buda Musique, a specialist record label in Paris. That was the beginning of his resurrection. After the “Café Oran” record, there was a concert at the Barbican in London 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 project about the reunion of an orchestra of elderly Jewish and Arab musicians from Algeria.
In 2011 he moved to Israel from Marseille with his wife, Juliette (Amsellem) Medioni, to be close to his children. He continued to record and perform, especially with the Mediterranean-Andalusian Orchestra Ashkelon.
Her husband died in 2022. She is survived by her children, Yacov, Marilyne and Michael, and five grandchildren.
Mr. Medioni knows very well that he may be the last of his breed. In a 2003 interview in the appendix of his diary, he told British musician Jonathan Walton that he doubted he would live.
“It won’t do,” he remembers saying. “Maurice Medioni tells you no. It will only be listened to occasionally by people with nostalgia, and by young people who love their parents.”
