Taken form the album Strange Days where Natacha Atlas—who lives in France, but is of Egyptian, Palestinian, and Moroccan descent—backs multilingual vocals with muscular jazz arrangements. The end result is an occasionally dark, sometimes mournful, but often energetic tour of Arabic jazz. As Atlas explains, she and her co-writer Samy Bishai, of Digitonal, often found that combining the two schools together was surprisingly intuitive.

“When writing Strange Days, we were often surprised at how naturally Arabic scales worked with jazz changes, and occasionally at how difficult a seemingly simple hybridization could prove,” she says. “As a largely unexplored musical area, it was an unexpected combination of intuitive and unknown.”

For Atlas, the musical hybridization on Strange Days is the latest step in a career-long project of combining Arabic and Western genres. “Ever since my debut solo album Diaspora, I’ve drawn upon classical and folkloric Arabic traditions in one form or another, albeit mixed up with electronics and sampling,” she says. “Today, I find myself inexorably drawn to the language of jazz in all its diversity—no less broad and nebulous than Arabic music, and as difficult to define.”

Strange Days is a reflection of the broad and nebulous nature of jazz and Arabic music, with songs that range from the ominously atmospheric (“Lost Revolutions”) to the defiantly groovy (“Maktoub”). And Atlas confirms that this is no accident. “The sheer range of possibilities for combining elements of Arabic musics and jazz is virtually endless, extending from the overtly academic to the impressionistic,” she says. “The placement of notes within rhythmic space is infinitely flexible; the improvisational freedom of ornamental choice is as liberating as the harmonic and rhythmic freedom of jazz.”

Natacha Atlas – Strange Days on Bandcamp