2011 - Toufic Farroukh توفيق فروخ - Cinéma Beyrouth سينما بيروت

Toufic Farroukh is a saxophone player and composer of jazz with a middle-eastern flavour stemming from his bi-cultural roots in Lebanon and France.
His brother was a saxophone player and he’s the one who guided him to this instrument and taught him its ABCs. He was an amateur who instilled in Toufic the love of professionalism. They had discovered the saxophone in the Boy Scouts. The instrument was strange to their environment; unconventional, and used only for certain occasions.
Farroukh moved from Beirut to Paris, where he studied music in the conservatory and in the Advanced College of Music, saxophone was his principal instrument. He did not study jazz and its roots at all, nor played jazz on the saxophone.
His first album “Ali on Broadway” (1994), received good press from the specialist magazines, but only touched the French public in small measure. In his second album “Little Secrets” (1998), the flavour and colour of the Orient make their appearance here and there, in amongst the jazz motifs.

“One of the pioneers of Lebanon’s Oriental jazz, along with Ziad Rahbani and Rabih Abu Khalil, is Toufic Farroukh” writes the Daily star’s Jim Quilty.

The paris-based Lebanese misucian, and AFAC grantee in 2009, Toufic Farroukh returned to Beirut lately to Launch his latest CD “Cinema Beirut” which is a compilation, re-mix, and re-mastering of music from  the Lebanese film soundtracks of the past few years.

Quilty writes that “The sound of “Cinema Beyrouth” is, thanks to Farroukh’s ensemble of French session players, completely different” explaining that it is “much more enclosed and organic than that of the older material.”