David El-Malek

David El-Malek was born in 1970 in Pantin, where he stayed for just one year. He grew up in Israel until 1979, the year he returned to France, when he first settled in Bordeaux.

His first musical steps were very late, following his military service in January 1990. At the age of just twenty, without any precise professional project, employed during the day in an ice cream company, he bought himself a tenor saxophone as well as a method, and began to discover the instrument with passion. In September of the same year, he enters the Montreuil Conservatory, for one year, and follows the courses of Jean-Claude Forenbach where he discovers the harmonic theory, which he will live like a true revelation.

Continuing to catch up, away from any marked out circuit, at the price of hard work, he gradually builds up a musicality and a phrasing of a very personal richness, and gradually enters a network of professional musicians.

At the end of 1994, he joined Bruno Angelini's Quartet Est, alongside Jules Bikoko, Laurent Robin and Daniel Garcia Bruno. The following year, the group is selected for the Concours National de la Défense, where David receives a third prize as a soloist, a second prize for composition and the jury's special prize.

Sideman on numerous projects, notably alongside Laurent Coq, Pierre de Bethmann, Laïka Fatien and André Ceccarelli, he set up his own quartet with which he recorded three albums: Live aux Café des Arts (1999), Organza (2001) and Talking Cure (2003). In 2005, a quartet was born with Baptiste Trotignon, with whom a first album was released the same year. Their second opus, Fool Time, has been in the stores since autumn 2007.

After having participated in the recording of no less than six albums in 2007 (including those of Elisabeth Kontomanou and André Ceccarelli), he decided to build a long-term project that is particularly close to his heart, Music from Source, a repertoire of original compositions and arrangements on Judeo-Arabic-Spanish folk and liturgical music. He conceives this new stage both as a return to his own sources, strongly imbued with his childhood in Israel, and as the bearer of a profound universality, so much so that he wishes to share these timeless and bewitching melodies in a new format.

Partially played with the Orchestre National de Lyon in April 2004 at the Lyon Auditorium under the direction of Wayne Marshall, then again in July 2007 at the World Saxophone Congress in Slovenia with the Ljubljana Radio Symphony Orchestra, the project was adapted to a more intimate formula (brass and rhythm ensemble) during a residency at the Lyon Opera House at the end of 2007, and then recorded under this same formula. A second stage with a string quartet and traditional North African percussion was released in 2012, and adapted at the beginning of 2013 for the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra on the occasion of the Présence Festival.

Artist Henri SEMER Paris, he plays a Mark VI tenor saxophone.

Selective discography (leader) : 2012] Music from Source II (Naïve), [2008] Music from Source (Plus Loin), [2007] with Baptiste Trotignon Fool time (Naïve), [2005] with Baptiste Trotignon (Naïve), [2003] Talking cure (Cristal Records), [2001] Organza (Cristal Records)

Photo credit : Henri SELMER Paris