As part of the “Connect Sessions” series, Ortel Connect house band Cats & Breakkies regularly invites guest musicians from different ethical, cultural and musical backgrounds to make music. The outcome of each live session is a song, specially composed for the session, which the guest artists perform in their native language. This time, Cats & Breakkies invited Arabic singer Ahmed Eid. Together they played the Arabic folk song “Fog en nakhal” (Above the Palm Trees).
The Berlin band Cats & Breakkies, was founded in 2013 and since then has always been looking for new creative ways to expand their musical boundaries. The band describes their music as a mix of electronic and dance music, jazz and world music. Cats & Breakkies is thus predestined to host musicians from all over the world to make music with them. Especially the band's musical director, Raphel Kaletta, focuses on cultural and musical diversity: He completed his Master’s degree at the University of Hildesheim, Germany at the “Centre of World Music”, majoring in cultural diversity and musical education.
Guest artist Ahmed Eid is also familiar with world music. While studying jazz at the Cologne University of Music in 2009, the passionate double bass player met Daniel Avi Schneider, Singer Soufian Zoghlami and trombonist Max von Einem. Together they founded the band Bukahara, which combines jazz, Balkan beats, folk and Arabic influences. With a lot of acoustic dexterity and great love, the wholehearted musicians demonstrate that swing, folk, reggae and Arabic-Balkan do not necessarily contradict each other. The multi-instrumentalists achieve a balance between contagious lightness and enthusiastic devotion.
Now Ahmed Eid has teamed up with Cats & Breakkies for Ortel Connect and produced a completely new piece of music, which he recites in Arabic during the sessions. Syrian actor and web video producer Firas Alshater is the intro-speaker for the music session. He runs his own YouTube channel ZUKAR since January 2016.
You can watch the result of the musical collaboration here: