Music Improvisation with Al-Qasar

Join musicians from the genre-defying global psychedelic ensemble Al-Qasar for this 90-minute interactive jam session exploring music as a form of conversation. Rooted in Al-Qasar’s signature blend of North African grooves, Middle Eastern melodies, and electric energy, the jam session invites participants into the art of improvisation as a shared dialogue.

Participants will have the opportunity to learn to listen, respond, and communicate using melody, rhythm, and dynamics, cultivating a deeper awareness of musical interaction across diverse traditions. By the end of the session, participants will gain confidence in improvising and understand how to weave musical phrases into expressive, meaningful exchanges, whether in solo performance or as part of a band.

This workshop has a limited capacity of 10 participants and is suitable for intermediate to advanced musicians aged 18 years and older. Interested participants must have taken part in at least five improvisation sessions, whether live or in a studio.

Al-Qasar

Al-Qasar was started between Los Angeles and Paris in 2016 by US-French producer Thomas Attar, featuring core members Turkish psychedelic rock singer Sibel, Iraqi-French drummer Adrien Al-Aiedy, and French bassist Guillaume Theoden. Al-Qasar’s music never wavers, pulling from the hypnotic roots of North African trance and threading it into a fabric with the elaborate beauty of Arab scales and the shock and thrill of rock’n’roll. The collective recently wrapped a world tour in support of their first full length album, Who Are We (Glitterbeat Records), which reaped global praise. In the past two years, the band performed on five continents and at major festivals such as Pukkelpop, Lowlands, Sziget, Reeperbahn, and WOMADs and collaborated with rock’n’roll legends Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys). The project’s second album, UNCOVERED (WeWantSounds), tackles songs from Western pop to the Arab folk repertoires. Cultures collide, and the result of this fission is Depeche Mode sung in Turkish, Sean Paul in Arabic, Nubian legend Hamza El Din with fuzz guitars, and iconic Lebanese composer Wadih El Safi through space echo. Produced between Tunis, Lisbon, Los Angeles, London, and Paris, UNCOVERED tells the story of a world in flux, its ancestors deep in the past but its eyes set on the zeitgeist. It’s retro-futurist Arab psychedelia with one foot in the Mojave and the other in the Sahara.